1) Sermon for Mattins on the 2nd Sunday of Epiphany, 15th Jan 2017
1 Corinthians 1:1-9; John 1:29-42

‘Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.’ Are you clear about that? Do you know what John the Baptist was on about? Certainly a man from Mars might be struggling.

I want to talk this morning about seeing things, or rather people, for what they really are. John the Baptist said – twice – that he didn’t know who Jesus was at first. Then ‘he that sent me to baptise with water’ said to John that whoever he saw being descended on from heaven by the Spirit, ‘the same’ – that one – ‘baptizeth with the Holy Ghost’.

Park that scene in your mind for a moment. Before we start to wrestle with things descending from heaven, or lambs, or even lambs of God, I just want to pause and suggest that perhaps we ought not to be too worried about what happened 2,000+ years ago, when there is so much to challenge us happening now. 

Perhaps people come to church almost as a way of getting away from the cares of the world. Brexit. Trump. The NHS crisis. What do we Christians do? We have a nice soothing service commemorating something in the church: the son of God, say. Manifesting, showing himself. Behold the lamb of God. Sounds comforting. A lamb. Almost cuddly. Much nicer than ranting politicians and worrying news bulletins.

But think about the man from Mars. Or maybe there’s someone new here in church today, someone who honestly doesn’t go to church much. Well, if you’ve never come across it before, frankly, what is a lamb of God? What’s the relevance of these rather odd sounding ideas to modern life?

Ever since Bishop John Robinson published his book called ‘Honest to God’ in 1963, thoughtful Christians in this country have realised that God isn’t very likely to be a man with a white beard sitting on a throne above the clouds. So if God isn’t ‘up there’, how likely is it that He will send angels down as messengers from above? 

Charles Wesley’s ‘Lo, He comes, with clouds descending’ may be lovely words to have in a hymn – and of course they reflect the passage in St Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians (4:15-17) where at the last trump, St Paul says that Jesus will descend from heaven, the dead will rise from the grave, and together with them we will all rise to meet the Messiah in the sky: but it surely don’t describe how we think that God might work today. We really don’t believe in a ‘Spirit in the sky’ any more, if we ever did.

So what about the lamb? It is the old Jewish idea of a scapegoat. See Leviticus 16:7-10. You metaphorically unloaded your bad things on to the back of a poor goat, who was then pushed out into the wilderness to fend for itself. It somehow took away the bad behaviour and hurt and alienation, by suffering for you.

Sometimes I’ve been to church services – the last one was called a ‘U2charist’, a Holy Communion where all the hymns were songs by the rock band U2, at St Martin of Tours in Epsom – where the congregation are invited to pick up something, like a pebble, say – and put it into a big bin or some other receptacle, and throw it away – as it were sacramentally, with the idea that the pebble was something, something you felt or did, that you wanted to get rid of. 

Obviously it’s better to chuck away a pebble than to turn a poor goat loose in the desert without shelter, food and water. But the idea is similar. The scapegoat, or the scape-pebble, is metaphorically taking away whatever it is you feel burdened by. I suppose if you accept the idea behind it, it might do you some good: who knows?

The idea is sometimes called ‘substitutionary atonement’. Someone takes someone else’s punishment for them. ‘Greater love hath no man, than that he lay down his life for his friends’ (John 15:13). Or much more recently, Fr Maximilian Kolbe, the Franciscan friar in Auschwitz, who volunteered to take the place of a man selected at random by the Nazis to die by starvation in reprisal for an escape.

Some people say that what Jesus did by dying on the cross was the same sort of thing. He died, it is said, as a sacrifice, a propitiation, to make up for our sins, so God would be pacified, would be content with the sacrifice and would spare us. That’s what John the Baptist might have had in mind when he called Jesus the ‘Lamb of God’. 

The Prayer of Consecration in the Holy Communion service – on page 255 of your blue Prayer Books – ‘Almighty God .. who didst give thine only son Jesus Christ to suffer death upon the cross for our redemption… who made there .. a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction, for the sins of the whole world..’ – that has the same idea.

It’s not an idea which liberal theologians feel comfortable with today. Why would a loving God want a human sacrifice – let alone a sacrifice of his own son? And anyway, we don’t slaughter animals on altars any more. I can see the sort of logic when mankind was more primitive, maybe living hand-to-mouth in caves. Food – and sheep and goats were walking food – was precious. If God was the most important thing you knew – or at least God was the most powerful, could do you the most good, or harm – then you wanted to keep him on side, to give Him something of the highest value – your walking food, your sheep or goat, ready for the oven – or indeed, if it was a ‘burnt offering’, ready cooked.

