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Welcome Aboard

July 14, 2024 //

Sermon for Evensong on Sea Sunday, 14th July 2024, at St Peter’s Church, Old Cogan

Reading: Psalm 95 https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=587981145

Today is Sea Sunday, the day which many Christian churches throughout the world set aside to remember and pray for seafarers and their families and to give thanks for their lives and work. Charities such as the Mission to Seafarers and the Sailors’ Society conduct fundraisers today.

From our psalm today, Psalm 95:

When we enter into our worship, we remember God as a god of power, this power being expressed in the mighty ocean:

‘For the Lord is a great God: and a great King above all gods.

In his hand are all the deep places of the earth:

and the heights of the mountains are his also.

The sea is his and he made it’.

The Psalmist never forgot the forces of the sea:

‘There go the ships: there is that leviathan whom thou hast made to play therein’. It’s Psalm 104. The great sea monster, Leviathan; nobody knows what Leviathan was like, except perhaps that he might have been a bit like the Loch Ness monster. Nobody could contradict that.

Jesus’ disciples were fishermen. They were mariners; they were seamen on the sea of Galilee, which some people slightly belittle by calling it just a lake. But it was surely a place where storms could get up and the power of the waves was able to strike terror into the seafarers. The story of Jesus stilling the storm comes in all the three synoptic gospels, Matthew Mark and Luke: ‘Who can this be,’ said the disciples, ‘when even the wind and the sea obey him?’

I’m always impressed by the amount of travelling which went on even in biblical times, even though there weren’t any aeroplanes, motor-ships, trains or cars. Nevertheless, arguably the greatest Christian disciple, Saint Paul, was nothing if not a great traveller. In our lesson today, in the New Testament lesson from Saint Paul’s letter to the Romans, he is writing to the Romans explaining why he hasn’t come to see them yet, but reflecting on the fact that he has been on a mission to visit all the Christians who had not already been visited by others of the disciples as they spread the good news of the Gospel.

Paul travelled through Syria, Palestine, Cyprus, Turkey, Macedonia, Greece and Rhodes, and when he eventually did set off for Rome, he was shipwrecked in Malta, but eventually he did make it to Rome. Pretty impressive travelling – and most of it was done by sea.

And talking about maritime matters in the Bible, we must not forget Jonah and the Whale, which may be rather mythical, but again it illustrates the power of God, as shown in the sea and and in the maritime world. As someone who has been in practice as a maritime lawyer I am particularly partial to the story of Jonah, not because of its physiological and veterinary aspects, but because it illustrates a very early example of the concept of general average, an extraordinary sacrifice made to preserve the ‘maritime adventure’ as a whole, as it is put in the Marine Insurance Act 1906.

And we worship, we make our journey of faith, by ship. How so? You might ask. Look up – not to heaven on this occasion – but just look up to the ceiling of this lovely church. You are sitting in that part of the church which is called the nave, and the nave, that word, comes from the Latin for a ship, navis. If you look up to the roof, the ceiling of the church, you will see that it looks like the upturned hull of a ship. It’s not an accident. The sea is central to our faith.

Today, this year, there is some academic celebration of another sea, the Sea of Faith, the name of the TV series which went out on BBC television in 1984 under that name, Sea of Faith, presented by the great Cambridge theologian and philosopher, Don Cupitt. He took his title from a very well-known poem by Matthew Arnold, the son of Thomas Arnold, the first headmaster of Rugby School.

Matthew was at some time a fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, and he retired to live in Cobham in Surrey. He was briefly churchwarden of St Andrew’s church there. I rather warm to him, not necessarily because of the excellence of his poetry, but because my elder daughter went to Rugby; I went to Oriel; I lived for 30 years in Cobham; and I too was churchwarden at St Andrew’s. I feel we have something in common!

Possibly Matthew Arnold’s best known poem is called Dover Beach. I’ll read it to you.

The sea is calm tonight.

The tide is full, the moon lies fair

Upon the straits; on the French coast the light

Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,

Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.

Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!

Only, from the long line of spray

Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,

Listen! you hear the grating roar

Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,

At their return, up the high strand,

Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago

Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought

Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow

Of human misery; we

Find also in the sound a thought,

Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

‘The Sea of Faith …. Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world’. He wrote that in 1867. The ‘sea of faith’, he thought, was retreating in the face of the rise of secularism and modern science. Well, that’s 150 years ago and we’re still here. We still debate the ideas which Don Cupitt among others promulgated in the 1960s.

That new understanding of our relationship with God, and our understanding of God himself, led to the other great theological text of the 1960s, Bishop John Robinson’s ‘Honest to God’. It gave people who were beginning to be put off the Christian faith, because they found it difficult to reconcile with modern scientific understanding, it gave them a way of making sense of faith, without them having to believe in things which they had come to think of as nonsensical.

That’s for another day and another sermon, I expect. My point today is simply that it’s a good idea to look at our faith and to reflect on God against a maritime background from time to time. Our God is the God who ‘made heaven and earth, the sea and all that in them is.’ [Exodus 20:11] When we pray, perhaps we should be asking whether we have ‘permission to come aboard’. I think that we can be confident that, as we embark on this boat, we are welcome. Welcome aboard! Amen.

Tags Aegean, Cobham Surrey, Don Cupitt, Dover Beach, Exodus, fishermen, General Average, Honest to God, Jesus, John Robinson, Jonah and the Whale, Latin, Letter to the Romans, Leviathan, Loch Ness monster, Marine Insurance Act, mariners, Matthew Arnold, Mission to Seafarers, nave, navis, Oriel College Oxford, Psalmist, Rugby School, Sailors’ Society, Sea of Faith, Sea Sunday, seamen, Sophocles, St Andrew’s Church Cobham, St Paul, synoptic Gospels, Thomas Arnold

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Any Questions?

By publicsquare

June 17, 2024 //

Sermon for Evensong on 16th June 2024

Jeremiah 7.1-16; Romans 9.14-26

https://tinyurl.com/5xdpyys2

On Friday night I was nearly on the wireless. On BBC Radio 4. Completely by chance I had heard, when I was listening to the news in the morning, that Any Questions, which is not to be confused with the TV programme Question Time, and is much more venerable – it is apparently the oldest continuously running radio programme anywhere in the world, 76 years old, so it’s even older than me – that Any Questions was coming that same night to Newport to Newport Cathedral, to Saint Woolos’. There were a few places still available in the audience. I quickly booked a ticket and went over there. When you arrive, you are given a card to complete and hand in, with any suggested questions which you might have for the panel. Some of you may well have listened to the programme on Friday night or possibly when it was repeated at lunchtime yesterday.

The panel was a distinguished group, mostly Welsh people, two socialists, one Plaid Cymru and the other, less socialist, Labour; Boris Johnson’s press spokesman (who actually had had a long and distinguished career as political correspondent for the BBC before working for the Conservatives), a champion of industry with a strange name, and the Conservative Secretary of State for Wales who had apparently had a career as an amateur boxer, fighting under the name the Tory Tornado. It was all chaired by Victoria Derbyshire.

It came out that all the panel had gone to Oxford, except, of course, for the ‘Tornado’. Presumably most of them had gone to Jesus College, so there was a high degree of courtesy and comity between them, despite some very different views. Shortly before the programme began the producer appeared and called out eight names of people who had been selected to put their questions to the panel. I was very excited to learn that my question had been chosen, and I was number six. So we sat at the front clutching little bits of paper on which our questions had been nicely re-typed by the BBC; but alas, by the time they had dealt properly with question number five, the hour was up and I, together with the last two questioners, was left on the bench.

Before my turn there had been some very interesting questions, one involving bets on the likelihood of a conservative victory and the willingness of the panel members to ‘have a flutter’; on whether the allegedly inferior performance of the NHS in Wales was to be attributed to underfunding from Westminster or to mismanagement, by the party of Nye Bevan; about the potential effects of imposing VAT on private school fees; about which party’s manifesto would provide growth and stability; and finally, before my turn, there was this question.

