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

2 Timothy 3:14-4:5; Luke 18:1-8 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nehemiah 8:9-18; John 16:1-11 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nehemiah 5:1-13, John 9

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amen indeed. 

Hugh Bryant

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ezra 1; John 7: 14-36. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sermon for Evensong on the Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity, 4th 2016
Isaiah 43:14-44:5, John 5:30-47 

On Wednesday night I went to rather a good party. It took place in a car showroom in Guildford. It was in honour of the new registration plate which came in on 1st September. The idea was that you could pick up your new car at midnight and drive it away. I was one of the fortunate ones who were doing exactly that. Some of you may have noticed that my little Smart car has changed colour! Well, apart from nourishing my petrolhead tendencies, the party at the Smart showroom, still open late on Wednesday night, was interesting for another reason.

I had a long conversation with the managing director of the garage, who was a courteous and friendly South African, who told me that he had been living in Guildford for the last five years. Somehow or other we got on to talking about our Christian faith. You might think that it was rather surreal to be in a garage having a party at midnight: but I think that the fact that we were having a serious discussion about Christianity in a car showroom in Guildford at midnight probably tops even that! 

I asked my new friend which church in Guildford he went to. He told me that it was a relatively new church which had been ‘planted’ by Holy Trinity Brompton, the London church where the Alpha course started. He had been in London, worshipping at Holy Trinity, originally – indeed I think he was part of the team exported by HTB, as it is known, to start the new congregation in Guildford.

I was a little bit surprised to think that Guildford needs another church, as there are a lot of thriving churches there already. Think of Holy Trinity, Saint Saviour’s, Emmanuel, Stoughton or St John’s, Stoke, to name just a few. All big, well-supported churches, within a mile of the centre.

But of course that doesn’t matter. So far as spreading the gospel is concerned, the more the merrier. ‘Go therefore and make disciples of all the world’ (Matt. 28:19), was Jesus’ great commission. I was intrigued, and I looked up the new church on the Internet, as you do. 

What was interesting to me was that, when my new friend introduced it to me, the thing he said was, ‘There is a new church plant in Guildford, which meets in a theatre.’ And then he went on, ‘You know, Guildford has the highest rate of marriage breakdown in the country.’
Now I may be doing him a disservice, because he didn’t say  this, but I wondered whether the statistic about the divorces in Guildford was some kind of mission statement. Actually I’m not sure that mission statements are necessarily a very good thing.

Nevertheless, it got me thinking about why we are Christians: almost, what’s it for? It seemed like my friend in Guildford felt that the very high divorce rate was, in itself, an important reason for having more Christians. It may be a gross oversimplification, but I got the feeling that perhaps the idea was, that if you were better disciples, if you loved Jesus more dearly and followed him more nearly, then there would be fewer divorces. That seems, of course, perfectly laudable. It is, though, rather a surprising objective, if you put it at the top of the headlines, as the most notable reason for going to church.

The sanctity of family life has always been at the heart of Christianity, and indeed it has been since the time of the ten commandments – ‘Thou shall shalt not commit adultery’ (although of course that’s not the only reason why marriages fail). But it seemed almost that that was the new church’s ‘strap line’.

But what is the appeal of a particular church? What is its unique selling proposition? Are there different USPs for different churches, or is there one central USP, which is what Jesus brings? Why do you go at all, and why do you go to one church rather than another? Incidentally, when I looked up the new church’s website, the divorce rate in Guildford was right up there again, prominently mentioned. They didn’t mention other social concerns, such as perhaps a mission to refugees or to relieve poverty, perhaps by supporting their local food bank, although I’m sure they do that too.

So go back to the question, “What is Christianity for?” Is it to make us better people, so we don’t get divorced so much, for example? The difficulty is that good Christians still do bad things. Indeed, right at the very beginning, St Paul, in his letter to the Romans, chapter 7, confesses that although he wants to do the right thing, he still does what he does not want to do, he falls for temptation, the bad option, every time. Although he knows what God’s law lays down, he does not always follow it. (See Romans 7:14-19).