Anyway, what is ‘salvation’, these days? Being saved. Saved from sin. I think that some of us might have said, when we were children, perhaps, that ‘salvation’ was all about not really dying, and instead having eternal life. Certainly that comes into it: but although we may well accept that there is a sense in which there is a life after death – have a look at 1 Corinthians 15, for example – it’s clearly not as simple an idea as suddenly stopping the population from dying at the end of their lives.

No, the idea is that you’re saved from sin, from the consequences of your sins. You will be all right on the Day of Judgment: ‘that ye may be blameless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ’, as St Paul puts it in his first letter to the Corinthians , in the passage that we had as the epistle, the lesson, today. 

Sin isn’t really just doing bad things. It isn’t just breaking one or other of the Ten Commandments. The real sting of sin is that it is separation from God, or separation from God’s way, the right path in life. I get to that this way. If God is the ultimate Creator, and if one can reasonably expect that his creation is good and right and well-conceived, breaking one or other of the Ten Commandments will tend to upset that good order in creation. 

We were meant in creation to have stable lives – families. Children who would love their parents. Murder is obviously against the created order. Stealing likewise, and giving false evidence. That well-run created order will begin to look scruffy, unbalanced. Those sins – the Greek word means ‘missing the mark’ – drive a wedge between us and the well-ordered world which God made for us.

I would suggest that, these days, when we don’t any more have sacrifices, or at least those sort of slaughtered animal sacrifices, what Jesus did, or what God in Jesus did, was to enter fully into human life – and to suffer the injustices that can ruin that life. He was condemned to death for a crime he didn’t commit. God could have saved him: he could have saved himself – think of the temptations in the wilderness (Matthew and Luke, both chapter 4, Mark 1:13).

But God – or he himself, as God – didn’t save himself. Because if he had done, he wouldn’t have been a man, fully human. There were miracles, of course: turning water into wine. Even the resurrection itself. But the point is that Jesus was shown to us, it was his Epiphany to us. God had shown that He was involved with us. ‘God in man made manifest’ (Hymn 90).

Well, that takes us to the point where John the Baptist saw the Holy Spirit descending like a dove, identifying Jesus as the son of God, and the first people signed up to become followers – or rather, students, of this rabbi, or teacher. And they went round to Jesus’ house, and spent time with him.

So where does that take us? Granted we can work out, with the help of a few commentary books, what the Bible says. But how do we relate to it? How do we become ‘saved’? That’s for you to ponder over this lunchtime. Or, if you look at your pew sheet, you’ll see that the lessons from St John’s Gospel this morning and tonight at Evensong are continuous. They run into each other. 

First the lamb of God and the first two disciples. Then in the next bit, Nathanael, ‘an Israelite .. in whom there is no guile’. What happened next? So you’ll have to come tonight to hear the second chapter of my sermon. Until then, think about what you’d tell the man from Mars, about that Lamb.

2) Sermon for Evensong on the 2nd Sunday of Epiphany, 15th January 2017
Galatians 1:11-24; John 1:34-51

This morning at Mattins I spoke about the earlier bit of this reading from the first chapter of St John’s Gospel, and now this is by way of a second instalment.

John the Baptist had recognised Jesus for what he was, the Son of God, the ‘Lamb of God’, picked out, identified, demonstrated to be those things – because that is what the Greek word for Epiphany means – when the Holy Spirit descended in the form of a dove on to Jesus.

We chewed over what all these rather odd expressions – that the Lamb was in John’s eyes a sacrificial lamb, a sort of scapegoat, following the old Jewish idea that you could somehow unload all your failures and mistakes, sins even, by putting them sacramentally, symbolically, on the back of a goat and sending it out without nourishment to die in the desert.

We thought that a good and kind God would not really want such a cruel sacrifice. That perhaps the prevalence of this idea of ‘substitutionary atonement’ in the Bible and in our liturgy rather reflects an earlier age, where there was powerful symbolism in giving away to God, sacrificing to him your main source of food in animal sacrifice. 

We can understand that idea in theory, but, just as we now don’t take literally the idea of ‘heaven’, and God with a white beard sitting above the clouds, we can decide to take the idea of the sacrificial Lamb as a symbol. There is no gory end here. The lesson which we take from this image, the Lamb of God, is, instead, the reason why we describe our faith as ‘revealed’ religion. God in Jesus, in human form, has been revealed, shown – the Epiphany word again – to us. Just as we suffer injustice sometimes, so did Jesus. He was one of us. 