A lady called Julie Pearce asked, ‘Where have honesty truth and integrity gone in politics, and do you think politics has deteriorated as a result?’The politicians on the panel predictably danced on pinheads, and perhaps the apologist for the most egregious immoralist in recent politics, Boris Johnson, produced the most ingenious evasion, when he turned immediately to discussing the merits and demerits of Lloyd George 100 years ago, whom he praised as the greatest Welsh prime minister, even though he was at the same time spectacularly immoral, he said.

Interestingly, none of the panel identified either themselves or other members as exhibiting any tendencies towards vice. Exceptionally, they were all as pure as the driven snow, we were asked to believe. As I sat there in the cathedral, I pondered what we as Christians at All Saints might have said in response to this question. Our Bible readings today are very relevant. The passage from Jeremiah is a prophecy in which God puts words into the mouth of the prophet chastising the men of Judah for their immoral behaviour. Although they went to worship in the temple, they still needed to mend their ways and their doings, the Lord said. Deal fairly with one another, do not oppress the alien, the orphan, and the widow, shed no innocent blood, and do not chase after false gods.

That could be very relevant even today. Deal fairly with one another: don’t just go for the cheapest thing on the internet and do our local shops out of business.

Don’t oppress the alien, the orphan and the widow: surely refugees – aliens – ought to be welcome and we should recognise that immigration is a good thing; after all, quite apart from whether we should offer safety and sanctuary, immigrants supply much-needed skills in industry, in the NHS and in our social services.

Does the policy of a ‘hostile environment’ and sending people to Rwanda in breach of the Refugee Convention amount to ‘oppressing the alien’? What do we do for orphans and widows? How does the two-child benefit cap fit in? What about social care and nurseries?

God isn’t having any. This is what he says: ‘You steal, you murder, you commit adultery and perjury, you burn sacrifices to Baal, you run after other gods whom you have not known; then you come and stand before me in this house, which bears my name, and say, ‘We are safe’; safe, you think, to indulge in all these abominations.’ And he says he will ‘fling them away out of his sight’ as he previously thrown away the people of Ephraim. No prayers would avail to save them.

That was the fierce prescription in the Old Testament. Did things become softer and more understanding after the coming of Jesus? St Paul’s letter to the Romans suggests not. But Paul comes at it from a different angle. Does God’s willingness to punish immorality mean that God is unjust? Paul says that it is up to God whether or not to punish somebody, and it does not depend on what he calls ‘man’s will or effort’. So why does God punish some people, or rather, allow them to be harmed? What are the rules? Is God just capricious, harming some people without a good reason?

Interestingly Paul doesn’t answer that. Instead, he suggests that it’s almost impertinent for us to ask that kind of question. ‘Who are you, sir, to answer God back? Can the pot speak to the potter and say, ‘Why did you make me like this?’? Surely the potter can do what he likes with the clay. Is he not free to make out of the same lump two vessels, one to be treasured, the other for common use?’

We have to recognise that God is bigger than we can understand, beyond our comprehension. As Jesus showed and taught, things are sometimes not what they seem, and values can be turned upside-down. The last shall be first … And being the chosen people of God may not protect you. Again, there are things happening today which might fit into this kind of analysis.

What about the war in Gaza? Does it make a difference that today’s Israelis say, as some of them surely do, that Hamas is like the Amalekites, previous occupants of the Promised Land, whom God told Saul and the Israelites, as told in the first book of Samuel [1Samuel 15:2-4], utterly to destroy – and God took them to task when they left some of them alive? Does that justify what the Israeli army is doing in Gaza?

Or we should consider what Paul points out in what the prophet Hosea said; [Hosea 2:23]: he said, ‘As it says in the Book of Hosea: ‘Those who were not my people I will call My People, and the unloved nation I will call My Beloved. For in the very place where they were told “you are no people of mine”, they shall be called Sons of the living God.’

The message is that just because one goes through the motions of worship, or goes to the temple, to the biggest cathedral, to the poshest church, it doesn’t somehow sanitise the things we do. We must love our neighbours, and worship just the one true God.

And we mustn’t use God as an excuse either. Fergal Keane, the veteran BBC war correspondent, was interviewed recently, and he said this: “It takes human beings to inflict injustice, pain, and cruelty on others. And it is too much of a cop-out to say ‘I blame it all on religion.’ That allows us, people with freedom of choice, off the hook. There are many places where faith has been manipulated, used as a banner, a suit of armour, as something to drive people on to hate their neighbours.” [https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/246585]

Perhaps that’s all a bit deep for Any Questions. But we should keep asking questions – and saying our prayers.

Tags adultery, aliens, All Saints Church, Amalek, Any Questions, BBC, BBC Radio, Bible, Boris Johnson, CBI, Christians, Church Times, comity, Conservative Party, denouncing convention, economic growth, Ephraim, Fergal Keane, Gaza, God, Hamas, honesty, Hosea, hostile environment, IDF, immigration, integrity, Jesus, Jesus College, labour party, Lloyd George, murder, Newport, Newport Cathedral, NHS underfunding, nurseries, offshoring, Old Testament, orphans, Oxford University, Penarth, perjury, Plaid Cymru, private school fees, Question Time, Rain, Refugee Convention, refugees, Roman, Rwanda, Samuel, sanctuary, Saul, social services, socialists, St Paul, St Woolos, temple, theft, Tory Tornado, truth, two-child benefit cap, Victoria Derbyshire, widows

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Not Doing the Right Thing

By publicsquare

June 5, 2024 //

Sermon for Evensong on the first Sunday after Trinity at St Peter’s Church, Old Cogan, 2nd June 2024

Jeremiah 5:1-19, Romans 7:7-25 https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=584275767

Two different ways of looking at morality, what is right and good and how people understand God in relation to that morality. On the one hand you have Jeremiah, writing about the world before the sack of Jerusalem in 587BC, a long time before Jesus, and then on the other hand you’ve got St Paul, writing to the Romans in the light of Jesus, just after the time of Jesus, so within the first century AD.

In Jeremiah’s world God is very definitely directly involved in life on earth. The Israelites have made a covenant, an agreement, with the Lord that they will respect him as the one true God, but they have been forgetting the covenant and worshipping another gods, behaving in a very immoral way, (albeit described very picturesquely, which you have to know about horses to understand).

Jeremiah the prophet is God’s mouthpiece, or at least he knows the mind of God. He says that God will act like a kind of super-parent, punishing bad behaviour in his children directly; if they carried on like that they would come to a sticky end. Indeed the Babylonians conquered the Israelites, destroyed the Temple, and took the Israelites off into captivity. ‘By the waters of Babylon, we sat down and wept’. ‘God will punish you,’ is Jeremiah’s message.

Father Etienne Charpentier, in his commentary on Jeremiah, says that this ‘God will punish you’, these prophetic sayings, ‘…may well shock us. They often present us with a God who threatens his people with punishment because they have sinned.’ He asks, ‘So are natural catastrophes, wars, human injustice, all punishment from God? We find such a picture of a vengeful God intolerable’. He suggests that it is not a question of God doing harm, but the prophets making sense out of the ups and downs of life – ‘… these events are less divine punishments than occasions for discovering the love of God which invites them to a new life’.

I’m not sure. It seems to me that Jeremiah’s idea of God belongs to that school who refer to ‘their God’, as opposed to their opponents’ god. That God will empower people to do certain things, often at the expense of or involving harm to, someone else. It underlines the problem, that God might seem to be doing bad things as well as good ones. But how can this be, if God is love?

Contrast that with St Paul’s letter to the Romans, where he suggests that the question whether or not people are doing evil or good depends on whether or not they are breaking the moral law, the Jewish law, the 10 Commandments and the law derived from it.

Before the law, before Moses was given the tablets of stone, the people did not know what the law was and went on in blissful ignorance, but once they had the law then they knew the difference between good and evil, between right and wrong. St Paul seems to be arguing that there is no natural sense of right and wrong, no natural conscience in the way imagined by Thomas Aquinas, who himself based his philosophy on Aristotle. They thought that we have a sort of innate natural conscience and that people do not need to be taught in order to be able to tell right from wrong.

St Paul understands right and wrong as being questions of the Jewish law, of sin. We tend to distinguish moral right and wrong from whether something is sinful or not. Atheists can and often do act perfectly morally, they do good, and they recognise good and evil, even though the concept of sin may not be something they recognise.

