A Note for Revd Sir John Alleyne’s Modern Church Discussion Group.

Though it isn’t the church’s official New Year, which is the beginning of Advent, nevertheless this is the time of New Year resolutions and tours d’horizon. I thought that perhaps we could do the same sort of thing here as a trigger for discussion and debate.

Challenges within the Church of England include a Primates’ meeting coming up, at which the Archbishop of Canterbury will try to square the circle between different parts of the Anglican communion who can be broadly categorised depending on their attitude to homosexuality and same-sex marriage. Those attitudes reflect the sources of authority recognised by the different parts of the church.

The other ‘topical’ challenge is the bums-on-seats issue: possibly slightly linked to the Primates’ debate: the actual C of E is declining gently in numbers in England and Wales, whereas there is growth in Africa, China and South America, broadly the GAFCON area; it makes Christianity worldwide the fastest-growing religion.

In relation to both the Primates’ meeting (the Jensenite/GAFCON faction), and the issue of church growth, two possible questions, I would suggest, could be, ‘Are they Christians?’ and ‘Why are they Christians (if they are)?’
These two questions could be a prism through which we could look at the church at other times in the last 2,000 years, and compare how our current circumstances are.

From the starting point of Jesus’ Great Commission, Matt.28:19-20, ‘Go ye therefore, and teach all nations..’, I would identify some pivotal times in the history of Christianity.

First, the effect of the Emperor Constantine adopting Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire after the battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312AD; then the humanism of Erasmus followed by the Reformation; then (at least here in the UK, apart perhaps from in Scotland) the evangelical revival in the 18th century and the Anglo-Catholic revival of J. H. Newman and the Tractarians, the Oxford Movement centred on Oriel College; then Honest to God.
At each stage it is instructive to ask, ‘Were they Christians?’ and, if they were, why.

Constantine was arguably not a Christian at all. He is said to have had a dream which led him to think that, if he painted the sign of the cross on his soldiers’ shields, he would win the battle. He did, and he did win. That is why he was a Christian – if he was. Perhaps the mere fact that his edict making Christianity the official religion of the Empire was the biggest cause of Christianity becoming a world religion, would itself entitle him to call himself a Christian. But perhaps he went on to accept the gospel message, and to believe.

Erasmus and the Reformers were clearly Christians. Perhaps the more apt follow-up question to ask in their case isn’t why they were Christians, but why they acted as they did. The humanist impulse was to make the gospel intelligible to all; the Reformers again wanted to remove perceived obstacles between God and his people, so they could read the Bible in their own language, and so they could encounter the divine without needing to go through a priest. Whether in fact it brought more people in as believers, I do not know. There was a ‘revival’ of faith, but not necessarily an increase in numbers.

It was more a question how ‘the ploughman learnt his Pater Noster’. The ploughman had had a lively faith all along: but he did not understand the words. They were all ‘hocus pocus’ to him. ‘Hocus pocus’ is a corruption of ‘Hoc est corpus meum’, the Latin for ‘this is my body’, which was at the heart of the Mass – and which the priest said for them.

Why was he a Christian? I suspect that at least up to the time of the 18th and 19th century revivals, people believed at least partly through fear: fear that God would visit harm on them, as he had done to the Israelites when they disbelieved, and partly through a belief in eudaimonism, the idea that, if something bad happened, as for example if you fell ill, it was because you had sinned, and you were being punished. There is a chilling and sustained example of this theology in the ‘Order for the Visitation of the Sick’ in the BCP. (‘Wherefore, whatsoever your sickness is, know you certainly, that it is God’s visitation.’) There was a lively fear of a final judgment, of hell fire and damnation. Although people spoke of Jesus as their saviour, they did not believe that this had let them off the hook. God was to be feared.

Then came pietism and the Methodist revival. John Wesley was impressed by the faith of the Moravians, praying but unafraid in an Atlantic storm on the way back from America: his heart was ‘strangely warmed’ as he walked along Aldersgate Street in the City of London, on his way to a Bible class. His brother Charles wrote 3,000 distilled pieces of theology, in hymns, many of which we still love today. John went round on horseback, preaching, preaching to people who wouldn’t normally feel posh enough to be seen in the parish church – the new urban poor, caught up in the beginnings of the industrial revolution. Bible study and self-help, together with signing the Pledge against alcohol, brought many Methodists out of the slums.