Are Christians better, morally, than other thoughtful human beings? They are subject to the same temptations and the same weaknesses. If you follow what St Paul said in Romans 7, you’d conclude that Christians are, morally, nothing special. That may be overly harsh: because, as St Paul says, in his letter to the Galatians, the fruits of the Holy Spirit are a number of moral virtues. They are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, fidelity, gentleness, and self-control. (Galatians 5:22). If you are a Christian, if you have been saved by God’s grace in Jesus Christ, then there will be signs of your having been saved in the good that you do as a result.

This certainly got me thinking about us here at St Mary’s. I’m not aware if we do have a spectacularly high divorce rate. But if we were to go off and plant another church in order to spread the good news of Jesus far and wide, what would we home in on? What would be our unique selling proposition? Of course, some of you will immediately say, ‘Hang on, that’s exactly what St Mary’s actually did, at the turn of the last century: when we, we at St Mary’s, set up St Andrew’s, Oxshott.’ St Andrew’s, Oxshott was a church plant, a church plant from St Mary’s.

I’m sorry that I am not a good enough historian to be able to tell you what it was that they took from St Mary’s to the good people of Oxshott by way of a gospel message. Whatever it was, it was obviously a good message, because St Andrew’s, Oxshott has thrived ever since. We must all pray for them to find a new vicar soon, to step into Jeremy Cresswell’s shoes, as he is now enjoying retirement, having been their much-loved vicar for 25 years.

I wonder what the church planters 100 years ago identified as the particular spiritual need of the new community growing up in Oxshott. Perhaps that can be a group discussion topic! You know, I am inclined to think that, rather than identifying a particular social ill and suggesting that more discipleship would fix it, the dynamic for a church like ours – and, dare I say, I think it might have been the same 100 years ago – might have been – might be today – what is in our lessons today. 
In the prophet Isaiah:
‘I am the Lord, your Holy One, the creator of Israel, your King.

Thus saith the Lord, which maketh a way in the sea, and a path in the mighty waters..’

There is our Lord, our creator. He confronts us. We ought to respect, to worship, our Creator. But the danger is that we ignore Him. In the Old Testament, nearly 3,000 years ago, Isaiah laments this: 

‘But thou hast not called upon me, O Jacob; but thou hast been weary of me, O Israel.

Thou hast not brought me the small cattle of thy burnt offerings; neither hast thou honoured me with thy sacrifices.’

Again, in St John’s Gospel, Jesus says,

‘And the Father himself, which hath sent me, hath borne witness of me. Ye have neither heard his voice at any time, nor seen his shape.

And ye have not his word abiding in you: for whom he hath sent, him ye believe not.

Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me.’ 

God is there, in front of us, around us, at the ‘ground of our being’ [Paul Tillich]. And yet we are preoccupied, we worry about ourselves, about our needs. Yes, we are concerned to improve our lives, whether there are divorces, or bankruptcies, or chronic illnesses, or jobs lost. But we forget God. 

I’m sure we agree with the new church people in Guildford that these things like divorces are signs of sin, of people being separated from the love of God. So the driving force of our mission, both here and by the new church in Guildford, is to remind people about Jesus, about the fact that He came to be God among us, to show that the Creator cares for us.

We need to remind people about God, about Jesus. We believe that if you do believe and trust in Him, you will have that sure and certain hope, the hope of eternal life. You will, while you live your human life, still be subject to the pull of sin, but the more your faith, the bigger the hole you make in your life for Jesus, the more you will show those blessed signs of love which St Paul told the Galatians about. And that works just as well in our beautiful Saxon church as it does in a theatre. We are all God’s people.

Sermon for Evensong on the 14th Sunday after Trinity, 28th August 2016
Isaiah 33:13-22, John 3:22-36 

‘He shall dwell on high’, we read in the prophet Isaiah (33:16), and John the Baptist said, ‘He that cometh from above is above all: he that is of the earth is earthly, and speaketh of the earth: he that cometh from heaven is above all.’ (John 3:31)

What is it like in heaven? We talk about heaven and earth. We make a distinction between earthly things and heavenly things. And perhaps we think that, somehow, the higher you go, the nearer you get to God. 

A week ago it was the 75th anniversary of the publication of that wonderful poem called ‘High Flight’, by the Spitfire pilot, John Gillespie Magee.

