Sermon for the 12th Sunday after Trinity, 23rd August 2015
Hebrews 13:16 To do good and to distribute forget not; for with such sacrifices God is pleased.

‘To do good and to distribute’: surely that’s not what the second lesson said. The words from Hebrews in the NRSV were ‘To do good and to communicate…’ It’s not an exhortation to open Facebook or Twitter accounts. What does it mean to ‘communicate?’

The King James Version and NRSV both say, don’t forget to ‘communicate’; which is a puzzling word. In fact, the writer to the Hebrews wasn’t just talking about passing messages – he meant sharing, sharing in the wherewithal of daily life. The Greek is κοινωνία, ‘having in common, sharing’ – literally translated and understandable in Miles Coverdale’s Bible translation of 1533, from which all the Bible pieces quoted in the Book of Common Prayer come. So, ‘don’t forget the sharing’, literally, or ‘don’t blot out the sharing’.

The ‘sharing’ that I want to speak about tonight is food and money for the Foodbank. As some of you will have heard, I am just about to resume being the general manager of Cobham Area Foodbank. I hope you won’t groan inwardly if I suggest that now would be a good time to tell you how the Foodbank is doing, and to share with you some of the challenges which we face as we go into this autumn, rounding off our second year of operation.

In the first clear year, we provided approximately 1500 food parcels for people here in Cobham who could not afford to buy food. Just under half the people were hungry not because of changes in state benefits or because of unemployment. The biggest category, 40%, were people who are working, who are employed, but who don’t earn enough money to pay the rent and buy food as well.

The various Government cuts have made life more difficult for people at the poorer end of our society. If you are unlucky enough to be made redundant, and you were working in a low-paid job, so you weren’t able to build up any savings, you will find that you don’t get any unemployment benefit for at least two weeks, and in fact, often longer.

If you receive housing benefit, to enable you to afford to pay the rent, (because there are very few council houses left – for practical purposes, none in Elmbridge) – you will find that the Council has to apply the so-called ‘bedroom tax’. They assess how many bedrooms you’ve got, and if your children have grown up and moved away, you will find that they will say that, according to the rules for Housing Benefit, you should be occupying a smaller house: they will only provide the benefit for a house which is ‘appropriate’ for your needs, so a one-bedroom house or flat if you’re by yourself – but even if you wanted to move, there aren’t any available.

Whereas in the old days with council houses, rents were controlled and went up very slowly, now the market dictates the rent, and landlords can raise the rent of their properties to whatever level the market will bear.

So the tenants are squeezed. They have to pay more rent, and they get less benefit to set against it. If they are in a low-paid job, perhaps on the minimum wage and perhaps on a zero-hours contract, paid by the hour worked, but without a guarantee that they will actually get any work to do, they will soon run out of money.

They have to take a hard decision about whether to pay the rent or go and buy food for themselves and their families. In the old days, again, with a council house, the council was pretty understanding about rent arrears when people were in financial difficulty. Nowadays the majority of so-called social housing is let on an ‘Assured Shorthold Tenancy’, which gives the landlord very sweeping powers to evict tenants if they miss a couple of rent payments. So people regard paying the rent as being the top priority, and then find that they haven’t got enough money left to buy any food.

The exact mix of food that they get is planned by a nutritionist. Each food parcel is supposed to last a minimum of three days. We are very blessed by having a lot of very generous people in this area. We are definitely not short of food. Some sorts of food are in surplus – if our clients could live just on pasta and baked beans, we could probably feed them until this time next century!

But although we get lots and lots of food, which is great, we are struggling to get enough money to run the Foodbank.

We had a lot of generous grants to start the thing up – the Bishop of Guildford’s Foundation gave us £5,000, the churches, prominently including you here at St Mary’s, chipped in substantial sums, Elmbridge Borough Council gave £2,000, and even the government, despite their negative remarks about food banks, gave us £2,000 through the Cinnamon Trust. Cargill have very generously met the leasing cost of our van so far, but may not do so in future because they have moved to Weybridge.