St Paul sees sin as ‘the flesh’ as opposed to ‘the spirit’; bodily appetites versus the soul; versus heavenly, spiritual matters. ‘Spirit’, in Hebrew ‘ruach’, or Greek πνευμα, is the same word as ‘wind’. This is part of where the idea of God as Holy Spirit comes in. So if in general we think of ‘sin’ as being cut off from God, living away from God, St Paul links this with his concept of body and soul, of the flesh as opposed to the spirit. He wrestles with a conflict inside himself. [Romans 7:14–15 (REB)]: ‘We know that the law is spiritual; but I am not: I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin. I do not even acknowledge my own actions as mine, for what I do is not what I want to do, but what I detest.’

I really like this passage, in the same way as I like the story of Doubting Thomas. Paul knows what he ought to do, what is right and good: but he doesn’t do it. He explains this as being down to his ‘fleshly desires’. Earlier on he has used the example of the Commandment ‘Thou shalt not covet’. You can see how breaking that commandment will involve the opposite of spiritual things. You feel the need for that Hermès handbag or that Lamborghini, when really your mind should be on higher things.

But to me that just helps to make St Paul more credible. He isn’t just an impossibly virtuous person; instead he, and Doubting Thomas, are people like me. That for me is the takeaway from this part of his letter to the Romans, and not really the rather convoluted argument about the relationship between sin and the Jewish Law, the ten Commandments.

I just don’t think that we see sin or moral good in terms of whether we are aware of the Ten Commandments or not. I suppose the argument is a bit reminiscent of the Garden of Eden, that before Adam and Eve knew the difference between good and evil, what they were doing was morally neutral.

But you could note, however, that perhaps the Fall, eating the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge, gave Adam and Eve a conscience. It wasn’t a question whether they knew the Jewish Law or not – the Ten Commandments hadn’t arrived at that stage, so they weren’t there to be broken. But that doesn’t mean that good and evil didn’t exist. It’s just that they didn’t know about it.

Another parallel between Paul’s ideas and the Garden of Eden is where he says that, before sin intruded, he was ‘fully alive’, but after sin came into the equation, ‘sin sprang to life and I died’. Adam and Eve were immortal before Fall, but subject to death as part of God’s punishment for their disobeying Him. ‘Dust you are, to dust you shall return.’[Genesis 3:19 (NEB)]

And the other big difference in the Christian understanding when compared the Old Testament, Jeremiah’s, view is the clear promise that by God’s grace, through the operation of the Spirit, there is forgiveness for a repentant sinner. St Paul asks, ‘Miserable creature that I am, who is there to rescue me out of this body doomed to death?’ [Romans 7:24 (NEB)] At the beginning of chapter 8 of the letter, Paul answers his own question like this: ‘The conclusion of the matter is this: there is no condemnation for those who are united with Christ Jesus, because in Christ Jesus the life-giving law of the Spirit has set you free from the law of sin and death.’[Romans 8:1–2 (NEB)]

St Paul is like Jeremiah in that he feels close to God; he might even have said something about ‘Our God’, but I feel he sees things much more generously. ‘If God is on our side, who is against us? He did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all; and with this gift how can he fail to lavish upon us all he has to give?’ [Romans 8:31–32 (NEB)] When you are feeling down, just read Romans chapter 8. God will not punish you: He will bless you.

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Gone Up

By publicsquare

May 11, 2024 //

Acts 1.1-11

Luke 24.44-53

https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=582458634

Today is Ascension Day. Having heard the lessons that you have heard, and having recited the Apostles’ Creed, you are in no doubt that we are celebrating Jesus’s Ascension, his going up into heaven.

Perhaps the nicest and most picturesque words in this connection unfortunately are not ones that we in Wales use, but they are in Psalm 47, verse 5, where the Church in Wales sees fit to translate the verse as, “God is gone up with a shout of triumph, and the Lord with the sound of trumpets”, whereas in the 1662 English Book of Common Prayer (which is also authorised for use in Wales), Bishop Miles Coverdale translated the Psalms, and what he said was, “God is gone up with a merry noise”. Gone up with a merry noise: and I am delighted to say that that expression, ‘gone up with a merry noise’, actually survives into Common Worship, the Church of England’s latest prayer book.

It reminds me of someone releasing a balloon, so that it shoots up to the ceiling, with a noise like a loud raspberry. I hope it’s not sacrilegious or blasphemous to have an innocent smile at the thought of Jesus disappearing into a cloud like a balloon – and Coverdale left no doubt what sort of noise it was, by what he said in the second half of the verse, (God is gone up with a merry noise,) and the Lord with the sound of the trump. The sound of the trump.

Am I seriously saying that the best we can do in the face of the Ascension is to make schoolboy jokes? Perhaps we are a bit embarrassed about the story, because honestly I don’t think any of us really believes that Jesus somehow levitated into the clouds, with or without sound effects, and disappeared from sight. I suppose you could say that, if we believe in the Resurrection, that’s so difficult to believe that adding an Ascension doesn’t really make any difference in terms of credibility. In for a penny, in for a pound.

It does bother some people, even faithful people in our churches here in Penarth. I took a service the other day and we recited the Creed; on the way out as I was shaking hands with everybody, one of the faithful said to me, “By the way, he descended into hell: where is hell? Where exactly is that?” And as far as I can tell, they were not trying to pull my leg.

What do these apocalyptic miracles really mean? Are they in any sense true or factual? Those of you who have heard me preach before, will know that at this point I like to bring out the story of the first spaceman Yuri Gagarin, who apparently was asked by President Khrushchev whether he had seen anybody up there – and he was able to confirm that he hadn’t. There weren’t any people with white beards sitting on top of the clouds. But it didn’t actually put Yuri Gagarin off going to church. So far as I know he was a regular churchgoer and he remained one after going up above the clouds.

But equally, if someone who doesn’t normally darken the doors of church came in and listened to what we were saying and what we were professing to believe, they might react with a certain amount of ridicule. So I would say that we ought to be able to cope with the idea that the Ascension is a story. It is the sort of story that you would have to have made up in order to explain why Jesus was no longer there, after a substantial period – it says 40 days – of resurrection appearances. If there hadn’t been an Ascension you would have had to invent one.

Well, maybe that sounds insufficiently respectful, and if so, I hope the Lord will forgive me. But I think it’s important to wrestle away at the true meaning of the Ascension story. As I was in my study writing this, I looked up and there, high up on the windowsill, was Tikka Masala, my beloved Bengal cat. Bengals love to climb up things. My other Bengal, the late lamented Poppadum, who lived to cat 100, 21 years old, was an inveterate tree climber. She scared the pants off us by getting stuck at the top of really tall trees. But she never actually fell, fortunately. She was queen, queen of all she surveyed. Top Cat indeed.

People like going up. If you are ‘high up’ in society, it means you are superior – and indeed ‘superior’ is a Latin word which means above, on top of, something. All the ‘high’ words, or at least most of them, have very positive connotations. To be ‘on high’ is to be at the top, to be superior indeed, to be in charge.

There is a slight exception which is that, certainly at the time of Jesus, it did slightly depend in what context you got up to your high place, whether this was a good thing or not; because if you were strung up, as Jesus was in the crucifixion, then ascension was not divine or praiseworthy but was a sign of disgrace. But that does seem to be an exception that proves the rule.

The idea of the divine being ‘high up’ predates Christianity, of course. The Greeks believed that the gods lived above the clouds on Mount Olympus, and in the Old Testament the Canaanites worshipped the Baals ‘on the high places’. They erected sacred poles and altars in high places. They were obviously meant to be the sort of place where God would be found. The Roman Catholic Church doesn’t just believe in one Ascension, Jesus’s Ascension, but also they believe that his mother Mary ascended into heaven too.

If you are a logical positivist, as I was when I was an undergraduate, studying philosophy – and I was fortunate enough to attend some of the last lectures given by Sir Alfred Ayer in Oxford – you learned that for something to have meaning you had to know what would contradict it: and I wonder whether there is that kind of connotation to the very mysterious thing that the two men in white say to the disciples. ‘This Jesus who has been taken up from you into heaven will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.’ Jesus is going to come back, which is a reversal of the Ascension, a contradiction of it. And perhaps as such that flags up for us the possibility that this may look far-fetched, but it’s not. We may not understand how something works, but all we need to know is that it does work. So I think we are allowed to let our imaginations run riot on Ascension Day. God is indeed gone up, with a merry noise.