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,

And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;

Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth

Of sun-split clouds, –and done a hundred things

You have not dreamed of –Wheeled and soared and swung

High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there

I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung

My eager craft through footless halls of air…

Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue

I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace

Where never lark or even eagle flew —

And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod

The high untrespassed sanctity of space,

Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

In 1941, Magee had flown his Spitfire to 31,000 feet. He wrote the poem on the back of an envelope:

‘… I’ve trod

The high untrespassed sanctity of space,

Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.’

It is every pilot’s favourite poem. God is high, high up there. We will pray, ‘O Lord and heavenly father, high and mighty, King of kings, …’ High, high and mighty. In the liturgy, God is the king of heaven. ‘High’ is the adjective not just meaning tall, but also, metonymically, ‘important’, ‘high-ranking’, ‘leading’. 

I think we would all acknowledge that God isn’t really a kindly-looking old man with a beard, living above the clouds. When John Magee’s Spitfire was flying miles above the earth, and he ‘put out [his] hand, and touched the face of God’, we need not worry about whether God avoided a close shave – literally – with the Spitfire’s propeller. The idea of a place, away from, above, the world we live in, where God the creator, or the various gods, say, in the Hellenic tradition, goes back to the earliest forms of civilisation. But it isn’t meant to be taken literally. God is not confined, not limited to one place, however exalted.

In the metaphor, though, as well as God on high, there is a nether region, another place. Down, but not literally – not to Australia. Heaven, where the good people go, is up there. Hell, the other place, is down, down below. Think of Dives and Lazarus, Jesus’ parable of the rich man and the crippled beggar (Luke 16:19-31). Lazarus the beggar goes up to heaven, and Dives goes down to Sheol, Hades, the realm of the dead. Hell is also supposed to be a furnace. The sinners who end up there are burned. As Isaiah says: ‘Who among us shall dwell with the devouring fire? who among us shall dwell with everlasting burnings?’ (33:14) God puts people to the test, the test of refining fire.

It’s a graphic way of imagining the awesome power of God. According to Isaiah, unless you live virtuously, you will end up in the fires of Hell. Who will be able to come through the testing in the fire? The answer: ‘He that walketh righteously, and speaketh uprightly; he that despiseth the gain of oppressions, that shaketh his hands from holding of bribes, that stoppeth his ears from hearing of blood, and shutteth his eyes from seeing evil.’ (33:15)

And then Isaiah paints a picture of the place where these virtuous people end up after they have passed through the testing fire:

‘Look upon Zion, the city of our solemnities: thine eyes shall see Jerusalem a quiet habitation, a tabernacle that shall not be taken down; not one of the stakes thereof shall ever be removed, neither shall any of the cords thereof be broken.

But there the glorious Lord will be unto us a place of broad rivers and streams; wherein shall go no galley with oars, neither shall gallant ship pass thereby.’ (33:20-21)

The city of God; ‘Glorious things of thee are spoken, Zion city of our God’. These are lovely pictures, perhaps the best we can do with our limited understanding, to imagine the Kingdom of God – the Kingdom of Heaven. 

But there is a problem. The problem is that this beautiful vision is so far removed from our daily life, that no-one these days really takes any notice of it. As John the Baptist says about Jesus, ‘And what he hath seen and heard, that he testifieth; and no man receiveth his testimony.’ (John 3:32)

A prophet is without honour, indeed. There was Jesus, who was God, there in front of them, not a metaphorical figure: someone who’d been there, in that heaven, and was telling everyone who listened to him about it – but his testimony was not believed – at least not according to John the Baptist.

That’s strange. Surely Jesus was surrounded by big crowds, most of whom presumably would have described themselves as followers. Maybe this is like what people say about Jeremy Corbyn. He certainly attracts great crowds – but people say that, when the general election comes, he won’t get the votes from the electorate as a whole, as opposed to just his followers.

I couldn’t speculate on whether that’s a correct view, in Mr Corbyn’s case, but I wonder whether it was what John the Baptist thought about Jesus. ‘No man receiveth his testimony’: did John think that the craze for following Jesus was just a local thing, just that, a craze?

