Sermon for Mattins on the Third Sunday in Lent, 19th March 2017
Romans 5:1-11, John 4:5-42

What I want to talk about is a very famous passage, which we have had as our first lesson, from the fifth chapter of the letter of St Paul to the Romans.

‘Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ:

By whom also we have access by faith into this grace wherein we stand, …’

These are words which have inspired some of the greatest Christians in history, and have shaped our own understanding of the gospel. If you read article XI in the 39 Articles on page 616 of your Prayer Book, you will see that it is called, ‘Of the Justification of Man’. It says, 

‘We are accounted righteous before God only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by faith and not for our own works or deservings: wherefore, that we are justified by faith only is a most wholesome doctrine.’

The quotation, that we are justified by faith ‘alone’ is a direct quotation from Martin Luther’s translation of Romans chapter 3 verse 28, where Luther introduced the word ‘alone’ , through faith alone, which is not in the Greek original and it is not in the King James Bible either. So I think we can infer that Thomas Cranmer, who wrote the 39 Articles, was familiar with the German translation of the Bible by Martin Luther.

So this passage brings us from just after the time of Christ, St Paul’s time, maybe 50 A.D., to Martin Luther and Thomas Cranmer in the early 1500s, when this idea of justification by faith was one of the key ideas in the Reformation, and then again it cropped up in the Evangelical revival in the early 1700s, when John Wesley was going to a Bible study meeting in Aldersgate Street on May 24, 1738, ‘When a person read Luther’s Preface to the Epistle to the Romans, which teaches what justifying faith is.’ Wesley said, ‘I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved to me from the law of sin and death’. Wesley subsequently described the experience as being tantamount to being born again. He referred to his spiritual rebirth: but it could also be described as a conversion experience. 

Indeed, John Wesley said, after he had felt his ‘heart strangely warmed’, that he had ‘not really been a Christian’ before then. That was a little bit surprising, given that he was already an ordained minister in the Church of England. With his brother Charles he even ran the so-called Holy Club in Oxford. So much for ‘not really being a Christian’ – but it does underline what a big experience Wesley felt he had had. And of course he and his brother went on to found the ‘people called Methodists’, the Methodist Church.

So much for history. What do these words really mean? What is ‘justification’? What is ‘faith’? What is the ‘grace’ referred to? What was all the fuss about in the Reformation? I expect that these are words which would not readily come to mind these days. On the other hand, Martin Luther, John Wesley, and certainly St Paul, had a different perspective. They were worried, seriously worried, about heaven and hell. Whether they would go up or go down. They were worried about God as the judge eternal. 

The word which is translated as ‘justification’ or sometimes, ‘righteousness’, has a flavour of the courtroom about it. Choosing the right, judging, deciding on the right course of action. So righteousness, being right, came also to mean being right, in a right relationship, with God. The idea was that, through man’s exercise of free will, after the fall, after Adam, mankind was imperfect, was not how God had created them to be. Would God condemn them to eternal damnation? 

Martin Luther found that the whole thing weighed down on him and caused him to become extremely depressed. He wrote that he hated that word, ‘righteousness of God’. ‘I felt I was a sinner before God with an extremely disturbed conscience … I did not love, yes, I hated the righteous God who punishes sinners.’

The Catholic church at the time preached that you could justify yourself at the Pearly Gates by having done lots of good works, and also by having obtained ‘indulgences’, which were permissions which the Church granted – on behalf of the Almighty – in return for payment. Indulgences were supposed to reduce the time which your soul would spend in Purgatory being purged of all its sins. Luther couldn’t find any justification in Scripture for those ideas; and then he lit upon the fifth chapter of Romans and the idea that we did not earn our salvation. There was nothing that we could give to God to earn his reconciliation, his pardon; but rather it was a free gift, grace; and all we had to do was to have faith.

Those of you who are church historians will know that Martin Luther is supposed to had this insight when he was on the loo. It is known in German as the tower experience – Das Turmerlebnis. The monastery where he lived had a toilet in a tower. Luther said that the idea, that the righteous shall live by faith alone, struck him, like a thunderbolt, in the monastery toilet. He is clearly the patron saint of all those of us who spend too long reading in the smallest room. 