John Wesley was a fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford. Just across the High Street, in Oriel, were John Henry Newman and his friends Froude, Keble, Pusey, the Tractarians, following the Noetics – it was said that the Senior Common Room of Oriel was the intellectual power-house of England in the early years of the 19th century. The Tractarians and the Methodists both brought revival: the church had become moribund in many places. Incumbents collected ‘livings’ – but didn’t live there. Many churches were run by put-upon, under-resourced curates, while their vicars spent their time in metropolitan, leisured pursuits.

There weren’t enough places of worship for the growing urban working classes. To some extent Methodism grew into those gaps, although following the Anglo-Catholic revival, with government help, many new churches were built in the cities. Both these ends of the revival movement – or both movements, if you like – resulted in greater commitment to mission in the church. The Anglo-Catholics expressed their calling in the great inner-city missions, in the East End of London and in the provincial cities. The non-conformists were similarly engaged in social concerns, as I mentioned earlier that the Methodists were, through promoting temperance and self-improvement.

Again I point our spotlight at these expressions of Christianity. Were the Tractarians and the Methodists Christians? Clearly, no-one could doubt it. Why? I think in both cases, revival came from a perception that their response to God’s calling, to God’s revelation in Jesus Christ, was not worthy, was not adequate. The slothfulness of much of the Church of England brought out the Wesleys on horseback, preaching in places where the pillars of society never went, where there were no churches, or where the parish church was not genuinely open to all. The state’s attempt to reorganise the church in Ireland by reducing the number of bishops so affronted the Tractarians by its apparent ignorance of the historic episcopal succession in the church, that they challenged the status quo and called for a return to the values of the early church Fathers.

I think that it is worth emphasising, when we look at the 18th and 19th century revivals, that a major focus was on social action as a result of faith. The revivalists were not only concerned with the fate of their own souls, but rather their love of their neighbours was equally important. As well as the inner-city missions, another example was the Clapham Sect, who campaigned for the abolition of slavery, were mostly Anglicans, all at some time either ministering or worshipping at Holy Trinity, Clapham Common.

My next focus is on post-Enlightenment Christianity, following the challenges of Darwinism and the First World War. Although Darwin apparently never completely lost his Christian faith, many people felt that his work on evolution in his ‘The Origin of Species’ had made less space for God. If God was a God of mystery, an unmoved mover who had done miracles to prove that He existed and was present in his Son, himself miraculously born, then the more that mankind found out about how things actually worked, so less of that old God remained. Perhaps this challenge to belief in God was particularly effective among educated people, who began to feel that human knowledge was beginning to push out God.

Then the ghastly realities of 20th century warfare, following the invention of the machine gun, first shown in the Boer War – where concentration camps were first used, by the British Army – and in the trenches in Flanders, caused many ordinary, not necessarily highly educated, people to doubt the existence of God. The German soldiers were praying to the same God as the Tommies, for the same thing. Did God really want such terrible slaughter and brutality to take place?

Ludwig Wittgenstein, who fought in WW1, and Bertrand Russell, the first a Christian and the second an atheist, started to describe reality in a starkly mathematical, logical way. Logical positivism, the name by which Wittgenstein’s philosophy was called, held that whatever propositions could not be contradicted, must be meaningless. He said, about metaphysical propositions – what it is to be good, for example – ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent’. Sir Alfred Ayer popularised logical positivism in his great ‘Language, Truth and Logic’ (1936). Until the 1960s, many, if not most, Oxford undergraduates studying philosophy were logical positivists, and often therefore, atheists. More recently, of course, it has proved unattractive to have a world view in which metaphysical ideas such as truth, beauty, the good and so on are held to be meaningless, and so logical positivism has waned in influence.

In the blessed 60s came Anglicanism’s reflection of the modern German theologians such as Bonhoeffer, Bultmann and Tillich, Bishop John A. T. Robinson’s ‘Honest to God’. God was not a man with a flowing beard living above the clouds in heaven: God was not ‘out there’ at all, but rather is at the ‘ground of our being’. Tillich was also willing to put forward the idea that the historicity of Jesus was not important, and a fortiori that the various miracles such as the Virgin Birth were not necessary to ground our understanding, and worship, of God.

About ‘Honest to God’, Prof. Peter Gomes of Harvard has written, ‘For a book to do well with a British public, it was once considered an infallible rule that it must involve religion, royalty and sex; and a teaser for such a book might be this: “Take your hand off my knee,” said the duchess to the bishop.” Two out of three is not bad, and John A T Robinson, without the assistance of royalty, sold over 1 million copies of his little book that was translated into 17 languages.’