‘No man receiveth his testimony’. Testimony is what a witness gives in court, evidence. Why would people be reluctant to believe Jesus’ evidence? I suspect that there could be different answers, depending whether you’re talking about people then, contemporaries of Jesus, 2,000 years ago, and people today. 2,000 years ago the people who refused to believe Jesus were other Jews, the Pharisees and the Sadducees. For them Jesus’ teaching wasn’t convenient. He challenged them in all sorts of ways, accusing them of hypocrisy, challenging the trappings of their piety – having the best places in the synagogue, for instance. But He told them that the first would be last in his kingdom. Not what they wanted to hear.

The problem today is that people don’t so much positively resist Jesus’ teaching, as ignore it altogether. John the Baptist taught his followers that, if anyone did accept what Jesus said as being true, that it was real evidence, then they had taken to heart the very words of God himself. God had given Jesus the words, his words. ‘He whom God sent utters the words of God, so measureless is God’s gift of the Spirit.’

It takes God away from the world of picturesque metaphors, from the heights of heaven. In Jesus, God is right there in front of us. Well, I ought to have said, God was right there in front of them. Them, not us. Jesus recognised the struggle we would have, when he appeared to Doubting Thomas. He said to Thomas, ‘Because you have seen me you have found faith. Happy are they who never saw me and yet have found faith’. (John 20:29)

So for many people, it’s just a distant, academic thing. ‘Jesus gave evidence about heaven. He was talking about what he had witnessed with his own eyes’. Really? Come on, they say: it’s too far-fetched.

John the Baptist, like Isaiah, thought that there would be a Last Judgement, that there were big penalties awaiting anyone who did ignore Jesus’, or the prophet’s, words of God. For the believer, ‘He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life: and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him.’ 

We tend to downplay the hell-fire and damnation aspect these days. But what do you think? It’s not so long, in evolutionary terms, since John Magee made his High Flight, and ‘touched the face of God’. God is still there – maybe not just up there. I think the hymn has it right.

For the beauty of the earth, 

for the glory of the skies, 

for the love which from our birth 

over and around us lies, … (Folliot S. Pierpoint, Common Praise No 253)

God is still with us; in the beauties of creation: in love, which you can find over and around us. Over, indeed; but also all around us. Let’s not be blind to Him.

Sermon for Evensong on the Thirteenth Sunday after Trinity, 21st August 2016 –

Isaiah 30:8-21, 2 Corinthians 9: Supermarket Stories (2) – God loves a cheerful giver.

My sermons today will have been tales of two supermarkets. This morning I was gently pointing out that perhaps Jesus’ saying, that it was all right to heal sick people on the Sabbath, wasn’t a total let-off from the Ten Commandments – and especially the one about observing the Sabbath day and keeping it holy. Although we all go to Waitrose after service on Sunday, is it the right thing to do, really?

Tonight I’m bringing to you my thoughts, about helping with the Foodbank collection at the big Sainsbury’s in Cobham yesterday. It put me in mind of part of our lesson from St Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians: ‘God loves a cheerful giver’. 

You can heave a sigh of relief, that I don’t plan to give you a hard sell to increase your banker’s order to St Mary’s – although of course if someone new came along and wanted to know how the work of the church is sustained, then pretty early in the discussion I would expect the practicalities of a banker’s order and Gift Aid declaration would come up. 
No, I wanted to share with you a little about an expression I heard plenty of times yesterday. It was, ‘I’m all right, thank you.’ Yes, ‘I’m all right, thank you.’ That was probably the first thing I heard, when I offered someone a small shopping list with a list of those items we haven’t got enough of in our warehouse in order to provide a nutritionally-balanced package of food for all our clients. ‘Would you like a shopping list? You know, for the Foodbank – things to buy for us?’ And they said, ‘I’m all right, thank you.’ 

Under my breath I muttered, ‘It’s not whether you are all right that I’m concerned about. It’s your Mum in a nursing home. The family who live next door to you. Are they all right?’ But I sensed that what was being said wasn’t actually what he really meant. 
We were wanting people to take one of our ‘shopping lists’ and buy one or two of the items listed in it, in addition to their own shopping. They would then be able to drop off the food in our collection crates, and add to our food collection, making up the shortages in our warehouse and enabling clients to pick up good food to tide them over their thin time.

This person wasn’t expressing a view about how he was, yesterday. He wasn’t all right. But he said he was; because he was embarrassed, or shy. He wasn’t, I’m afraid, a cheerful giver.