The point was that having experienced the thunderbolt, Martin Luther was changed. In a sense, just like John Wesley after him, he felt he was reborn. I want to read you what Luther wrote in his Preface to the Epistle to the Romans, the passage that so affected John Wesley. Luther translated the New Testament into German, and added his own notes, introductions, to each book. Let me read you how Luther introduced the Letter to the Romans; and you might get a flavour of what he was getting at.

Faith, … is a divine work in us. It changes us and makes us to be born anew of God (John 1); it kills the old Adam and makes altogether different men, in heart and spirit and mind and powers, and brings with it the Holy Ghost. 

Oh, it is a living, busy, mighty thing, this faith; and so it is impossible for it not to do good works incessantly. It does not ask whether there are any good works to do, but before the question arises it has already done them, and is always at the doing of them. He who does not do these works is a faithless man. He gropes and looks about after faith and good works, and knows neither what faith is nor what good works are, though he talks and talks, with many words, about faith and good works.

Faith is a living, daring confidence in God’s grace, so sure and certain that a man would stake his life on it a thousand times. This confidence in God’s grace and knowledge of it makes men glad and bold and happy in dealing with God and all His creatures; and this is the work of the Holy Ghost in faith. 

Hence a man is ready and glad, without compulsion, to do good to everyone, to serve everyone, to suffer everything, in love and praise to God, who has shown him this grace; and thus it is impossible to separate works from faith, quite as impossible as to separate heat and light from fire. 

It goes right away from the ancient heresy of Pelagius in the second century, that you have to do good works in order to earn your salvation. God has granted salvation, that is, the grace, to everyone who believes and trusts in him. It’s the fact of having received the grace, the assurance of your salvation, that evokes in you an irresistible urge to do good works, to express love for your neighbours.

Luther’s new idea was a dividing line between the Roman Catholics and the newly emerging Protestants. Does it make any difference to us today? As members of the Church of England, we straddle the line between Catholicism and Protestantism. Our church is not really one or the other. We broke away from the Roman Catholic Church because Henry VIII could not organise his marital affairs without clashing with the Pope. Henry in effect carried on with Catholicism but without the Pope. As king he became the “defender of the faith”, fidei defensor in Latin, which you will see on our coins as ‘F.D.’ or ‘Fid. Def.’ But we didn’t have the sale of indulgences or the doctrine of Purgatory any more. People didn’t build chanceries and chapels in which masses for the dead would be said, because people no longer believed that they could, in effect, buy themselves into the kingdom of heaven. 

What is this ‘grace’, though, if we are no longer worried about heaven and hell? We now tend to take rather a sceptical attitude towards what comes next when we die. We think that all those stories about St Peter at the Pearly Gates are more likely to be fanciful than not. Where does that leave us in relation to salvation, justification?

I think we are back to the woman of Samaria: ‘Give me this water that I thirst not’, Jesus having said to her, 

‘Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again:

But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst;’ 

Our prayer must surely be the same as the Woman of Samaria’s: we need that water. And then our lives will be changed. Even staid respectable souls like us! There may not be a fear of hell and damnation – but how do we stand firm against populism, racism, xenophobia, Trump? We need God’s grace.

How does it work? How do we get it? Is it just a matter of luck, as it seems to have been with John Wesley? Just being in the right place at the right time, and in the right frame of mind? That was how Martin Luther thought it worked. He subscribed to a mystical text which came out in German in the fourteenth century, which Luther published with a preface of his own, in 1516, called the ‘Theologia deutsch’, the German theology, according to which a Christian should surrender his will utterly and completely, opening himself to the divine will and becoming possessed by the spirit of God, becoming vergöttlicht, ‘Godded-up’. 

The point about this is not that you can earn it, but you just have humbly to trust, to believe, to open your mind, to hope that eventually your prayers will be answered. What a good thing to do in this season of Lent!
Let us pray for Luther’s thunderbolt; let us pray for our hearts to be strangely warmed, like John Wesley’s. Then we will, truly, be justified by faith. 