There is still rent to pay on our warehouse, there are bills for fuel, insurance and repairs to be paid for; and we do sometimes have to go out and buy food. Because we’ve got a ton of pasta and baked beans, we haven’t necessarily got enough of certain other foods which we need in order to offer a balanced diet.

In round numbers, it costs about £20,000 a year to run Cobham Area Foodbank, and we have funding at the moment which will take us just about up to October. Thereafter, we will have to see if there’s a food bank for food banks! We might, for instance, have to do without our van. It would cost £12,000 plus VAT to buy it.

As the Foodbank turns into a mature operation, its philosophy is being reviewed and refined by the trustees. I’d be interested to know what you think we should do.

One trustee wrote recently, “[You say that the guiding principle should be], ‘what would Jesus do?’. He did not lift anyone out of poverty while here on earth, provided mass catering only once, did not heal or deliver everyone, but he talked about Kingdom, eternal life, relationship with God. He had all the resources of heaven, yet said ‘the poor you will have with you always'”.

In discussion with them, they argued that being a Christian didn’t mean you always had to help people – especially if their misfortune was to some extent of their own making. They argued that we should avoid creating a ‘culture of dependency’.

I have to say that I do feel that Scripture doesn’t support those sort of views. Just take the sentences of Scripture which are set out in the Prayer Book at the Offertory in the Communion service:

‘Whoso hath this world’s good, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him?’ 1 St. John 3.

‘Give alms of thy goods, and never turn thy face from any poor man; and then the face of the Lord shall not be turned away from thee.’ Tobit 4.

‘Be merciful after thy power. If thou hast much, give plenteously; if thou hast little, do thy diligence gladly to give of that little; for so gatherest thou thyself a good reward in the day of necessity.’ Tobit 4.

‘He that hath pity upon the poor lendeth unto the Lord: and look, what he layeth out, it shall be paid him again.’ Proverbs 19.

‘Blessed be the man that provideth for the sick and needy: the Lord shall deliver him in the time of trouble.’ Psalms 41.

But what about the point that some people have brought their trouble on themselves? For instance, what if people are hungry because they have made ‘bad life choices’ as someone has inelegantly described it? What if they have taken out a Sky Sports subscription when there’s barely enough to pay the rent?

A common reason for people asking for a food voucher is that they have been ‘sanctioned’ by the Jobcentre. They have not submitted enough job applications, or they have failed to attend a meeting. If so, their benefits are docked for a period – leaving them destitute.

There was a shameful story recently about some adverts placed by the Dept for Work and Pensions which apparently described two people, ‘Sarah’ and ‘Zac’, who had suffered sanctions but who were saying that it had been beneficial to them in the long run: they had followed advice or improved in some other way and had got themselves out of dependency. The only problem was that the DWP had made the stories up. There were no real ‘happy’ claimants who lost benefits. I strongly suspect that such sanctions almost never help the poor people concerned. [See http://gu.com/p/4bjv5%5D

Of course the Foodbank would never turn people away who have been ‘sanctioned’ in this way, even if it were true that they had been sanctioned for a good cause. Indeed, I would argue that we are obliged as Christians to treat generously even a situation where someone almost wilfully refuses to do the right thing.

We do know of cases where someone who is getting out of debt, being counselled by Christians Against Poverty, suddenly veers off the track and takes out a Sky TV subscription. And then asks for a food voucher. Well then, what?

Again, I think that Scripture tells us to be generous. Think of the Parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11f) – sometimes called the parable of the Compassionate Father. The prodigal son is hungry because of the way he has dissipated his inheritance. It’s entirely his own fault. But Jesus clearly says that his father was right to be compassionate, to forgive him, to welcome him back. The brother who complains about this stands for those people who would not help people who have somehow caused their own misfortune, whatever it is. Jesus says they are wrong.