Tags Alfred Ayer, Ascension Day, balloon, Bengal cats, Bible, Book of Common Prayer, Canaanites, Church in Wales, Church of England, Common Worship, Creed, God, Jesus, logical positivists, Miles Coverdale, Mount Olympus, Nikita Khrushchev, Old Testament, Penarth, Psalms, raspberry noise, Resurrection, Top Cat, Yuri Gagarin

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A Dreamcoat or a Rocket?

By publicsquare

May 6, 2024 //

Sermon for the second week in Lent, preached on 20th February 2024

Genesis 41.46 – 42.5
Galatians 4.8-20

Can we swap places for a minute? Would you come up here and see things as your preacher does, or maybe on your way out, let me know what you feel? We’ve got to deal with two stories today, the first one being Joseph and the amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.

Joseph’s brothers were jealous of his natty outfit, his coat of many colours, and when they were all on a journey through the desert, they chucked him into a pit, intending to sell him into slavery to the next bunch of traders coming through with their camel train. But unfortunately for them, some other spice traders came across him, pulled him out of the pit and took him away to Egypt. where they sold him to the Egyptian government, to Pharaoh, as a slave.

But Joseph prospered. He did a good job, and eventually, with various twists and turns in the story, he ended up being effectively Pharaoh’s viceroy, running the administration of the country. His secret was that he could interpret dreams. He was a kind of diviner, a seer.

He saw the future in a dream and realised that the crops would fail, and he would need to build up a stockpile of grain, if widespread famine in Egypt was to be avoided; so when the crops duly failed, and the famine broke out, Joseph sold grain to all and sundry and became more and more influential, owning more and more land as people run out of money and had to give him their land in return for food.

Among the people who were affected by the famine was Jacob, living in Canaan. Jacob was Joseph’s father, but he had been told that Joseph had died, torn apart by wild beasts, his brothers having shown their father the coat of many colours, stained with the blood of animals, to simulate the remains of a tussle to the death.

Jacob sent the brothers over to Egypt from Canaan, where they were, to buy grain, not knowing that they were about to buy it from the brother whom they thought they had abandoned to an unknown fate in the desert.

They didn’t know it was that long lost brother that they were buying from, and as you will remember, there is a thrilling story full of suspense about Joseph toying with his awful brothers, and making them think that they were going to be wrongly accused of stealing a whole load of grain from Pharaoh so that they would meet a dreadful fate. Then, at the last minute, the tables were turned and Joseph revealed himself as their brother.

You can imagine that it must’ve been a real ‘Oh something moment’ for them, quite a shock. Imagine how they must have felt. They must have thought that the most likely thing would be would be for their younger brother, who was now in such a powerful position, to get his own back on them; that it would not turn out well for them.

The lovely thing is, in this story, that Joseph didn’t do that. In fact he forgave his brothers, and invited them to bring their father over from Canaan to where they could live in Egypt in a land of plenty. Joseph didn’t blame them because, according to the account in the book of Genesis, he reasoned that his whole story, being abandoned and sold into slavery, and then working his way up with Pharaoh so that he became the head of the government of Egypt, was God’s will, was what God had intended, and no humans, certainly not his brothers, were really responsible or to be blamed.

What a wonderful story! That’s one of the two pieces we are looking at this morning. The other one is part of Saint Paul’s great letter to the Christians in Galatia, which is part of modern day Turkey. This reads almost like one side of a telephone conversation.

We don’t really know what Paul was responding to, and what the Galatians were saying to him. We can only try to draw inferences from what he is saying.

You wouldn’t pick this passage in the letter to the Galatians. I think if somebody asked you what the letter is all about, the bits which everybody quotes are the passage where he says that you are all sons of God in union with Christ Jesus. ‘Baptised into union with him, you have all put on Christ as a garment. There is no such thing as Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female. You are all one person in Christ Jesus’. That comes at the end of chapter 3. and then, at the end of chapter 5, he talks about the signs of being led by the Holy Spirit. ‘The harvest of the spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, fidelity, gentleness, and self-control’. These are the qualities that come when you are a good Christian.

But these two famous passages are not what we are looking at today. This bit is all about the Galatians kind-of hedging their bets about what they really believed in.

They would be Greeks living in the Roman Empire, and you would remember that every Roman house had its household gods, Lares and Penates, and of course, in the Greek world, there was the Pantheon, on Mount Olympus; Zeus, and Hera, and all the other gods, each one representing and upholding a particular sphere of influence: so Ares, or Mars, was the god of war, for example.

The big difference between the theology of the Romans and Greeks and Judeo-Christian theology, (because Christianity originated in Judaism – Jesus was a Jew) was that whereas the Greeks and Romans worshipped lots of different gods, the Christians, as well as the Jews, worshipped one God, one true God, and by and large, they did not make statues or paint pictures of the one true God. He didn’t really have a name – ‘I am who I am’, he said – and certainly in the Jewish tradition, only priests could see God and not be burned up in the experience. ‘Immortal, invisible, God only wise’ sums it up.

But the Galatians wanted to have it both ways. They wanted to go back to the old gods as well, just in case. And St Paul got very cross with them. He said it was a retrograde step and that they would no longer be able to be saved and gain eternal life, if they were enslaved by their worship of elemental spirits, as he called them. it could just have been earth, wind, fire, and water, the basic elements, but whatever it was, Saint Paul was very frustrated by the Galatians’ wanting to worship those elemental spirits as well as the one true God as revealed in Jesus Christ.

So on the one hand, we have the story of Joseph and the amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and all the other, a rather bad-tempered rocket written by Paul to the Galatians.

So – imagine you are up here. What do you say about those two passages? What lessons can we draw from them? I would be tempted, I have to say, to draw out how generous Joseph was. He was almost as saintly as Jesus wanted us to be in his Sermon on the Mount. Love your enemies. Turn the other cheek. Certainly not an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth where those awful brothers were concerned.

But I suspect that in the wider sweep of the story of the people of Israel, Joseph’s kindness rather gets blotted out. This is all part of the story of Israel being enslaved, and then freed, and then finding a place in the promised land, building the temple, having the temple knocked down, being enslaved again in Babylon, and so on, until eventually, at the time of the second temple, they are established in Palestine.

It’s very tempting to try to draw parallels with what’s happening in the same area today. Just imagine what the possibilities would be if Mr Netanyahu took a leaf out of Joseph’s book and showed compassion and forgiveness. But if you and I swapped places and you had drawn that conclusion, I’m not sure that people would give you an easy ride as they were shaking your hand on the way out at the end of the service. They might say you’d stretched things rather a lot.

And what about Saint Paul and the Galatians? Apparently, according to Paul, they were volunteering to be enslaved again by worshipping the elemental spirits, rather than the one true God. What would you say about that? It’s a different kind of slavery from the slavery which the Israelites endured in Egypt and in Babylon. This is more an intellectual slavery, abandoning their principles and hedging their bets spiritually.

And, in passing, you might want to observe that Saint Paul’s letters, particularly this sort of letter where he takes a congregation of Christians to task for something that he thinks they are doing wrong, is a sort of communication which I don’t think we would get in today’s world. Because St Paul is in effect telling the Galatians what to believe.

We go to great lengths to ensure that we don’t interfere with everyone’s freedom to believe whatever they want to. We regret the history of the missionaries. Who would say now, ‘Don’t believe in Scientology or Mormon, but stick to the real stuff?’ Alternatively, when we are thinking of Islam or Judaism, we are at great pains not to say that people mustn’t be Muslims or Jews, but that people should be only Christians.

No, instead, we emphasise that all three religions, called the religions of the book, effectively worship the same one true God. We just approach that one true God in slightly different ways. So we wouldn’t be tempted to write the sort of letter that St Paul has written if we found, for example, that somebody had converted from Christianity to Islam. Nevertheless, in certain countries the reverse move, from Islam to Christianity or Judaism, is something which is condemned, indeed, sometimes bringing the death penalty.