You encounter the same effect sometimes, when you collect for Christian Aid. Some people refuse to give, in a variety of ingenious ways. ‘The dog must have eaten the envelope’. The best one I have heard is, ‘We don’t give to that kind of thing.’ What kind of thing? What ‘kind of thing’ is Christian Aid – or Cobham Area Foodbank? They are both registered charities, after all. They have to follow prescribed, approved, charitable purposes.

How awful! you will say. What is the world coming to? People never used to be that mean. Well, actually, nothing much has changed – for over 2,000 years. Look at this fascinating passage from St Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians. He’s fund-raising for something. One of the difficulties with Paul’s letters is that you rarely find out what a letter, which he’s replying to, said. But it’s clear that he’s been in Macedonia, and got concrete support for a charitable venture of some kind from the Christian congregation there. 

Members of a church were called ‘saints’, sancti, in Latin, άγιοι, holy ones, in Greek, by St Paul. It’s the sanctity of being separate, being fenced off, from ordinary society. Perhaps we’re ‘saints’ in that cut-off sense too. Look – there are about 20 of us meeting here for worship tonight. We’re rather a tiny minority of the population as a whole. Saints. 

But even so – and this is what I find fascinating here – mundane considerations of raising money to support the mission have to be dealt with. Paul has asked the Corinthians to raise some money for the relief of poverty in some of the other churches. He tells them how generous the Macedonians have been in giving to the same cause. He’s sending on ahead of him two of his team, to ensure that there’s no backsliding, so that the Corinthians’ contribution is ready when they arrive. Quite mundane stuff. No high-faluting theology or philosophy here. Just make sure that your Parish Share is ready!

And again, Paul appeals to quite basic instincts in his readers. The more you put in, the more you’ll get out. [2 Cor.9:6]. God can add to what you yourself give – and God can give you the necessary abundance so that you can afford to be generous. It’s a sort of ‘matched giving’. A big donor – if you are a Methodist, the Rank Trust – will add a pound for every pound that you yourselves raise. God is the ultimate matched giver. Pretty down-to-earth stuff.

Being a generous donor to charity is a good thing. People will speak well of you. ‘As it is written, He hath dispersed abroad; he hath given to the poor: his righteousness remaineth for ever.’ ‘Dispersing abroad’ isn’t offshore investment, by the way. It’s just a way of spreading generosity around. ‘As it is written’, says Paul. It’s a quotation from Psalm 112. Being a generous giver, says Paul, isn’t just a way of helping other Christians. It is in itself a way of praising God. 

But Paul is also keen to point out that giving to charity is not compulsory. ‘Each person should give as he has decided for himself; there should be no … sense of compulsion’ (2 Cor 9:7). But if you are willing, but perhaps worried whether you have enough to give some away, St Paul reassures you. ‘He who provides seed for sowing and bread for food will provide the seed for you to sow; he will multiply it and swell the harvest of your benevolence, and you will always be rich enough to be generous.’ (vv 9-10). 

But it isn’t easy. It isn’t easy to fund-raise for church or for charity. There will always be these people who tell you they’re ‘all right’, and pass on by. They’re not all right.

Sermon for Mattins on the 13th Sunday after Trinity, 21st August 2016
Hebrews 12:18-end, Luke 13:1—17 

Shall I see you in Waitrose in a few minutes? Quite possibly. Sometimes it makes me smile a bit that whereas, if you were not one of the faithful, here in church – you might go and play rugby, or at least take your children to play rugby, or you might go to the garden centre and pick up a few pot plants, and then go back home, open the hefty packet containing your Sunday paper, and with a nice croissant and cup of cappuccino from your Nespresso machine, you might while away a happy hour – and then realise that there are a couple of things which you need to pick up for lunch. So off you would go to the supermarket, to Waitrose or Sainsbury’s; and about midday you’d start to bump into the people from this congregation, and perhaps also from St Andrew’s. Or you could have got up at a more civilised hour and joined us here for Mattins – but we all still tend to end up in the supermarket.

And there we all will be, picking up those last few things which we need for our Sunday lunch. It is a good gathering place: we’ll see our friends, and stop to have a little chat. How did the children get on in A Levels? Have they got the grades that they need for their university places? How is so-and-so’s baby? It’s a real community, there in the supermarket on a Sunday morning. 