The first part of our two lessons from St John, this morning’s part, ended with the brothers Simon and Andrew leaving John the Baptist’s followers and joining Jesus’ ‘gang’. Now in the final bit of the first chapter of St John’s Gospel, we read about the next disciple coming in, Nathanael. 

I remember when I was 5, between the ages of five and eight, I attended the Nottingham Girls High School pre-prep department. Don’t worry, it doesn’t mean that I have changed sex. It is one of the strange things that schools used to do. In girls’ schools, when you were small enough, there were a few boys as well. There were six of us: Richard Stillman, Simon Stocker and his brother Mark, John de Ville, Nicky Boneham and me. Our class was therefore divided into six gangs. We, each of us boys, invited girls whom we thought suitable for our gang to hang around with us and in playtime our usual idea was to organise a pitched battle between our gangs. Only occasionally did we do things more peacefully, playing in the sandpit. Innocent things in the sandpit, I assure you. With a rather good model tractor, in my case.

Well here we are reading about the call of the first disciples. In this second part of the story, Jesus invited Philip into his ‘gang’: he said, ‘Follow me’, and he did. And Philip in turn brought his friend Nathanael in. There was a certain amount of rudery between the disciples about where each one had come from: the sort of thing that I as a Brummie had to get used to, all those years ago when I was working in Liverpool. It’s the same sort of thing that all non-Londoners have to encounter down here in the soft South. How can there be anything good north of Watford? ‘Can there any good thing come out of Nazareth?’ Well, Philip said, ‘Come and see.’ 

So the disciples were starting to group together. The gang was being assembled. But as so often in the Bible, when you look at things a bit critically, you realise that there are massive bits of the story missing. In John’s Gospel there is none of the birth story: no shepherds, no manger, no wise men, no Herod. When we first encounter Jesus, he’s grown up. We don’t know a lot more about what he has been up to. There is, of course, in Luke the time when he gave his parents the slip and turned up in the temple where he seemed to have been holding a seminar – and he was only 12 years old (Luke 2:43f). But now, fully grown, he has been recognised as the Messiah, as the Son of God, and he has started to get his own disciples, his own gang.

The really big gap which I would like to mention to everyone for further consideration is this: what did the disciples do next? Or, for that matter, what did Jesus do next? There they all were: the team is together. They are going around together. To some extent they will be doing some studying. They will be listening to Jesus explaining the Bible to them. But honestly, do you think that is all that it was? Do you think that they were just a bunch of travelling scholars? I would suggest to you that, if that had been the case, we really would not have heard of Jesus Christ and all the huge history of the Christians down through the last 2000 years. What were they all about?

St Paul wasn’t with the early disciples, actually accompanying Jesus: but still Jesus was ‘revealed’ to him, as he says in his letter to the Galatians: ‘But when it pleased God, who separated me from my mother’s womb, and called me by his grace, to  reveal his Son in me, that I might preach him among the heathen; ..’ we remember how St Paul was made blind on the road to Damascus; how he had a conversion experience and went from being the Christians’ chief persecutor to being their leading missionary. He had witnessed a huge epiphany. A huge showing of God in the person of Jesus. And what did he do? In St Paul’s case, he went about preaching. Indeed in Saint Matthews Gospel Jesus gave the disciples the great commission – but I think that is later on. 

I’m interested in what they did when they had Jesus with them. It’s generally reckoned that it lasted about three years. This morning I mentioned Bishop John Robinson and his rather revolutionary book, Honest to God, in the early sixties, and how he had challenged the idea that God was a little old man with a beard sitting on top of the clouds. Indeed, John Robinson followed the German-American theologian Paul Tillich in suggesting that a better way of understanding the nature of God was to think of God as being, as well as the ultimate creator, the heart of our being, the life force, the ground. Without God, without us being able to anchor ourselves in the ground, we would not have our life. 

And I was saying that salvation, saving us from sin, consists in getting us back in touch with God, bringing us back, grounding us in his love. Sins are the things that take us away from God. If the creator and sustainer of our world has demonstrated that he is interested in us, by sending Jesus, God is not just an impersonal unmoved mover. He is a man, was a man, like us.

That must mean that the kingdom of God isn’t some Shangri-La above the clouds, but it is a world where there was a new Jerusalem, ‘a new heaven and a new earth, the holy city, new Jerusalem made ready like a bride adorned for her husband. Now at last God has his dwelling among men. He will dwell among them and they shall be his people and God himself will be with them. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes. There shall be an end to death, to mourning and crying and pain; for the old order has passed away.’  