And finally, of course, if you were still in any doubt whether Jesus wanted us always to feed the hungry and clothe the inadequately dressed, remember the wonderful picture of the Last Judgement in Matt. 25.

‘When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory:
And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats:
And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left.
Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world:
For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in:
Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.
Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink?
When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee?
Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee?
And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.’

We should be guided accordingly. I hope you agree, and that you will continue to support us in our work.

Sermon for Mattins on the 11th Sunday after Trinity, 16th August 2015
John 6:51-58

‘Whoso eatest my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day.’ (v.54)

‘He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him.’ (v. 56)

You might be a bit surprised to have this lesson at Mattins – you might think that we’ve got things mixed up and that this is more appropriate as a lesson at a communion service.

But I think that there is merit in our stepping back and looking carefully at exactly what it is we are doing when we receive Holy Communion, and in reflecting on it. That’s what I want to do now.

When he wrote the Book of Common Prayer first in 1549, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer was heavily influenced by the Reformation, by the ideas of Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, Bucer and others on the Continent, whose ideas had become known in Cambridge, where Cranmer had become a don following his MA degree in 1515.

Then Cranmer was exposed directly to the Continental reformers when he went round Europe visiting theologians in order to try to construct arguments – theological arguments – for Henry VIII’s divorce. By the time he came to draft the Book of Common Prayer a dozen years later, he was a convinced Protestant, full of the ideas of the Reformation. He wasn’t so successful with his task for Henry VIII.

One of the important battlegrounds of the Reformation concerned the Lord’s Supper, Holy Communion. What is actually happening when we receive Holy Communion? Are the Roman Catholics right in saying that somehow the Holy Spirit comes down on the bread and the wine, making them into, transforming them into, the actual body and blood of Christ?

This process is called Transubstantiation, which means, becoming a different substance. If you want to see what Cranmer thought about this, look in the back of your little blue Prayer Book and turn to page 623, to Article XXVIII of the 39 Articles of Religion:

‘The Supper of the Lord is not only a sign of the love that Christians ought to have among themselves one to another; but rather is a sacrament of our redemption by Christ’s death: insomuch that such as rightly, worthily and with faith, receive the same, the bread which we break is a partaking of the body of Christ; and likewise the Cup of Blessing is a partaking of the blood of Christ.

Transubstantiation (or the change of the substance of bread and wine) in the Supper of the Lord, cannot be proved by holy writ; but is repugnant to the plain words of scripture, overthroweth the nature of a sacrament, and hath given occasion to many superstitions.

The body of Christ is given, taken, and eaten, in the Supper only after an heavenly and spiritual manner. And the mean whereby the body of Christ is received and eaten in the Supper is faith.’

The mediaeval view, which the Roman Catholics have carried on with, followed the writings of some of the early Christian Fathers: the Lateran Council, 1215, adopted what Cyril of Jerusalem had written in 348, to the effect that the Holy Spirit made the bread Christ’s body, and the wine, Christ’s blood.

We should remember that, as well as the words of Jesus quoted in St John’s Gospel in our lesson today, there is also the story of the Last Supper in the Synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke.

‘Jesus took bread, and blessed, and brake it, and gave it to them, and said, Take, eat: this is my body. And he took the cup, and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them; …. And he said unto them, This is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many.’

And there is also the description in 1 Corinthians 11. So much for Transubstantiation being contrary to ‘the plain words of scripture’!

On the face of things, it does look as though Christianity even involves at least symbolic cannibalism – which was the accusation which the Roman emperor Nero used against the Christians, as reported by the Roman historian Tacitus.[Annals, 15:44 – see http://tinyurl.com/otsupqf%5D

In the Catholic ideas was the thought that, if indeed the bread and the wine turned into the actual body and blood of Christ, then the bread and wine were themselves very special and perhaps worthy of worship. If they were Jesus’ flesh and His blood, then they should be objects of veneration in themselves. If you visit a major Catholic church or cathedral, you’ll find ‘relics’, saints’ bones or other body parts, which are venerated: they are supposed to have the Holy Spirit in them, and therefore, they can almost be worshipped themselves.