We don’t seem to worry too much about the fact that it is Sunday, or that the shops are open on Sunday. The idea of the Sabbath, and Sabbath Rest, doesn’t have much traction in today’s society. Even though, a long while ago, we were brought up on what the Bible said. The Creation story. The Ten Commandments. 

Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou nor thy son nor thy daughter nor thy manservant nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates: for in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day and hallowed it.

That’s what the leader of the synagogue was objecting to, when Jesus healed the poor lady who had been crippled and unable to stand straight for 18 years, in this story from St Luke’s gospel. Jesus rebuked the leader of the synagogue, and the other members of the congregation, calling them hypocrites; pointing out that, if it was OK to do something, to undertake some activity, even if only to make sure some animals were adequately watered as well as fed, surely it must be all right to relieve the suffering of a person who is ill, if you can do it.

The Health Service has certainly always followed Jesus’ teaching about healing on the Sabbath. No wonder that the doctors were rather indignant when the Health Secretary suggested that there needed to be ‘seven-day health service’ so called. He apparently didn’t know that all doctors working in hospitals work on a rota, which covers all seven days of the week. (I think he’s found out now that they do.) 

We’ve perhaps found that this passage, and other passages where Jesus pointed out the difference between people who were ‘whited sepulchres’ [Matt. 23:27], people who made a show of conforming with religious commandments, rather than, perhaps, going to the real meaning of those commandments, that this teaching of Jesus is a sort of excuse, a sort of release from any obligations literally to carry out the Ten Commandments. 

We might think that all that literal stuff, God having spoken to Moses and given him tablets on which were written the Ten Commandments [Exodus 24:12 etc], is just too picturesque and, frankly, too mythical to really be taken seriously. Either God didn’t speak to Moses in that way or we have changed our understanding of what it is for God to speak to anybody. Jesus was right: the Jewish Law, the Ten Commandments, tended to lead to a sort of box-ticking approach, a literal adherence to each and every Commandment.

But Jesus pointed out that sticking rigidly to the ‘letter of the law’ could produce highly unjust consequences. Starting with the poorly lady, who was supposed to come and be healed only on weekdays. So he gave them ‘a new commandment’, ‘A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love on another.’ That looks as though it trumps any other commandment. You can treat Sunday just like any other day, if that is more practical for you. 

But – perhaps it’s not quite so simple. Remember, Jesus said he did not come to abolish the law, but to fulfil it. And also, that the first of those two commandments, which between them contain ‘all the Law and the prophets’, was to love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. ‘On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.’

And the commandment to keep holy the Sabbath day can be understood as being really all about showing respect to God, the Creator and Sustainer of the world. And if that effectively makes the Shema Israel, ‘You shall love the Lord your God’, and so on, the most important prayer, then the next prayer – to love your neighbour as yourself – is subsidiary to it. So perhaps we were jumping the gun by following literally what Jesus said, that it was more important to heal a sick person than any consideration whether it was done on the Sabbath.

Can you feel the dilemma? On the one hand, all your Christian upbringing tells you that God spoke to Moses. God spoke; we must listen. But other teachers will pop up, and lead you astray. It’s so old-fashioned to worry about the shops being open on Sunday.

I think we should look at it again. I’m not suggesting that we should become like the Scottish Presbyterian ‘Wee Frees’ or the Welsh chapel men, who made Sunday rather joyless. But I think that we should try to insist on one day or another being a holiday, a sabbath, each week for each group of people. I worry about what a Christian should say to an employer who makes them work regularly on Sunday. You’re entitled not to be discriminated against on account of religion, under the Human Rights Act. But what about subtle pressures – will you get on as well, if you don’t abandon your upbringing? Will they choose you for the promotion next time? 

Perhaps there is no tension between the first and the second commandments. Perhaps loving God always leads you to love your neighbour. And yet … I wonder whether we should all rush to the supermarkets on Sunday just as we do on any other day: I nearly said, ‘Sunday, just like any other day.’ That’s wrong, surely. We need to recognise Sunday as being holy, being special. If that stops people from using the shops …. What do we say? 

One thing that I think we shouldn’t say, is that this story, this parable, is only a big let-out. Let’s keep thinking about it.