The attraction of ‘Honest to God’ was – and is – that it makes sense, to an ordinary person. The ‘man on the Clapham omnibus’ will understand it, will ‘get it’, even today. Robinson makes a simple case for being a Christian which does not require one to believe in things which a modern man, dependent on technology and believing in science, might find unlikely or just plain unbelievable.

Of course Don Cupitt has taken ‘non-realism’ even further, following his BBC TV Series ‘The Sea of Faith’ in 1984 and its accompanying book. His conclusion still has resonance. He wrote, ‘When we have …. freed ourselves from nostalgia for a cosmic Father Christmas, then our faith can at last become fully human, existential, voluntary, pure, and free from superstition. To reach this goal is Christianity’s destiny, now approaching. What could be simpler? Why did I not say all this at the outset? Because after all it is not simple ….’

I think that Honest to God was a very good thing for the church. It did bring people back, or into being Christians – and I think it may still have traction (although that is for another time!)

Now Christians inhabit a wide spectrum of belief, at the ultra-liberal end of which is Don Cupitt, and at the other, the Jensenite GAFCON literalists. The Church of England is now led by two conservative evangelical archbishops – which perhaps indicates that the centre of gravity, if the ballast in the ship of faith still consists in Scripture, Reason, and Tradition, is currently heavier in Scripture than Reason.

Today the 39 Anglican Primates – bishops, not gorillas – are meeting in Canterbury to discuss whether the Anglican Communion can continue. The Jensenites believe that homosexuality and gay marriage are sins, and they cite the Book of Leviticus (selectively), and some of St Paul’s less enlightened work in support. They support a ‘traditional Christian’ view which has caused great hurt to many LGBTI people, and they at least assent to, if not actively support, laws in such countries as Uganda, which criminalise homosexuals.

The liberals neither condemn homosexuals nor see why Christianity would rule out gay marriage. Liberals recognise a nuanced description of any person’s sexuality, so that it is not necessarily contradictory for marriage to be at the same time between ‘a man and a woman’ where that ‘man’ and that ‘woman’ are of the same biological sex. Also, a fortiori the Episcopal Church in the USA was not wrong to ordain a practising homosexual as bishop.

Are these positions Christian? Of course the proponents of each criticise each other precisely on the grounds that their opponents are not, not Christian. If one looks back at Christian history, I suppose that the current debate – and possible schism – does not resemble the pivotal moments I have mentioned (except for Constantine), precisely because at all these earlier moments of revival the innovators were never not Christian. The question was rather, were they better Christian than those against whom they reacted.

One thing one can say, is that it seems out of kilter with the previous revivals in that one effect of one view, the ‘traditional Christian’ position, is that, rather than building up the church, it actually hurts some people. Granted that this position is held by churches whose numbers are growing, nevertheless I cannot think that the negativity towards LGBTI people does anything positive to spread the Gospel of Jesus.

We are rather looking at something which perhaps resembles one of the early debates about alleged heresies; Arius or Pelagius, perhaps. Whether there was such a thing as original sin, or whether Jesus was actually God or was himself a created being.

Revd Rose Hudson-Wilkin, chaplain to the Queen and to the Speaker of the House of Commons, said on the BBC’s ‘The Big Questions’ (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06wrb9r) yesterday that the Parable of the Wheat and the Tares (Matt. 13:24-30) might offer a good model for the Anglican Communion.

“Well then,” they said, “shall we go and gather the darnel?” “No”, he answered; “in gathering it you might pull up the wheat at the same time. Let them both grow together till harvest, and at the harvest time I will tell the reapers, gather the darnel first and tie it in bundles for burning; then collect the wheat into my barn.”[Quoted from the New English Bible, the 60s’ favourite]

Her wise words echo that wonderfully Anglican theological idea of ‘holding in tension’ different, potentially contradictory, ideas.

How will the Primates’ discussions affect bums on seats? Let us now discuss it!
11th January 2016

Sermon for Evensong on 3rd January 20161 John 4:7-16

Lots of love. It’s reported that our prime minister, when sending a text message to his next door neighbour, Rebekah [sic] Brooks, the newspaper editor, thanking her (for letting him ride her horse), ended the text in question with the letters LOL, which he thought meant ‘lots of love’. Actually, as any of our children would be able to tell us, it means, “laugh out loud”. He may have conveyed slightly the wrong impression to Mrs Brooks.
I remember, in an English lesson at school, the teacher taking me gently to task when we were learning how to write letters, for ending my letters “lots of love”, when I should have been writing, “yours sincerely”. Nowadays the other ending, which young people say as they are taking leave of each other, is, “Take care”.
Take care. When I first heard this, I was rather taken aback. ‘Take care’ had rather a threatening tone, to me. Cave canem! Beware, beware of the dog! Take care, lest the dog bites you.