The Reformers didn’t believe in relics. The other thing that that they, and Cranmer, were unhappy about in the traditional ideas of the Mass, was what the Mass, Holy Communion, was intended for. The practice had grown up that the Mass was itself a sort of sacrifice. So if you offered a Mass for the souls of the dead, or to obtain some cure or other benefit for someone alive, it stood for a very primitive and literal form of religion which was really only superstition.

But Cranmer and the reformers objected to this, on the basis that the only ‘sacrifice’ in Christianity was, is, Christ’s sacrifice of Himself on the cross: that He obtained salvation for everyone through His sacrifice. There is nothing that we can do, in order to be saved, except by having faith. So saying special masses for people is out; a Requiem Mass was not good theology if the worshippers believed that they were in some way giving a present to God or making a sacrifice, in return for which He would look favourably on them.

In the Prayer of Consecration in the communion service, if we use the Book of Common Prayer, we say

‘Almighty God our Heavenly Father, who of thy tender mercy didst give thine only Son Jesus Christ to suffer death upon the cross for our redemption; who made there (by his one oblation of himself, once offered) a full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction, for the sins of the whole world …’

The service goes against the idea, that you are in some sense ‘bribing’ God, giving Him something, making a sacrifice in His favour. That had turned into a rather shabby set of superstitions, and even worse, into a sort of trade, whereby the church sold masses for the dead and for the sick, sold them for a price. That was one of Martin Luther’s main targets.

Well, you can spend a lot of time going through history books of the Reformation researching this topic, whether in the Eucharist, in the Lord’s Supper, there is a ‘Real Presence’ of Jesus in the bread and wine; our tradition in the Church of England comes down from what Thomas Cranmer wrote in the sixteenth century. He wrote that ‘spiritual eating is with the heart, and not with the teeth’ [Thomas Cranmer, 1550, A Defence of the true and Catholic doctrine of the sacrament of the body and blood of our saviour Christ, quoted in MacCulloch, D., 1996,Thomas Cranmer, a Life: New Haven and London, Yale University Press, p464], so, fortunately, there is no actual or symbolic cannibalism involved.

I wonder whether today we really think about this. What does taking Holy Communion do? Are we still divided from the Roman Catholics here? This is, after all, a mystery, a sacrament, an ‘outward and visible sign’ of an inner, spiritual reality. The minister will say, as the bread and wine are distributed,

‘The body of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was given for thee, preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting life’.

Surely that is the language of Transubstantiation. The words seem to say that you are eating and drinking the actual body and blood of Christ. So a Catholic would be happy with that.

Indeed, if you use the Common Worship service, (the more modern words), as we usually do at 10 o’clock, all the minister or the server usually says is, ‘The body of Christ’, and ‘The blood of Christ’. This is it, the very thing.

But if you use the full words of administration, either in traditional or modern form (‘you’ instead of ‘thee’), the second part is,

‘Take and eat this, in remembrance that Christ died for you, and feed on him in your heart by faith with thanksgiving.’

Remember, the ‘spiritual eating is with the heart, and not with the teeth’. In receiving Holy Communion, even without being cannibals, we are receiving Jesus into us, internalising Him. As we say in the Prayer of Humble Access, ‘We do not presume to come to this thy table, ….’ and so on, ‘Grant us so to eat the flesh of thy dear Son Jesus Christ, and to drink His blood, that our sinful bodies may be made clean by His body, and our souls washed by His most precious blood, and that we may evermore dwell in Him, and he in us.’

‘That we may evermore dwell in Him, and he in us’. It’s not a literal business. We aren’t literally eating human flesh and drinking blood, but it is a spiritual consumption. It’s a metaphor, a sacrament, an ‘outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.’

I think that there is also the idea of a difference between bodies and souls, that there is a physical world and a spiritual world, that the body and blood of Christ in the communion are spiritual things, not physical ones.