Sermon for Evensong on the Third Sunday of Lent, 19th March 2017
Joshua 1:1-9, Ephesians 6:10-20 

In Lent we remember Jesus being tempted by the Devil for 40 days in the wilderness. Today we have a reading from St Paul’s letter to the Ephesians recommending that the Ephesians should metaphorically arm themselves to withstand ‘the wiles of the devil’, the devil, defined as ‘principalities, …[and] powers, … the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.’

What is the devil, these days? Leave aside those pictures of Jesus with a horned figure on his shoulder in the desert. Principalities, and powers: it could be about Donald Trump, and Vladimir Putin, Gert Wilders, Marine Le Pen – and in some instances, even the ‘Brexiteers’. What is the ‘spiritual wickedness’ that we, the descendants of those rather sophisticated Ephesians, have to contend with? If we go through the kit which St Paul recommends that his Christian soldiers should put on, we may be able to identify the types of incoming fire that each bit of armour is designed to contend with.

Have ‘your loins girt about with truth’ is the first one. Truth is the first casualty in war, they say. But what about ‘alternative facts’, or the ‘post-truth environment’? What about powerful men saying things in public that are completely and demonstrably untrue? That President Obama got GCHQ to bug Trump Tower during the recent presidential election, for which no evidence has been offered? Or that a vote to leave the EU would immediately save £350m a week, which would be given to the NHS instead. Was that true?

The next one is the ‘breastplate of righteousness’. The word for ‘righteousness’ in the Bible means literally ‘justice’ in the sense of winning a court case. The Rule of Law: ‘be you ever so high, the law is above you’, as Lord Denning said. Human rights, fairness, the brotherhood of man. The Germany of Angela Merkel has spent €22bn on taking in, housing and looking after up to 1 million refugees. We, the UK, have baulked at taking more than 350 children from among those now roaming homeless in the Pas de Calais. The poor countries of Europe, Greece and Southern Italy, have mounted huge rescue operations and brought ashore to safety hundreds of thousands. Who is righteous? 

But we find that our Supreme Court judges, the successor to the Judicial Committee of the House of Lords, the highest court in the land, are called ‘Enemies of the People’ by some newspapers: and in the United States of America, a Federal Court judge who found that President Trump’s anti-immigration policy conflicted with the constitution and quashed it, found himself being referred to by the President as a ‘so-called judge’. Righteousness, justification, justice. All at peril in our new unenlightened world of Trump and Brexit.

I had tea and spent a happy evening earlier this week with my friends Bill and Hope from Hartford, Conn. They are retired clergy – and indeed I have on a couple of occasions preached in their churches in the USA. ‘What have you given up for Lent?’ we asked each other. Bill has had a wonderful idea. He has given up mentioning Donald Trump – at all – during Lent. Bill is already feeling the benefits. He’s calmer, happier, and can rely on words having their normal, natural meaning.

But I can’t stop thinking about it. Is there a common factor in these evils? Do they, taken together, add up to being the devil incarnate? Ingredients in the mix would include the current, increasing, nationalist, sometimes racist, impetus: hostility to facts and verifiable data: hostility towards supranational concepts of justice. Xenophobia and insularity channelling into inhospitable treatment of refugees and others in need. 

There is a common thread in all this – some commentators call it ‘populism’. This is a bleak philosophy, a mean-spirited outlook. I think it could simply be renamed ‘meanness’. ‘Unto him who hath it shall be added: but from him who hath not it shall be taken away – even what he hath.’ (Matt. 13:12). The meanest line in the Bible!

People are being blamed for being poor, and blamed for relying on benefits or food banks. They must be scroungers or cheats, say some of the newspapers. Someone recently complained to me that it was wrong that our food bank was asking people to donate cat food. I asked them how they would feel if they had fallen on hard times, but they had a pet. Would they let their cat or dog starve? 

‘Oh, I see’, they said: for the first time they realised that ‘poor people’ are not rubbish, but they are human beings just like them. All that the Good Samaritan saw, on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho, was a man who had been hurt. He didn’t stop to think whether the injured man was someone who was entitled to be helped. The fact that he was a fellow human being was enough.

That is how it should be for food banks, and hospitals, and refugees. The Samaritan didn’t check whether he was overdrawn at the bank before paying the injured man’s hotel bill. He didn’t calculate whether it would stretch his resources to help the man. All that mattered was that he was hurt, that he was a fellow human being who needed help. 