That happens in Pakistan or Iran, but we don’t tell people what to believe. We have to some extent therefore changed from Saint Paul’s approach. What do you think? What do we make of that?

So those are your reflection points for this second week of Lent. What lessons could we draw from the story of Joseph and the amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and what do you think St Paul was up to in his frankly rather tough letter to the Galatians? Would it wash today? Let’s swap places and you can tell me the answers.

Amen.

Tags Ares, Babylon, Bible, Canaan, Egypt, Galatia, galatians, God, Greek, Hera, Holy Spirit, Iran, islam, Jacob, Jesus, Joseph, land of plenty, Lares and Penates, Mars, Mormon, Moses, Mount Olympus, Netanyahu, Pakistan, Palestine, Pantheon, Pharaoh, Scientology, sermon on the mount, slave, St Paul, Technicolour Dreamcoat, Turkey, Zeus

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The Morning After

By publicsquare

April 21, 2024 //

Sermon for Morning Prayer on 21st April 2024, Fourth Sunday of Easter

Acts 4:5-12, 1 John 3:16-24

https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=580609123

I want you to think about the morning after the morning after the morning after the night before. Or possibly, the morning after that.

Think of something that has happened, something that you’ve been involved in, that was really a big deal. Something that really made a difference.

Maybe it was the day you got married, if you did. Or the day when you won an Olympic gold medal. Or the day when something really momentous happened in the world outside. Perhaps you can even remember Armistice Day, or perhaps more likely, the day after the Brexit referendum. In all those cases, things changed; things changed really radically for ever. Nothing would be the same again. In our Bible lessons today the context is another of those enormous events as we enter into the world of the very first Christians, in the first, the earliest, churches.

The momentous event was of course Easter, Jesus’ resurrection. They had either experienced meeting the risen Christ themselves or they had met people who had. That’s one reason why I always find it very exciting to read the Acts of the Apostles, written by St Luke, as book 2 of his gospel, in effect; and St Luke was certainly around at the earliest time even if he didn’t actually meet Jesus. St Paul describes him as the ‘beloved physician’ and there are certainly moments in the Acts of the Apostles, describing St Paul’s journeys, where the third-party narrative, ‘they’ did this, ‘they’ did that, turns to ‘we’ did it, so we can infer that Luke was there.

So it is a very immediate, personal account of what it was like to be an early Christian. And so we are seeing the Easter people, the first Easter people, picking up their lives and carrying on after the amazing events of Easter. And we hear that they ‘met constantly to hear the apostles teach, and to share the common life, to break bread and to pray. A sense of awe was everywhere and many marvels and signs were brought about through the apostles’. They held everything in common, as we heard in one of the lessons a couple of weeks ago.

And then the part which we heard read today: Peter and John had healed a man who had been crippled from birth, who was begging at the gate of the temple. Peter said, ‘I have no silver or gold; but what I have I give you; in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, walk!’ And the man who had been crippled from birth sprang up, stood on his feet and started to walk.

Needless to say it attracted a lot of attention, and Peter said this to the crowd: ‘Why stare at us as though we had made this man walk by some power or godliness of our own? The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of our fathers, has given the highest honour to his servant Jesus… And the name of Jesus, by awakening faith, has strengthened this man, whom you see and know, and his faith has made him completely well.’

The chief priests and the Sadducees, just as they had done with Jesus himself, took exception to this and considered it to be blasphemy. They arrested Peter and John and put them in prison. And the passage describes what happened when they were asked to explain themselves.

It’s very reminiscent of a similar episode when Jesus himself was tackled about healing somebody on the sabbath day. Again, to use a contemporary expression, the disciples pushed back against the criticism. What was wrong with healing somebody who was sick? You might be tempted to say, what does it matter who the doctor was? Just be grateful that the cure worked. But the high priests were concerned that Peter and John were giving credit to Jesus in a blasphemous way. But they insisted that it was Jesus who was the divine agent and it was the sick man’s faith in Jesus which had brought on his healing.

Let’s go back a minute to the question of the morning after the morning after the morning after the night before. Nothing was the same after Easter. Whom could you trust? There were so many people claiming that they were the true believers, that they had an inside track to understanding the story of Jesus.

So let’s look at the first letter of John, the first ‘Epistle General of John’ as the King James Bible puts the heading. It’s possible that the John who wrote the letter was the apostle, or certainly was the same person who wrote Saint John’s Gospel. Although he would have had to be pretty old, it’s not impossible. Some scholars do think that all three of them are the same individual.

Again we are in the world of the very early church, and it’s clear that in that world it was commonly expected that the end of the world was round the corner, and all the references to salvation and eternal life referred to a last judgement at the bar of heaven which was just about to happen. All the more reason, the early Christians felt, to be sure that you were a true believer, that you were one of the people who were truly saved, the elect.

And this is what the letter, John’s first letter, is all about. In one of my Bibles there’s a sub-heading describing the letter as a ‘recall to fundamentals’. It begins with these words: ‘It was there from the beginning; we have heard it; we have seen it with our own eyes; we looked upon it, and felt it with our own hands; and it is of this we tell. Our theme is the word of life. This life was made visible; we have heard it and bear our testimony; we here declare to you the eternal life which dwelt with the Father and was made visible to us.’ Do you remember the beginning of St John’s Gospel? ‘In the beginning was the word’. And it is all about love. The ‘word’ is Jesus, and Jesus is love; and the key to being saved is whether you are ‘in Christ’, which is a rather mysterious expression which is generally reckoned to mean whether Christ is in you.

In John’s First Letter there are a series of illustrations of what it means to be in Christ and to be in the light of Christ. ‘A man may say I am in the light; but if he hates his brother, he is still in the dark.’ Only the man who loves his brother dwells in the light. And then this great passage that we had read to us as the second lesson, contrasting two examples, one, the greatest example, that greater love hath no man…, And we ought to lay down our lives for one another, the supreme sacrifice; and the other, because we can’t be in a position to offer a supreme sacrifice every day, the everyday salvation, the everyday expression of love, which you will remember from the sentences before the traditional Holy 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?’ If a man has enough to live on, and yet, when he sees his brother in need, shuts up his heart against him, how can it be said that the divine love dwells in him? That’s how it works. God is love.

God is love; God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. If we are in Jesus, in the Son, we are in love, love is in us; and the test of that is how we show that love. Let us love our brothers and sisters, let us love our neighbours. If we are Easter people, if we are like those early Christians on the day after the day after the day of the great event, what difference does it make to us? Is it still buzzing in our minds? Does it still draw us irresistibly to do things that we didn’t do before? Let us pray that it does.

Amen.

Tags 1 John, Acts of the Apostles, Bible, Christians, Easter, Epistle, First Letter of John, God, Jesus, John the Evangelist, love, Resurrection, Sadducees, st John's gospel, St Luke, St Paul, St Peter, the word

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Wednesday of Holy Week

By publicsquare

April 8, 2024 //

27th March 2024 at 7.30pm – Quiet devotional Eucharist

Gospel Reading: John 13:21-32

Jesus was troubled in spirit, and declared, ‘Very truly, I tell you, one of you will betray me.’ The disciples looked at one another, uncertain of whom he was speaking. One of his disciples—the one whom Jesus loved—was reclining next to him; Simon Peter therefore motioned to him to ask Jesus of whom he was speaking.

So while reclining next to Jesus, he asked him, ‘Lord, who is it?’ Jesus answered, ‘It is the one to whom I give this piece of bread when I have dipped it in the dish.’ So when he had dipped the piece of bread, he gave it to Judas son of Simon Iscariot. After he received the piece of bread, Satan entered into him. Jesus said to him, ‘Do quickly what you are going to do.’

Now no one at the table knew why he said this to him. Some thought that, because Judas had the common purse, Jesus was telling him, ‘Buy what we need for the festival’; or, that he should give something to the poor. So, after receiving the piece of bread, he immediately went out. And it was night.

When he had gone out, Jesus said, ‘Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him. If God has been glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself and will glorify him at once.