‘Always keep a hold of Nurse

For fear of finding something worse.’

(Hilaire Belloc (1907), Cautionary Tales for Children: Jim, who ran away from his Nurse, and was eaten by a Lion. London, Gerald Duckworth and Co, 13th Impression, 1957, p.16)
I thought it was rather stern – take care, and make sure you are not naughty in some way or another! But I am now convinced that people say it not in a threatening way, but really in an affectionate way, meaning, “take care of yourself!” Take care. Make sure you come to no harm. Take care – it’s the same as saying ‘lots of love’.
There’s a lot of love in the Bible. Tonight’s lesson, from the first letter of John, is one of the great ‘love’ passages. ‘God is love….If we love one another, God dwelleth in us’. (1 John 4:8,12) ‘Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another.’ (v.11)
Yesterday I witnessed the joyful scene as our Director of Music, Prof. Robert Woolley’s, daughter Jessica married her Jamie here at Saint Mary’s. And of course the lesson which Jessica’s Mum, Sue, read out was from 1 Corinthians 13: ‘Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not -‘ have not what? ‘Love’, of course. It always is ‘love’ in wedding services.
But in the Authorised Version of the Bible, it is ‘charity’, not ‘love’. The end of the passage there is, ‘Now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three’. (You’ll remember that the three ancient Gladiator aircraft which protected Malta in the war were called Faith, Hope and Charity – Charity, not Love. The RAF used the King James Version.)

I think that you are all pretty familiar with the fact that the New Testament was originally written in Greek, and in Greek there are several words which mean ‘love’. The ‘love’ in 1 Corinthians 13 and also in the first letter of John is αγάπη, which is sometimes translated as ‘brotherly love’, ‘caring’, or ‘charity’. Interestingly, in the Authorised Version, in 1 Corinthians, the word used is ‘charity’, but the translation of the same Greek word in the first letter of John, in the same Bible, is ‘love’. King James’ translators didn’t feel obliged always to translate a word the same way every time. They matched the words to the context.
In St John’s letter, it wouldn’t trip off the tongue quite so well if you said, ‘Beloved, let us have charity for one another, for charity is of God, and everyone that has charity is born of God and knoweth God’, for example. But although the translators allowed themselves to be flexible, and used the word ‘love’ here, the meaning is ‘charity’, rather than sexual love or passionate enthusiasm – which are other senses of the various Greek words in the original text which could mean ‘love’.
It’s actually true also of 1 Corinthians 13. Even when the happy couple are standing there at the altar, no doubt deeply in love, it’s not that type of love that St Paul was writing about in his letter to the Corinthians. This again is αγάπη – it is not passion, it is ‘taking care of’ each other, looking after each other.
So ‘God is love’, said St John in his Letter. Does that tell us anything about the nature of God – what God is? No-one has actually seen God [v. 12], but even if you had, ‘God is love’ is quite a surprising thing to say. To be made of love is rather a lovely idea. Elvis Presley sang that he was a ‘hunk of burning love’ – but clearly, not literally. And actually, I think that Elvis’ love was the wrong type … Definitely not brotherly love!
We are not making statements about the nature of God, what God is made of, if that is not a contradiction in terms, (because God isn’t made of anything, but rather, we believe, He is the one who made everything.) Really, we can’t say anything about that.
When we come across this passage in the first letter of John, it makes us smile. God is love. It’s a perfect lesson to have during the happy time of Christmas, during the season of goodwill. Love is in the air.
But there are one or two interesting things which are perhaps not immediately apparent.The first is precisely the idea that God is nice. He is kind, not a figure of awe, not to be feared. The Old Testament idea of God was much more judgemental.
In book after book of the Old Testament, the stories, first of Adam and Eve, of the Fall, and then of the Israelites, the exile, of God’s covenant – ‘I will look after you if you worship me properly and exclusively – but if not …’, and God’s punishment when the Israelites worshipped other gods, when they went after Baal rather than the one true God, that was all much more complicated than just saying, ‘God is love’. God had a vengeful, terrifying side.
Now according to St John, there’s no longer any suggestion that this is a God to be feared. This is God who ‘so loved the world, that he sent his only ‘Son, to be the propitiation for our sins’. The New Revised Standard version of the the Bible (which we sometimes use), translates this bit as ‘He sent his only son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins’. In the New English Bible, instead, and much better, He sent His Son as the ‘remedy for the defilement of our sins’. Christians disagree about this bit.
Evangelicals talk in terms of a ‘sacrifice for sin’, sacrificial atonement, Jesus in some sense ‘paying a price’ to God for our sins. Other Christians, and I am one of them, don’t think this makes sense, in the context of a god described as being a god of love.
If God is some kind of threatening being, demanding a human sacrifice, even sacrificing His own Son in a violent, retributive sort of way, this is not consistent with the tone of this passage, or indeed with the other ‘love’ passages in the New Testament. The idea of an atoning sacrifice doesn’t square with the teaching in the Sermon on the Mount, for example. Where is the idea of forgiveness, or of turning the other cheek?
Again one turns to look at the original Greek: the word for what is translated as the ‘propitiation’ for our sins is ίλασμον, well translated in the NEB as ‘remedy’. The sense is of something that ‘makes us friends again’, reconciles us, to God. If ‘sin’ is something which alienates us, the propitiation is what brings us together again. But it isn’t a crude human sacrifice. Just as we no longer slaughter animals in order to obtain divine favours, so we surely shouldn’t have some ghastly human sacrifice at the heart of our understanding of God – and, properly understood, I think that St John, in his letter, supports this. Indeed he says that ‘we may have boldness in the day of judgement’ (v. 17): we have nothing to fear from God, the God of love.
The other crucial thing is precisely the fact that God did send His Son. The touchstone, the reason for our belief, is that ‘we have seen and do testify that the Father sent his Son to be the Saviour of the world’ (v. 14). God appeared, God revealed Himself, in the person of Jesus. We can say, with St John, things like ‘God is love’, because Jesus was love, personified.
So we should learn the lesson of this wonderful passage from St John. ‘Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another’ (v.11). It isn’t a message directed to our inner man. It isn’t a message to make one feel at peace, or happier. It’s a social message. This love is directed outside ourselves. And it’s that brotherly love, too. Do something for someone. Show your love.
The young ones have it all summed up very neatly.
They say, ‘Take care!’