We are the fifth richest country in the world. It is seriously evil to say, to people whose homes have been bombed, whose loved ones killed, who have literally nothing, that we ‘can’t afford’ to take them and care for them. That really is the devil at work. 

Just because it is written in elegant prose in a broadsheet newspaper, the Daily Telegraph or the Times – or at least in a middle-class tabloid, like the Daily Mail – it doesn’t make it any less evil. When these siren voices from comfortable warm offices, sounding so reasonable, encourage people to be mean towards those less fortunate than themselves, to put up barriers to keep the have-nots out, are they not the ‘rulers of darkness of this world’, are they not showing ‘spiritual wickedness in high places’?

The Jarrow marchers didn’t blame their hunger on other people, on ‘immigrants’. Something has changed in our world. What is wrong in going to another country to seek your fortune? Is it all right if you’re a Scotsman, or an Irishman, and you go to Dubai – but not if you’re a Romanian or a Pole coming to Lincolnshire? 

This is not right. St Paul asked that your ‘feet should be shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace’. St Paul said you should dare to stand up against this tide of prejudice and illiberality. You might need to take a bit of protection, because now populism has made it OK to be chauvinistic and racist, and the racists and xenophobes will try to bully people who stand out against them. Which is what we must do. Take the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit: you are a proper Christian, and you must not mind taking a hit or two for the truth.

Look at St Paul’s own position. He was writing this brave message, even though he himself was in prison. He was an ‘ambassador in bonds’. The least we can do, from our comfortable homes in Surrey, is to make our voices heard. If, for instance, Brexit means turning away people who need sanctuary and people who are willing to work hard to make a better living than they could at home, it is as false as Trump. Like St Paul, we may speak boldly: like St Paul, we ‘ought to speak’.

Amen. Let it be so.

Sermon for Evensong on 12 March 2017
Numbers 21:4-9; Luke 14:27-33 

How do you feel about kids’ rugby? On Sunday morning? Or, if it’s a nice day, popping in to church for the 8 o’clock service so that it leaves the rest of the day free? What about those churches which put on a special 4 o’clock service so that you can play sport or go to a match and still go to church later? The evening will still be free. Or what about that vexed question what the right time for Mattins should be? Is 11:30 too late: does it get in the way of making the gravy for your Sunday roast?

It’s a tough one, if you are a vicar and you have to organise your church’s schedule best for its ministry. What is going to appeal to the most people? What is going to put those bums on the seats? Maybe the answer is related to feeding people, literally as well as spiritually, for example in the way that the Alpha course does. They give you a meal as well as Bible study. But remember the poor old Israelites in the wilderness, complaining about the food; even the heavenly manna wasn’t much cop – it wasn’t very interesting. [Num.11:6] Maybe a nice meal isn’t it. 

We are great ones today for giving people choices. ‘One size fits all’, or Henry Ford’s ‘You can have any colour so long as it is black’, just won’t do today. Even 3,000 years ago, the Israelites were complaining to God, or at least to God’s representative, to Moses the prophet. ‘Wherefore have ye brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? for there is no bread, neither is there any water; and our soul loatheth this light bread.’ Loatheth it. It’s no good for you to just dump us here in the wilderness where the food is such rubbish! What’s the point? 

In Saint Luke’s Gospel it’s the other way round. God is not being spoken to, but he is Himself speaking to his people – Jesus, who is God, is talking to his disciples. He’s talking about relative values. The seemingly awful passage about hating one’s father and mother comes just before our lesson tonight. And then the rather odd-sounding stuff about building a tower or setting out with an army to make war: it seems to me as though the contrast is between almost reckless commitment, throwing oneself into discipleship even at the expense of your love for your family, on the one hand, and preparing accurate bills of quantities before undertaking a building project, or detailed strategic calculations of the forces required to win a battle. 

In the Gulf War the US Army devised a strategy of a need for overwhelming force, called ‘Shock and Awe’, as a prerequisite for action: Jesus’ hypothetical leader planning to take on 20,000 men, with a army of half this number, would not have satisfied US Army rules. It all adds up to your commitment to become Jesus’ disciple being very carefully weighed up – but, if you accept the call, nothing, absolutely nothing, will come before your loyalty to Jesus. 