Sermon

If all we had to go on about the Last Supper was the account in St John’s gospel, perhaps some of Christian history might be different. All the other gospels have Jesus breaking bread and sharing wine with his disciples, telling them that the bread is his body which is given for them and that they should eat it in remembrance of him, and the wine is the wine of the new covenant, the new settlement between God and mankind.

Now none of that is in St John’s account, and we might, if all we knew was what is in Saint John’s account, not have had all the arguments about exactly what was going on in Holy Communion. As you know, our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters believe that, at the moment of communion, the bread and the wine are ‘transubstantiated’, they change their physical nature and actually become the body and blood of Jesus. Saint John, on the other hand, was concentrating on the nature of the betrayal by Judas that Jesus was going to suffer.

Jesus was troubled – and that is the third time in St John’s gospel that Jesus is troubled in spirit – and he quoted a text,“He who has taken bread with me has turned against me”, which is from Psalm 41. Whereas in the other gospels Jesus just says that the person who is going to betray him is just one of the disciples who has dipped his bread into the common bowl, without going any further than that, in Saint John’s account Jesus points out Judas by handing him a piece of bread after he has had a private conversation with the disciple whom he loved, at the prompting of Simon Peter.

It builds the dramatic tension by making it more mysterious and also, perhaps, there is a dramatic juxtaposition of the ‘disciple whom he loved’ with Judas Iscariot into whom the devil, Satan, has entered. In John’s Gospel Satan gets into Judas at the moment where Jesus hands him a piece of bread, whereas in the other gospels Satan has entered the heart of Judas earlier on, before they sit down to supper.

Nothing in Saint John’s Gospel is there by accident, so we have to think about why John made it more complicated. I wonder whether John’s way of describing the Last Supper actually takes some of the blame away from Judas. Judas did something evil at the prompting of the devil, and it wasn’t until the devil had come to him, at the moment when Jesus handed him the piece of bread, that he decided to betray Jesus.

Or perhaps more precisely, Satan entered him, so perhaps it wasn’t up to him at all. In yesterday’s reading Jesus speaks of a time of ‘crisis’ or judgement: ‘Now is the judgement of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out’ (12:31). Our understanding is that Satan and the ruler of this world, the ‘prince of darkness’, are the same thing. I don’t think you have to believe literally in the devil in order to understand the point of this.

When Jesus was in the wilderness at the beginning and was being tempted, he was tempted by a person, a tempter, a devil; the idea is that this devil, this Satan, is not just bad but he is in charge, he is a ruler. We might think that it would therefore be pretty difficult for Judas to have resisted him. So the die is cast. Off goes Judas, into the night.

Then Jesus goes back to the idea of ‘glory’ that we were talking about last night. In the garden, the last time that his heart was troubled, he wonders what to say to his heavenly father and, according to St John, instead of crying out to God to let him off – ‘take this cup away from me’ – instead he says, ‘Father, glorify your name’.

And here, after Judas has left, Jesus again talks about glorification. ‘Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him. If God has been glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself and will glorify him at once.’

I find this rather mysterious. The king is glorious. How can he glorify himself when he is already glorious? I feel that this pair of verses must mean more. I think that there is a very good translation in Eugene Peterson’s one-man ‘translation of the Bible in contemporary language’, which is called The Message, which is a mighty feat of scholarship. He puts it like this.

‘When he had left,’ when Judas had left, ‘Jesus said, “Now the son of man is seen for who he is, and God is seen for who he is in him. The moment God is seen in him, God’s glory will be on display. In glorifying him, he himself is glorified – glory all around!”’

I think that makes it a bit clearer, although it’s still a mystery to me why Jesus should refer to this particular moment as being glorious – when after all he has just been betrayed. Surely, far from it being a glorious moment it is an ignominious one.

Perhaps again this is Jesus being contrary. ‘The first shall be last and the last shall be first.’ It could be an example of euphemism, describing something in glowing terms when actually it is exactly the opposite. For instance the prince of darkness, Satan, is called Lucifer, which means the bearer of light.

‘O worship the king, all glorious above’ – we can do no other, as Martin Luther said.

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Good Friday Reflections

By publicsquare

April 8, 2024 //

Jesus is crucified

Mark 15:24-32

And they crucified him, and divided his clothes among them, casting lots to decide what each should take.

It was nine o’clock in the morning when they crucified him. The inscription of the charge against him read, ‘The King of the Jews.’ And with him they crucified two bandits, one on his right and one on his left. Those who passed by derided him, shaking their heads and saying, ‘Aha! You who would destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourself, and come down from the cross!’ In the same way the chief priests, along with the scribes, were also mocking him among themselves and saying, ‘He saved others; he cannot save himself. Let the Messiah, the King of Israel, come down from the cross now, so that we may see and believe.’ Those who were crucified with him also taunted him.

Reflection

When Jesus drove the moneychangers out of the temple and the Jews challenged him, and asked by what authority he did this, Jesus didn’t give them a straight answer but simply said, ‘Destroy this temple and within three days I will raise it again.’ (John 2:19). The people who heard this were sceptical, because they said it had taken 46 years to build the temple and he was claiming to be able to rebuild it from scratch in three days. But after the resurrection the disciples realised that Jesus was talking about his own resurrection from the dead. The temple was the temple of his own body.

It reminds me of Jesus’ time in the wilderness after his baptism. At the beginning of his ministry he is tempted by the devil: ‘Come down from the cross’ is like the tempter saying, ‘Throw yourself off the pinnacle of the temple and the angels will save you’.

The people who were jeering at him like this are doing what the devil did before; and perhaps we are meant to think that this kind of thing is indeed the devil’s work. There’s nothing good about it. What the chief priests and the scribes are saying is perhaps a little bit different. ‘He saved others but he cannot save himself.’

They seem to have been making an argument that it’s not good enough just to save other people. If you’re going to be the Messiah, you have to be able to save yourself as well. It might be a superficially attractive proposition but it doesn’t have much real logic to it. Surely the Messiah could have been a wonderful Messiah simply on the strength of all the saving work that he had done for other people.

It’s extraordinary that after all the good that Jesus had done these people just wanted to criticise and belittle him. What harm has he done to them? The bandits presumably were just joining in and doing what in the social media world is called a ‘pile on’. They weren’t holding themselves out to be any kind of example. Although, as we will hear in the next part, one of the criminals must have thought better of everything and said, ‘Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.’ And Jesus answered him that the same day they would meet in paradise.

But first we need to come to terms with what happened to Jesus. ‘And they crucified him.’ Perhaps we all know now from many good Fridays about the terrible business of crucifixion. You can see from Iain McKillop’s picture that Jesus is spread out lying on the ground and they are driving nails into his arms. There will be a little step, a suppedaneum, for his feet to stand on. He doesn’t hang from the nails, although they will be horribly painful. The fact that he can’t move on the cross will mean that eventually he will asphyxiate, he will suffocate. Sometimes apparently it took several days for people crucified to die. And I suppose that in the eyes of the normal population, the passers-by, to see somebody dying on the cross was to see somebody being punished for some terrible crime. If they had bothered to walk closer to Jesus’ cross, they would have seen the inscription, the little plaque stuck on top of the cross which we understand from the other gospels was written in Latin, Greek and Hebrew, each one saying “The king of the Jews”. That was posted up by order of Pontius Pilate. The high priest had asked Pontius Pilate to amend that so that it read, ‘He said he was king’. Pontius Pilate refused: ‘What I have written, I have written,’ he said.

Jesus couldn’t move. If he had stepped off, the nails would have torn his arms and his legs. The sun was rising. There was no shade. Somebody gave him a drink from sponge soaked in what is described as “Sour wine”. Alcohol only makes you drier and more thirsty. It doesn’t quench your thirst. What a terrible way to die.

Arguably the death penalty, which ever way you do it, is impossibly cruel. Think of the frightful business of the last person to be executed in the USA where it was the second attempt, the drugs not having worked the first time. They were rendered speechless in their agony until they died. Or think about all the things that apparently went wrong when people were hanged.

But here in a way it’s not the pain and the terrible mechanics of suffering being inflicted that are especially significant where Jesus is concerned, it is just simply the fact that he is dying, that he dies. Nobody can say that he didn’t die. This was very dying. This was extreme dying. Death, death on the cross.