Sermon for Evensong on the Feast of St John, 27th December 2015
Isaiah 6:1-8, 1 John 5:1-12

‘On the third day of Christmas, my true love sent to me
Three French hens,
Two turtle doves
And a partridge in pear tree’

Oh, also I need to mention that the church also celebrates John the Apostle and Evangelist, on this third day of Christmas. Whether or not John the evangelist and John the apostle are one and the same, the church honours the one who on this day proclaimed Jesus as ‘the word made flesh – ‘”In the beginning was the word”, the author of St John’s Gospel, who was also known as the “disciple whom Jesus loved”. One of the sons of Zebedee, the Sons of Thunder, Boanerges, James and John.John was at the transfiguration and in the Garden of Gethsemane with Jesus. He was at the foot of the cross with Mary. John was a witness of Jesus’ resurrection and he ‘saw and believed’.

As well as John’s Gospel in the Bible there are three letters and the Revelation of St John the Divine. Nobody knows whether it is the same John who was the author of all these writings but it is certainly possible that it is. So John is a very considerable figure in the story of Christianity. I have to contrast him with the partridge, two turtledoves, and the three French hens.

Tonight, our thinking about St John is in contrast with those jollifications, with the frivolity of Christmas, the sales which started even before Christmas Day, the parties and the presents – a contrast with that side of Christmas, which has nothing wrong with it, and is something to enjoy.

I think back to when I was five years old. It was 5 o’clock in the morning on Christmas Day. I’d been awake since just after midnight, and Father Christmas crept into my bedroom, lit a cigarette and coughed just in the way that my Dad used to react to his first fag of the day, and then deposited the all important stocking, or rather pillowcase, on the bottom of my bed, which I were not allowed to touch until official waking up time or else the presents would disappear back up the chimney again, up the chimney where Father Christmas had come from.

You must keep in your mind that joyful little scene on one hand, and the rather more serious story of the apostle John on the other, who, after experiencing three years of the most extraordinary events with Jesus, the like of which have never been seen before or since, devoted the rest of his life to making sure that as many people as possible knew the story and appreciated its life-changing significance.