And again, it’s what we pray for in the holy communion service in Common Worship: ‘send us out in the power of your spirit to live and work to your praise and glory’ or, ‘Keep us firm in the hope that you have set before us, so that we and all your children shall be free, and the whole earth live to praise your name.’ Or in the Eucharistic Prayer (E):
‘Lord of all life

Help us to work together for that day

When your kingdom comes

And justice and mercy will be seen in all the earth.’
It’s very practical. It may not be that we somehow win our place in the kingdom by doing good works: but as St Paul explained later on in his letter to the Galatians, you become ‘under the Spirit’: he says, ‘.. the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, long suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance.’ Those must have been the qualities that the disciples were demonstrating.

If you start to be filled with the Spirit – which is one aspect of God, after all – in this way, then people will start to notice. People will start to feel the power of the Good News, of God with us.

So we will become like Nathanael, ‘without guile’, good people. Then, with John the Baptist, they saw Jesus, the Lamb of God. Now much later, in Jesus’ gang, then among his disciples, now as members of his church, in ourselves, in each other we can see him again, in his Holy Spirit at work. Let’s make room for Him. God is with us.

Dear Mr Raab

Please would you read this piece from the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/jan/08/an-absolute-warzone-nhs-doctors-describe-their-week-in-ae?CMP=share_btn_tw.
What do you think about the situation described? Do you care?

It is vital that we get back to spending at least the European average, i.e. around 10% of GDP, instead of the current 6-7%. Your party’s dogma, that public spending should not exceed 35% of GDP, is harming our country. Mrs May’s vacuous speeches pretending that you care about poorer people are arrant nonsense in the light of the damage your party is doing to the NHS, let alone anything else.

The NHS is something on which your constituents, whose wishes you so loftily ignore in relation to the disastrous Brexit nonsense, would, I am confident, prefer you to spend your time. Or is there some privatising hidden agenda being followed by you and J. Hunt? Are you not ashamed?

Yours sincerely
Hugh Bryant

Sermon for Mattins on the Fourth Sunday of Advent, 18th December 2016
Romans 1:1-7, Matthew 1:18-25

Some of you will know that, despite my youthful appearance, I am now a grandfather. My elder daughter Emma and her husband Joe were blessed with the birth of a son, James, on 10th November. He weighed in at 7 lb 5 oz, (or 3.3 kg), and he is a bonny and fast-growing baby.

Having a baby seems to colour the lives of all around you for quite some time. Obviously as a grandparent I am spared the sleepless nights so far and the nappy changing, although I have said that I am perfectly willing to take my share. Fortunately, I don’t think anyone really believes me, although I do mean it, honestly.

Something of that baby halo is perhaps the reason why Advent and Christmas are such a happy time for most of us. I went out yesterday to do my last minute present shopping – well, really, just my normal present shopping, as I always leave things rather late – and I have to say that I had a very pleasant time in Kingston, even though there were quite a few people about. The atmosphere was very jolly. There were carol singers and music students playing their instruments very beautifully as buskers on the corners. Everyone in the shops was very courteous and friendly. I even managed to park very easily.

Christmas is in the air. Saint Paul has it rather well in our first lesson [Romans 1:1-7]. There are in effect two types of baby celebration. What you could call normal babies – wonderful babies like my grandson James, who are, nevertheless, just ordinary human babies, so in Jesus’s case, ‘made of the seed of David according to the flesh’, according to the flesh, just a normal, flesh-and-bone, human baby, and the unique, special baby, whom St Paul recognised as the Son of God. St Paul recognised Jesus as the Son of God as a result of his resurrection from the dead: ‘declared to be the son of God with power, …, by the resurrection from the dead’. It slightly begs the question whether St Matthew, in writing his gospel, might have been adding a bit of a legend in telling us all about Mary and Joseph and their encounters with angels before the birth of Jesus.

Saint Paul, writing to the Romans, recognised Jesus as being divine as well as human, not because of the circumstances of his birth, but rather because of his resurrection. Maybe this doesn’t matter hugely, because it is all, really, beyond human understanding. After all, if God is omnipotent, if God can do anything, then surely he can arrange for a baby to be conceived supernaturally, in the way described in two of the gospels.