Jesus Christ on the Cross: his mother and a friend

Iain McKillop, Jesus on the Cross with his mother and a friend

John 19:25-27

And that is what the soldiers did.

Meanwhile, standing near the cross of Jesus were his mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, ‘Woman, here is your son.’ Then he said to the disciple, ‘Here is your mother.’ And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home.

Reflection

‘And this is what the soldiers did’. What they had done was to share his clothes out equally among them – there were four soldiers – except for his tunic, which was described as being seamless, woven in one piece, so they tossed for it.

The ‘disciple whom he loved’ is never named. Very early in the history of the church it was believed to be John the Evangelist, the author of St John’s Gospel. It would mean that John lived to a very ripe old age, though: but no-one really knows. But what a very human and kind thing for Jesus to remember, even at this time when he was in terrible pain – that his Mum needed to be looked after. Who better to do it than his best friend?

‘Stabat Mater Dolorosa’ – ‘his mother was standing sorrowfully’, is what the Latin means, is such a moving picture. There is beautiful music, for instance Pergolesi’s lovely setting, composed in 1736. We have seen glimpses of Jesus’ earthly family – and especially his mother Mary and her willingness to be the God-bearer, but this is an intensely human scene. There’s nothing divine about this.

Iain McKillop’s picture shows Jesus more or less on the same level as his mother. Apparently the pictures we have often seen showing people strung up high on crosses aren’t necessarily right, as the Romans often suspended people only a foot or so above ground, so that wild animals could bite their legs. It was just another little twist of cruelty.

Poor Mary and the other ladies are watching her son, for the others their cousin, maybe, or just someone dear to them, dying, horribly, in their face, right in front of them. They desperately want to help him, to take him off that cross and to stop his suffering and pain. But those Roman soldiers – including an officer, a centurion – are there to stop them. They just have to watch.

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Politics for the Doubting

By publicsquare

April 8, 2024 //

Sermon for the Morning Service at All Saints Church, Penarth

On 7th April 2024

Acts 4:32-35; John 20:19-31 https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=579426284

You hear that people who go to church describe themselves as Easter people. We are Easter people. I presume that means that, as Christians, our lives have been touched by the momentous events of Easter all those years ago. It has been made a huge difference to our lives and to the way that we carry on. The biggest thing about Easter – not really an elephant in the room, but something altogether bigger – is Jesus’ resurrection from the dead.

Jesus definitely died, and he died in a way which really doesn’t leave it open to anyone to say that he wasn’t really dead. If you die by crucifixion you are most definitely absolutely dead. He was then put in a tomb which was sealed with an enormous rock and put under guard by the chief priests and the Pharisees, who had been given permission to do so by Pilate because they said they were afraid that the Christians would steal his body. So I think we can be sure that he was definitely buried in a grave which would not be easy to get at.

And then on the third day, as we celebrated last Sunday, the stone had been rolled away, the grave was empty, and Jesus had somehow risen from the dead. He saw Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James and Joanna, and perhaps other women who had gone to the tomb to dress the body, who all went to tell the disciples. They were not believed initially. ‘The story appeared to them to be nonsense.’

Some versions of the gospel add that Peter took it on himself to rush back to the tomb, and he found it empty and realised what had happened. But the other disciples were sceptical until Jesus appeared to two people on the way to Emmaus and they brought the news back to the disciples. And then Jesus appeared to all of them in the way that we had described to us in Saint John’s Gospel just now. On the first day of the week; when the doors of the house were locked; somehow Jesus got in and stood among them, giving them a chance to touch him and realise that he wasn’t a ghost.

And Jesus stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you.’ That’s one thing that you will miss this morning. We only share the peace when we’re having holy communion. I’m afraid we’re not doing that today. But this is where sharing the peace comes from. It’s a way of reminding ourselves of that appearance among the disciples, appearance by the risen Lord, Jesus resurrected from the dead.

They saw and they believed. They didn’t know how he had been resurrected, but they had no doubt that he had been. And then along came Thomas, officially known as ‘Thomas the Twin’ but known almost universally afterwards as ‘Doubting Thomas’. Because Thomas just couldn’t believe that Jesus had risen from the dead. Then we have this really powerful story, which I think really appeals to lots of us – it certainly appeals to me – showing how Thomas came to believe, because he saw and touched Jesus, in a way which I think we can all understand. He almost stood for Everyman at that moment. He could be any of us.

And then Jesus said this marvellous thing. ‘Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.’ That means all of us. We haven’t seen Jesus. We haven’t touched him. But to a greater or lesser extent, we Christians all believe. We believe that he rose from the dead. That makes a huge difference.

If you accept that this is possible, that that happened, that there is a life after death, that is going to make a big difference to you. But it probably isn’t going to make as much difference as it did to the disciples who actually saw him and touched him. They didn’t have any doubt. They believed.

So what effect did it have on them? One effect, one major effect, was what we have heard described in our reading from the Acts of the Apostles, that ‘those who believed were of one heart and soul’ and ‘no one claimed private ownership of any possessions. There was not a needy person among them,’ for ‘as many as owned lands or houses sold them’ and brought the proceeds of what they sold to be put into the common fund.

It looks like an early form of communism: at which point some of you may start to fidget and mutter about not mixing politics and religion – but perhaps another way of looking at it is to compare this passage with some of the Sermon on the Mount: that Jesus seems to have been talking in a utopian way, not a practical way. Turning the other cheek; not going for an eye for an eye but loving your enemies: just not practical, you might say. Just as you might well say that although a form of communism looks to be ideal, our experience in the last 2000 years has told us that it’s just not practical.

Perhaps meeting Jesus risen from the dead had made the disciples feel that they could do anything, that they could ignore practicalities and just go for whatever was the best and most ideal thing. What do we, 2000 years later, we who have not seen and yet have come to believe, are we able to do idealistic things? Maybe looking again at Thomas we might have to admit that although we do believe, perhaps our belief is not as strong as Thomas’ became – once he had touched the Lord.

Maybe we do still have a few doubts, and therefore to some extent in our lives we still play safe. So although living in a commune and sharing everything sounds great in some ways, we are cautious about throwing caution to the winds and selling up. But there is something there. There is definitely something which we could say. In the context of the extreme difference between rich and poor that the neoliberalism of the last 40 years or so, has produced, the emphasis on individualism, that everyone has the seeds of their own success in them, all you have to do is to get on your bike, as one of the politicians said at the time, all that is beginning to ring rather hollow, because just like the commune which the apostles operated, it doesn’t really work. It doesn’t make us love our neighbours or, increasingly, love God.

So now in this Easter season, when we are Easter people, let’s think hard about what that really means and whether we can say, ‘Lord I believe; help thou mine unbelief’[Mark 9:24]. That still means we believe, and it still means we can do something to show that we believe. Tomorrow it will be the Festival of the Annunciation, the angel announcing to Mary that she will be the mother of the son of God. The Bible lesson will be the Magnificat, which is arguably one of the greatest revolutionary texts in all of literature.

’He hath put down the mighty from their seat:

and hath exalted the humble and meek.

He hath filled the hungry with good things:

and the rich he hath sent empty away.’ [Luke 1]

Maybe Thomas was on to something. No doubt about it.

Tags Acts of the Apostles, Annunciation, belief, bike, Christians, communism, doubt, Doubting Thomas, Easter, elephant, Everyman, God, holy communion, individualism, James, Jesus, Joanna, Magnificat, Mary Magdalene, neoliberalism, peace, Peter, Pontius Pilate, Resurrection, sermon on the mount, st John's gospel, sunday, unbelief

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The Fall and the Freebie

By publicsquare

February 19, 2024 //

https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=575175148

Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7; Romans 5:12-19

The first Sunday in Lent, in preparation for the great Easter climax: a time of spiritual reflection, renewal, fasting. We are preparing for the events which revealed God’s love for humanity. God’s love, indeed, for fallen humanity, we often say. and that’s what our Bible readings this afternoon are about. The lesson from Genesis is sometimes described as the story of the Fall, and Christ’s passion and death, followed by his glorious resurrection, described in terms of sacrifice and redemption, salvation. Salvation for fallen humanity.