That’s all good. But what if some of our fellow Christians – for instance the Roman Catholics – what if they still believe that the body and blood of Christ has come in them through the Eucharist, in a real sense? After all, St Paul often writes in his letters about being ‘in Christ’, meaning that Christ was in him.

I think that now, 500 years after the Reformation, we needn’t be quite so fierce as Cranmer was in the 39 Articles. Even as a metaphor, to celebrate the Lord’s Supper is to do something very significant and powerful. We are ‘in Christ’ as we receive the bread and the wine. What a wonderful entrance ticket that is – free admission to heaven!

When we are ‘in Christ’ we will be like the Ephesians to whom St Paul wrote. We are not to get drunk, but ‘be filled with the Spirit; speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord.'[Eph. 5:18-19]

Let us pray that, when we receive the bread and wine in the Lord’s Supper, that the body and blood of Christ will be real to us, will be present: a present help in times of trouble. A real presence.

Sermon for Mattins on the Seventh Sunday after Trinity, 19th July 2015
Ephesians 2:11-end, Mark 6:30-34, 53-end

You’ll have to excuse the Welsh flavour of my sermon today. I’ve just come back from a very happy couple of days being with my younger daughter Alice in Cardiff, as she collected her M.B/B.Ch degree and became Dr Alice.

About 200 happy young people trooped across the stage at St David’s Hall to shake the Vice Chancellor’s hand. Soon most of them will be taking up a junior doctor’s post – what used to be called a ‘junior houseman’, and is now known as an ‘F1 (Foundation Year 1) Doctor’. They all take up their new posts, and the doctors they replace move up the tree, on or about 1st August.

Someone rather unworthily has said that, if you’re going to be in a car crash, try to avoid 1st August: give the new doctors a bit of time to settle in! More seriously, I know from my older daughter Emma, who is also a hospital doctor, that when they look at their new work schedules, these new doctors will all be working quite often over the weekends, as will their supervising consultants, never mind what the Health Secretary says.

So this was the class of 2015 at Cardiff University Medical School, and we were in the Welsh capital to join in the jollifications. I have always liked going to Wales. When we were little, we had holidays in North Wales, in Rhyl and the Lleyn Peninsula, in Abersoch. Wales had the Festiniog Railway, the Talyllyn – heaven, for boys, of all ages – and sheep. Sheep are very Welsh.

I remember that we sometimes drove over the Horseshoe Pass near Llangollen in Snowdonia. Dad’s Morris Minor bumped over a cattle grid at the beginning and end of the pass: in between, the animals could roam about freely, and there were no walls or fences to keep them off the road. And it was mainly sheep. You had to drive carefully, as they wandered about all over the place.

If you stopped in one of the lay-bys to admire the view, the sheep came up to inspect you – and if you seemed to be friendly, they would climb into the car! I’ve never been so close to a sheep, before or since. When you look at them close up, I think they look very weird – almost prehistoric. A sheep’s face hasn’t changed much since the time of the dinosaurs, and indeed, if you use a bit of imagination, a sheep’s head does look rather dinosaur-like.

And I remember my folks weren’t that keen on sheep coming into Dad’s car. Perfectly all right to have our friends’ dog in the car, or our own cat, if we needed to take her to the PDSA for her vaccinations. But not a strange – a very strange – sheep. The sheep were too strange, too alien. They had to be gently steered away.

This Sunday has a rather sheepy flavour to it. The people milling around and following after Jesus, in St Mark’s gospel story today, were like sheep without a shepherd. ‘Jesus … was moved with compassion toward them, because they were as sheep not having a shepherd’ (Mark 6:34).

Our hymns have sheep and shepherds in them: echoes of Psalm 23,

The Lord my pasture shall prepare,
and feed me with a shepherd’s care;

and

The King of love my shepherd is.