In his Gospel John wrote, ‘… these [things] 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.’ (John 20:31); and in a his first Letter, just after the passage which was our second lesson, he wrote, ‘These things have I written unto you that believe on the name of the Son of God; that ye may know that ye have eternal life, and that ye may believe on the Son of God.’ (1 John 5:13). This is the serious side of Christmas.

People come to church for all sorts of reasons at this time of year. Is it because we are going to have a nice time, a nice jolly time in church? I went to a Christmas morning family service this year, (not here). It was all very jolly. We sang nice carols. The minister gave a sort of walking-about sermon, asking everyone about how far they had come and what time they had got up in the morning. He didn’t actually ask when Santa Claus had turned up, but he might as well have done. We were each given two sweets, one to scoff yourself and the other to give away to a deserving friend. I’m ashamed to say that I am not quite sure what the message of the sermon was, and I couldn’t understand the Bible reading, which was translated into American by a (no doubt fine) theologian in North Carolina. I wonder what a newcomer would have made of all that.

Tonight a newcomer could be challenged again, because in our first lesson Isaiah tells a story of the Lord, (who is presumably God) sitting on a throne, high and lofty, with seraphs about, which had six wings – ‘with two they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet and with two they flew’. I’m not quite sure how they navigated. And then we get a bit of architecture, ‘The pivots of the threshold shook’: I have no idea what that looked like. It was a vision of God in heaven. That’s what He was supposed to look like. That was in our old Testament lesson. (Isaiah 6:1-8)

In the New Testament lesson we have had part of John’s first Letter. It says,

‘Whosoever believeth that Jesus is the Christ is born of God: and every one that loveth him that begat loveth him also that is begotten of him.
This is he that came by water and blood, even Jesus Christ; not by water only, but by water and blood. And it is the Spirit that beareth witness, because the Spirit is truth.’

So you are ‘in’, you are ‘born of God’, if you believe that Jesus is ‘the Christ.’ You are probably used to the idea of people talking about Jesus Christ as though ‘Christ’ was a sort of surname. But a surname would not have the same effect that Saint John is referring to here. Jesus is the Christ. ‘The anointed one of God’ is what it means.

In the Old Testament and the Jewish tradition it means the Messiah, the one who is going to come and save the Israelites.

Then we hear that Jesus is the son of God. ‘Whosoever believeth that Jesus is the Christ is born of God: and every one that loveth him that begat loveth him also that is begotten of him.’ We should love one another because we are all children of God.

We go on to hear about Jesus, the son of God, that he “came by water and blood”. No one knows what this water and blood is, unless it is a reference to his being pierced in the side on the cross by a Roman soldier. Blood and water came out of His side then, but it is not clear what the significance of water and blood is here. Perhaps it is just to emphasise his human birth.

It is difficult to understand. Not the cosy stuff that we have we waded through in an avalanche of saccharine for the last few weeks. We need some clear thought and we need some clear words.

I haven’t got instant answers, except of course to point out that like Isaiah, painting a spectacular picture of life in heaven, St John, St John ‘the Divine’, in his Book of Revelation, also depicted how things are in heaven, with cherubim and seraphim and the whole company of heaven. We now recognise them both, Isaiah and John, to have been painting a metaphorical picture, a mystical picture. To understand it is a ‘work in progress.’

God isn’t up there with a white beard above the clouds. He is perhaps better described as being ‘at the ground of our being’, at the heart of everything we do. But our language is ultimately inadequate to encompass the divine. So what is the message that we should take from these lessons today, and from our experience over the Christmas period?

I have to share with you an encounter with one of the neighbours of St Andrew’s church that I had on Christmas Eve – it certainly wasn’t Dr Marlene Robinson, you should know. As I was positioning the food-bank van outside the south door of the church and unloading comestibles into the church hall for the lunch which we put on, on Christmas Day, for those who are on their own or otherwise would miss out, out came this neighbour and remonstrated with me. ‘What are you people doing?’ he said. This is supposed to be a quiet place and a quiet day at Christmas. It’s all right for you guys to use the church for worship, but you certainly shouldn’t be plonking vans here and putting on lunches and inviting poor people to come and collect food: generally making a nuisance of yourselves.’

I started to try to explain to him that the church isn’t just a place where people worship – although that is very important – but we also have a mission to help our fellow human beings.

Indeed, as St John puts it, ‘We love him, because he first loved us.
If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?
And this commandment have we from him,
That he who loveth God love his brother also.’ (1 John 4:19-21)

St John’s first Letter contains those wonderful words. They are so true, and they should be the message which we take away from this Christmas. It’s not enough simply to be a true believer; you must do something about it too.