The important thing to note is that both Mary and Joseph didn’t behave in the way that you would expect normal people to behave when presented with an unexpected pregnancy. So far as I know, they didn’t have milkmen or window cleaners to blame in those days in Bethlehem. So Joseph’s magnanimity is even more impressive. All we can say is that clearly something very special happened, and a baby was born.

This idea of being on two levels, human and divine, is something that Saint Paul goes back to on other occasions. There is that very famous passage in his first letter to the Corinthians, chapter 15, which people often have as a lesson at funerals. Talking about the resurrection, to which we look forward in the creed, he asks, ‘How are the dead raised?’ Saint Paul makes a distinction between earthly life and heavenly, celestial, spiritual life.

‘There are … celestial bodies, and bodies terrestrial: but the glory of the celestial is one, and the glory of the terrestrial is another.’ (1 Corinthians 15:40)

It’s a challenging concept for that baby to be, on one level, just another human baby, and on another level, to be the son of God. These are familiar words to us, but supposing we were men from Mars, we might be brought up short and ask a lot more questions than perhaps we are inclined to do, because the Christmas story is so familiar to us.

For instance, what does it mean, to be the son of God? You will recall that there was a huge controversy in the early church because of the teachings of Arius that, if Jesus was the son of God, he was somehow created by God and therefore he could not be God himself. So even today, some people, when they say the Nicene creed, in the communion service, when they get to ‘I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and giver of life, who proceedeth from the Father and the son, who with the father and son together is worshipped and glorified..’, when they get to that bit, they miss out the words ‘and the son’ (in Latin, ‘filioque’) because they think that it implies that there is a kind of hierarchy with God at the top and the son in the position of a dependent creature.

Too much detail, you might say. Surely there is a way of understanding the godhead, as it is called, which simply says that God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit, are one in heaven – in the celestial world, as St Paul puts it. The baby in the manger represents and is part of the earthly world, but in the miracle of Christmas that baby is also of God and in God – and is God.

We say that God is all-powerful, all knowing; ‘immortal, invisible, God only wise’: the creator, the unmoved mover. But all those things are rather dry concepts. They are not what you would expect would produce the warm glow of goodwill which comes over us all at Christmas, and has been coming over us for the last 2000 years, at this time of year.

There is a temptation to see this miraculous time as a sort of get-out-of-jail card. People rejoice that Christmas is a time of goodwill and happiness. Somehow through our focussing on that baby and all the happy baby things that must have been going on in Bethlehem 2000 years ago, just as they were in Saint Michael’s Hospital, Bristol a month ago, our minds are able to be diverted from the harsh realities of the human condition.

People were singing carols in the market place in Kingston: and at the same time terrible things were still going on in the Middle East, in Syria, in Aleppo in particular.

Under our noses, on Friday in the Foodbank, we provided food for over 50 people, all living within a 3 mile radius of this church, because those people, in the midst of plenty, did not have enough money to buy food.

The NHS is recommending that hospitals cancel all routine operations over Christmas, because they have not got enough money to pay for the doctors, the nurses, the operating theatres and so on. This is despite our being in the fifth richest country in the world.

In this borough, Elmbridge, we have so far welcomed – how many refugees, do you think? Well, I’ll tell you, none. Although 30 years ago we welcomed a lot of people fleeing from the war in former Yugoslavia, so far we have not welcomed any Syrians, even though thousands of them, including hundreds of unaccompanied children, were huddled in the camp in Calais, 70 miles away, for months.

By contrast, just up the road from here, in Woking, they are committed to taking 12 families a year for the next five years. They already have their first five families. So it is not the case that nobody can do anything.

Life goes on, life is gritty and challenging. It’s the world that the earthly baby inhabits. Look at what Mary said, in the face of all this. She also faced both up, to heaven – and down, to earth.

‘My soul doth magnify the Lord; and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my saviour.

For he hath regarded: the lowliness of his hand-maiden.’

So far, what you might expect. Mary looks up: she is grateful to God, who has singled her out. But then she looks down, to the problems on earth. And what she says could almost be a revolutionary manifesto!

‘. .. he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.

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)

Mary and Joseph spent two years on the run from the Egyptians. They were effectively refugees themselves. And yet: there were those angels, and the shepherds, and the wise men. All that wonderful Christmas story.

It is a special time. Heavenly, and earthly too. Glory to God on high, and in earth peace …. and food for the poor, and justice for the afflicted. A humble refugee baby – and a heavenly babe, in a carol.

I pray that this Christmas it will be heavenly, but also heaven on earth, for you and for all those you love, especially babies. Even among the nappies.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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