Compare it with becoming a vicar in the Church of England today. First you have months of regular meetings with the Diocesan Director of Ordinands, who delicately and tactfully teases out of you the level of your commitment; then you go off for a country house party, called a Bishop’s Advisory Panel, for three days – rather similar to what the Diplomatic Service used to inflict on their candidates. 

Then at last – you don’t get ordained: you need two or three years of academic training first. It’s not quite ‘hating your father and mother’, but it has a flavour of the same absolute dedication.

But wait a minute: supposing you say, I’m just a member of the congregation. I do have a life to run. I may indeed have to fit church in around rugby training. Does that mean that I’m no good as a Christian? Surely not. Well truly, we don’t know; we don’t know whether Jesus would have accepted a rather less keen category of Christians. We hope so.

Maybe there’s a distinction to be drawn between full-on disciples, people who had given up all their creature comforts, left family and friends and followed Him on the one hand, and people like the five thousand, or four thousand, who did love the Lord and did follow Him, but who still took their kids to rugby training.

Another thing is this. Let’s say you do get it, you do realise that being a Christian is more than just going to a show in church each week. You do recognise what Jesus is: God, the Son of God, ‘almighty, invisible, God only wise’. What is Jesus commanding us to do in response? Is it just making sure you go to church? 

Have a look at Paul’s letter to the Galatians, chapter 5:22, ‘ …the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, … 25 If we live in the Spirit, let us also walk in the Spirit.’ ‘Walking in’ means doing; let us ‘do all such good works as thou hast prepared for us to walk in.’ [Communion Service, Common Worship Order Two/BCP 1928]. That means doing good works.  

The thing is, have you been ‘saved’? Are you ‘in the Spirit’, as St Paul put it? You hear people talking about Jesus dying ‘for our salvation’. How does it work? He died, we are told, in order that we ‘might have eternal life’. How would I explain that to someone who refused to believe it? After all, we do all actually die eventually, whether we’re Christians or not.

This is the heart of the Easter story. It is a demonstration, a revelation, that God exists, and that He cares for us. ‘Greater love hath no man, than that he lay down his life for his friends’ (John 15:13), is part of it. Jesus was condemned to death for no reason. Pilate could find no crime that He was guilty of. I suppose you could argue that the Jews saw the Christians as a challenge to them. They wanted to rub them out. They could have rounded up Jesus’ followers and had them all killed. 

The Romans could have bought into this as a way of combatting ‘terrorism’. At least one Disciple, Simon the Zealot, was a member of a militant sect opposed to Roman rule. But Jesus was willing to accept the ultimate punishment on behalf of, instead of, all of them. Think of Father Maximilian Kolbe, the monk who volunteered to be starved to death in Auschwitz in place of a man with a family who had been singled out by the Nazis. He died so that the other man could live.

Jesus died in place of sinful mankind. As St Paul put it in Romans 5:6-11, (NEB)
“6 … Christ died for the wicked. 7 Even for a just man one of us would hardly die, though perhaps for a good man one might actually brave death; 8 but Christ died for us while we were yet sinners, and that is God’s own proof of his love towards us. 9 And so, since we have now been justified by Christ’s sacrificial death, we shall all the more certainly be saved through him from final retribution. 10 For if, when we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life!”

All through the Old Testament there is the theme of man’s rebellion against God. ‘Sin’ means, being separated from God. Worshipping other gods, complaining against God’s prophets, (as we saw in our first lesson), and catalogues of debauchery, violence and immorality – breaking, or just ignoring, the Ten Commandments. God the Creator could surely have cast His creation adrift, torn it up and started again. Astronomers and physicists tell us that there are countless other ‘worlds’ beside ours. Maybe God has created better ones, where there is no war, no hunger or oppression. 

But the Israelites, maybe just the ‘remnant’, the ones who didn’t give up on God, expected that eventually they would be saved. Look at Isaiah 49, 
“Thus saith the LORD, In an acceptable time have I heard thee, and in a day of salvation have I helped thee: and I will preserve thee, and give thee for a covenant of the people, to establish the earth, to cause to inherit the desolate heritages”.