We know these stories. We know the story of Adam and Eve, and we know Paul’s famous passage contrasting Adam, who brought sin into the world, with the free gift, the grace of God, in giving us Jesus Christ. and I’m sure that as you’ve heard the lessons, as they were beautifully read just now, even if you aren’t word perfect in your memory, they were pretty familiar.

But in the spirit of Lenten reflection, perhaps not in a full-on 40 days in the wilderness sense, but nevertheless, in the hope that it makes you quietly go away and think about this, let’s have a closer look at the Fall and the ‘free gift’.

Let’s look at the Fall. What did Adam and Eve do wrong? I remember when I first heard this bit of Genesis, where God tells Adam that he can eat the fruit of all the other trees, but not this funny tree called the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; I wondered what its fruit looked like. It’s one clue that this is not meant to be a scientific explanation of anything, that one of the key elements is that there is this mysterious tree. It’s not just a plum tree or an apple tree.

But then again, what is wrong? What is wrong with getting to know the difference between right and wrong? The idea seems to be that, before the Fall, before the act of disobedience, humans, or at least the first humans, Adam and Eve, didn’t know the difference between right and wrong. They were in some kind of primordial innocence – but they were immortal, or at least that seems to be the implication, because the threat that God makes is that if they disobey him and eat the fruit of the tree of good and evil, “you shall die”. Later on in Genesis, it says, “you shall get your bread by the sweat of your brow until you return to the ground, for from it, you were taken. Dust you are, and to dust you shall return.” You will remember that phrase from the Ash Wednesday service.

But why should it be a bad thing to know the difference between good and evil? And is there any obvious link between acquiring an innate moral sense and becoming mortal? Without wanting to sound flippant, I do think that this is a fairytale. Or perhaps, to put it more positively, it’s a myth, a story told to illustrate a point. So I suppose the attractiveness of it, why it is such a compelling story, is that indeed, we are very drawn to sympathise with Eve. As the serpent says, “when you eat of the fruit of the tree, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.“

The woman saw that “the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise”.

What on earth is wrong with any of that? The only thing you can find in the text is that God told them not to do it. You might say that there was more to it. There was a suggestion that, as a consequence of them doing it, they would become mortal.

Alternatively, (and I think this comes out from Saint Paul’s discussion that we will go on to look at in a minute), it’s not that they will become mortal, so much as that God will kill them. There will be a death penalty for their disobedience. They were always mortal, because that’s the nature of being human: but if they disobey God, God will punish them, he will inflict death upon them. Perhaps that is closer to the true meaning.

It’s all painfully like stuff we remember from childhood. ‘Why do I have to stop throwing bread rolls at my brother when we are having our breakfast?’

Answer, ‘Because I told you not to.’

‘ Why not?’

‘Because if you carry on doing that, you will get a thick ear.’

The way that this is written, makes us realise that it isn’t the ability to tell wrong from right that is the problem – that ability is always a good thing – but it’s how Adam and Eve acquired this ability that got them into trouble.

The important thing is that they disobeyed God. They went off in another direction away from where God had directed them. The problem is not that they knew the difference between good and evil, but that they had become estranged from God. They had ploughed their own furrow; they thought they knew better than God what to do. That is why it is described as sin. What Adam and Eve did was sinful. Sinfulness isn’t necessarily doing something which is morally wrong, so much as becoming cut off from God.

That’s what Paul picks up on in his letter to the Romans. ‘Just as sin came into the world through one man, and death came through sin’, is what he says, not ‘bad things or doing bad things’ came into the world – and incidentally, St Paul seems to be a bit shaky on gender equality, because he only seems to blame Adam, whereas it looks as though the Fall was proximately caused by Eve: anyway, we’ll leave that for another day.

St Paul sees the Fall as alienation from God, as sin, not just doing bad things. He repeats what Genesis says about the consequence of sin being death. I can’t help feeling that perhaps Paul reasons backwards from Jesus’s rising from the dead, from Jesus‘s resurrection, from his conquering death, as it is sometimes called, to infer that mortality was the consequence of sin, that alienation from God, disobedience to God, made one mortal.

That seems to be the logic, although I have to say, it’s one part of these passages that you either believe or not, because there’s nothing you can do to prove or disprove whether God made previously immortal people into mortals.

Be that as it may, Paul contrasts the idea that Adam brought sin into the world – and as Paul says he is not treating Adam as a particular person, but, as the lesson says, “Adam, who was a type of the one who was to come“, or, as another translation [NEB] puts it, “Adam foreshadows the Man who was to come”– either way, it was not particularly Adam – or Eve – who was responsible, but mankind in general going away from the commandments of God.

The Greek word for sin is άμαρτια, which means missing the mark, shooting, and missing the target; Paul then goes on to talk about the effect of what he calls “the law“, that sin existed before the law, but until the law came along, you couldn’t measure how much sin there was. He means law in the sense not of statutes passed by government, but the Jewish law, which is intended to give direction, how to comply with God’s commandments.

So, if you disobey the Jewish law, which is in the first five books of the Old Testament, and summed up in the 10 Commandments, then you have broken the law, not in the sense of being a burglar or a murderer, (although if you were one of those, you would be contravening some of the 10 Commandments) – but more importantly, you are committing sins, things which drive you apart from God.

So Paul contrasts the beginning of sin, the Fall, the fall from grace, by Adam, the prototype man, he contrasts that with God’s gift, his grace, his free gift, to fallen mankind, in giving us his son, Jesus Christ.

Paul contrasts judgement following one trespass, which brought condemnation, and the free gift following many trespasses, which brings justification.

‘Justification’ is a technical term in the Bible. It means being on good terms with God. Sometimes theologians translate it as being right with God, so as to pick up the connotation of justice; but it is more like what an engineer or a carpenter, or a toolmaker, might understand as justification: bringing a work piece into alignment with another work piece, justifying that piece with its intended place.

You adjust something so that it fits.

It’s that kind of relationship that St Paul is talking about here: not a question of being acquitted in a court of law. This all comes in the context where Paul has introduced the idea of “justification through faith“. The idea that you’re not put right with God by doing good deeds necessarily, although good deeds are a good thing to do anyway, but that you depend on God’s generosity.

He is not so much rewarding us as being gracious to us, giving us what is translated as a “free gift” It’s a Greek word, which is translated as a free gift, but it also really means a ‘gifty thing’, a δωρημα as opposed to a δωρον. It’s the essence of generosity, the essence of giving, rather than just a particular present. And that squares again with the idea that we are being put right with God, being brought into adjustment, into a good fit.

Just one more puzzle, before I leave you to carry on musing on these really rich passages with so many things to ponder over. That is the consequence of the free gift. Saint Paul says that those who receive the free gift of righteousness are saved. They “exercise dominion in life” it said in our lesson, through that one man, Jesus Christ. It’s the conquest of life over death. We have the gift of eternal life. That’s what salvation is.

You need to go on and do some homework and read the 15th chapter of Saint Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians to give you more detail about what eternal life is and how it works. Jesus showed that it is possible, by himself rising from the dead. St Paul gives you some very believable analogies to explain in more detail how we can expect eternal life to come about.

So those are some ideas which you might want to reflect on as you begin your journey into Lent this year. All the Fs, the Fall and the Freebie, the Free Gift.

And just one more thing, for those of you who have been tackling me about this. What am I going to do by way of giving things up for Lent? I like to follow an idea which a former Lord Mayor of London had a good few years ago, called the absent guest scheme.

Whenever I go out for a meal or some other refreshment, I keep a note of the bill and then, at the end of Lent, I calculate what it would’ve cost to have had another person present at each of these occasions, an ‘absent guest’. I tot up what the total cost of the absent guests would have been and give it to my chosen charity for that Easter.

This year I will be giving it, I hope, to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, UNRWA, for their work in Gaza.

Tags 1 Corinthians 15, 10 Commandments, Adam, Ash Wednesday, Bible, Easter, Eve, faith, Freebie, Genesis, God, Jesus, Jews, Justification, Moses, New English Bible, Pentateuch, Resurrection, Romans, salvation, Sin, St Paul, The Fall, UNRWA

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