I am uneasy about an understanding of Christ’s death which sees it as a buying-off of God’s wrath. Christians have always used that language; in the Comfortable Words, “He is the propitiation for our sins”. ‘Propitiation’ (ίλασμον) is sometimes translated as the “atoning sacrifice”. But would a loving God be so cruel?

It is certainly true that, as between Jesus and ordinary mankind, Jesus could not be blamed, did not deserve any punishment: whereas ordinary mankind certainly were guilty of all sorts of sins. Although today we probably might be reluctant to say they ‘deserved to die’ for their sins: after all, humans were made that way. 

But what we can say is that, whatever the whys and wherefores of Jesus’ death, his Resurrection is the point at which we can see God at work. If Jesus was a typical human, in one sense, if he entered into our humanity – and died – then by being raised again He changed the game entirely. An awful lot hangs on this. If the Resurrection was just a ‘conjuring trick with bones’, as someone once put it, misquoting Rt Revd David Jenkins, [see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Jenkins_(bishop)%5D then the Sunday rugby crowd can sleep easy and continue to ignore what goes on in church. But if not?

If not. What if you do get it, what if you are ‘in Christ’? That needs even more thought, as we approach Easter. If you can get beyond Sunday rugby, what then? Is going to church the whole story? We can all think of people, in politics or other leadership roles, who are quite happy to be known for going to church, but who still do things which certainly don’t look very Christian. Think of all the nice churchgoing MPs who voted to bring the Dubs scheme for welcoming refugee children to an end, when only about 300 children had been saved, instead of the 3,000 originally promised. Is that like Sunday rugby – you know, you’ve just got to be ‘practical’?

Is that it? But what, what if it is true?

Like many 65-year-olds, I was rattling round the house that our family had grown up in, with my two Bengal cats, Poppadum and Tikka Masala. First my Mrs had traded me in for a new model, a year after I took early retirement. Then my lovely daughters left for medical school and, for one, marriage and a delightful first grandson for me! Just me and the cats left.

First the bad, then the good news: they all left, but I’m still rattling around this big old house. The cats are still here – and they get to go where they used not to be allowed ….

But what are the young ones who work around here doing? They could be living at Mum and Dad’s Hotel, of course: but what if the aged parents have decamped to Marbella? There aren’t many cheap flats around in this part of Surrey.

Then I heard about Step-by-Step (https://www.stepbystep.org.uk/) Their ‘supported lodgings’ scheme matches young people who need places to live with people who have a spare room which they’re prepared to share. It’s not a formal letting; one is simply taking a lodger. If it doesn’t work out, you’re in charge and can gently kick them out.

It’s a great idea. I thought I’d forgotten about teenagers – but now I’ve got a fine one in one of my spare bedrooms. He moves in mysterious ways: gets up mid-afternoon and then works night shifts for a bit. Then he just sleeps. He feeds on pizza except when I press a steak on him. Despite all that, he’s fine company. He even feeds the cats when I go off to visit my daughters. Result! Much better than talking to myself, or occasionally to the (lovely) cats …

The Foodbank is an independent charity, registered in England and Wales no 1154217, founded in 2013 by Churches Together in Cobham, Oxshott, Stoke D’Abernon and Surrounding Areas.

The Foodbank subscribes to the national network of over 400 food banks co-ordinated and advised by the Trussell Trust, a Christian charity in Salisbury. Trussell has devised, and Cobham Area Foodbank follows, a system whereby people who find themselves without the wherewithal to buy food, for whatever reason, can obtain a food voucher from a voucher issuer, who may be a school welfare officer, a Jobcentre, a housing benefit officer, a minister of religion or other professional, who will be able to verify the need expressed. The voucher details the number and ages of people to receive food, and records the reason why their need has arisen. These details are fed into a national Trussell Trust database.

The Foodbank has collection bins in all the local churches and some other premises including Waitrose, Starbucks and Sainsbury’s, and it invites donations of non-perishable food, which are collected in the Foodbank van (pictured) and taken to the Foodbank warehouse at Brook Willow Farm, Leatherhead, where it is weighed and sorted by types and best-before dates. The Foodbank does not distribute fresh or out-of-date food.

Every Friday morning the van collects sufficient food for the week’s distribution, which takes place in the Foodbank’s ‘pop-up café’ at Cobham Methodist Church, open from midday to 1.30pm. In the last year we have distributed on average 1/3 tonne of food per week, providing food for 960 adults and 732 children – an average of 32 people per week. We are noticing an increase in numbers – around Christmas there were weeks where we provided food for between 60 and 70 people, and distributed over 1/2 tonne of food.
All the clients live locally, in Cobham, Oxshott, Stoke D’Abernon, or Downside. The area served by the Foodbank has been extended in the last year also to include East and West Horsley, Ockham and Effingham. St Martin’s, East Horsley, Horsley Evangelical Church, Effingham Methodist Church, and Posh Wash dry cleaners are all now collecting food.
Where people for whatever reason cannot come to our distribution centre, we deliver their food at home. The volunteers who serve in the distribution centre and those who do home deliveries all undergo special training in order that they treat clients appropriately, warmly and with respect.
The governing principles are ‘there but for the grace of God go I’, and Jesus’ great second commandment, to love thy neighbour as thyself. The Foodbank does not judge or advise its clients in any way, save only that there is a display of ‘signposts’ to various forms of advice and assistance.
The Foodbank does not impose any limit to the number of food parcels any client can receive. The only criterion is need. Particularly where many clients are working, but in low-paid and uncertain jobs, living in privately rented accommodation where rents rise but housing benefits have been cut or capped, (or are otherwise harmed by government austerity, as graphically shown by the recent award-winning film ‘I, Daniel Blake’), the Foodbank trustees consider that ideas of reducing ‘dependency’ are usually cruel and to be avoided. Most Foodbank clients have no chance of getting themselves out of poverty.
There are around 60 active volunteers working in the Foodbank, in transport (drivers and mates), warehouse and the distribution centre. There are no paid employees. The Foodbank is administered by a General Manager, Hugh Bryant, who also manages transport and is assisted by a volunteer coordinator and distribution manager, Christina Van Roest, and a warehouse manager, Jane Olsen. Hugh reports to a board of trustees chaired by Revd Godfrey Hilliard, including Hugh, Christina, Peter Wall and the treasurer, Claire Smith.
The Foodbank is most grateful for the support it receives financially from the churches, from various grants and generous individuals. It needs around £15,000 per year in order to meet its costs for warehouse rental, hire purchase and depreciation of the van, insurances and periodic needs to purchase food, where donations have not provided items needed in order to provide nutritionally-balanced food parcels. Bank details and a Gift Aid form may be found on the website http://www.cobhamarea.foodbank.org.uk.
Hugh D. Bryant

9th February 2017

Text of letter to Dominic Raab MP through Avaaz, 1 February 2017

Dear Mr Raab,

You and I have already corresponded about your failure to represent your constituents’ 60-40 majority against Brexit. Even if, which I do not accept, you are able to get away with your unrepresentative position, I understand that you say you have a proper care for the best interests of your constituents. 

I would therefore urge you to support the giving of a vote in Parliament to approve or disapprove the Brexit settlement which HM Government says they will have negotiated, before any notice under Article 50 is given.

Further, I would ask that, until or unless terms are obtained which either retain our membership of the single market and customs union, or provide equal trade benefits, consisting in the absence of tariffs, which membership of the EU provides, you do not vote in favour of steps to leave the EU, as, unless such terms are obtained, leaving the EU would be catastrophic for our economy – and particularly the economy of the City of London, where many of your constituents earn their living.

I do not believe that a majority of those who voted nationally to leave the EU voted for us to leave the single market and customs union. The choice on the ballot paper was simply to advise Parliament of a wish to leave the EU or not: nothing else. Mrs May’s stated wish to interpret the vote as a vote for more restricted immigration, even if this necessarily implies leaving the single market and customs union, is not something for which any democratic sanction can reliably be claimed. Given that catastrophic harm to our economy would be caused by such a ‘hard Brexit’, I call on you for once to listen to your constituents and vote in accordance with their wishes, at least insofar as the need to stay in the single market and customs union is concerned.

Hugh Bryant

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Note: Your constituent Hugh Bryant sent you this message as part of an Avaaz campaign to ensure citizens and MPs have their say on the final Brexit deal.