The lesson from St Paul’s letter to the Ephesians has the idea of bringing the sheep into the fold: ”But now in Christ Jesus ye who sometimes were far off are made nigh …’

Do you remember the lovely prayer after Communion which we sometimes use?

Father of all,
we give you thanks and praise,
that when we were still far off
you met us in your Son and brought us home.
[Common Worship, Services and Prayers for the Church of England, (2000), London, Church House Publishing, p265]

There’s an echo in that of the parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11f) too. ‘But now in Christ Jesus ye who sometimes were far off are made nigh …’

There’s a sense of being ‘far off’ in the strangeness of the sheep when you get close to them. St Paul – or his follower who wrote in the same style – the author of the Letter to the Ephesians – points to the way that the Gentiles – those people who were not Jewish, like the original Christians, and indeed like Christ himself – those Gentiles who were attracted to Jesus and to his followers – were used to being excluded by the Jews, kept out. They were those rather weird-looking sheep which you had to keep out of Dad’s car.

But Jesus had broken down the boundaries: He ‘hath broken down the middle wall of partition between us.’ St Paul’s mission was not to the Jews, but to the Gentiles, to people like us. In Biblical terms, we are Gentiles. If Jesus hadn’t preached reconciliation and love, and if Paul hadn’t reinforced that message in his preaching, we wouldn’t have been able to become Christians.

The point is, that it doesn’t matter how strange you might look, or how alien. Jesus is just as much for the strange ones, for those prehistoric-looking sheep, as He is for us smart, sleek ones. So the prayer goes on:

‘May we who share Christ’s body live his risen life;
we who drink his cup bring life to others;
we whom the Spirit lights give light to the world.’

So next time we’re tempted to put someone down or ignore them, because they’re too alien, too different – too much like the sheep which I thought of as weird and prehistoric-looking – let us remember how Jesus welcomed them, even though He and his disciples were tired from their missionary work. ‘He had compassion on them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd.’

We can learn a useful lesson about the love of God from thinking about sheep, and the good shepherd. Let us pray:

‘Keep us firm in the hope you have set before us,
so we and all your children shall be free,
and the whole earth live to praise your name.’

Sermon for Mattins on the Third Sunday after Trinity, 21st June 2015

The scene is Armenia, around 257AD. ‘Armenia has been conquered by the Romans, who have outlawed Christianity, the growing new faith, and condemned all Christians to death. Paolina, who had loved the Roman proconsul Severo, married the Armenian nobleman Poliuto under pressure from her father Felice, governor of Armenia, who had told her that her lover Severo had been killed in battle.’ [Glyndebourne 2015 Programme Book]

Severo had not in fact perished. He eventually returned home safely. Paolina is dreadfully torn between her love for him and her duty to remain faithful to her new husband Poliuto.

Meanwhile Poliuto has become a Christian convert, and is baptised. Paolina warns him that he will be killed if the Romans find out. They do find out. Poliuto is condemned to death – but his sentence is suspended, to see if he is willing to renounce Christianity and go back to the old religion, the worship of the traditional Roman gods, Jupiter and Apollo and Mars and Co.

Severo, who, as the Roman proconsul, would be the man to condemn Poliuto to death, meanwhile tries to get his old girlfriend Paolina to love him again, but she says she is now committed to Poliuto – although she admits that she still has feelings for her old love too.

Poliuto refuses to recant. He says that death won’t matter, as he is confident of salvation in heaven. Paolina tries to persuade him out of it, to no avail. She is then so impressed by Poliuto’s new faith that she herself decides to convert, even if it will bring a death sentence on her as well.

Paolina is baptised, and together she and Poliuto march off to face the lions.

That was a very quick résumé of Donizetti’s opera ‘Poliuto’, which is being performed at Glyndebourne. If you haven’t been as fortunate as I was and got a ticket, then I really recommend you listen to it on BBC Radio 3 tomorrow night at 7.30. It is full of beautiful tunes and fantastic singing, and has never been performed in England before.

The opening scene involves rather a sinister back street in which people appear from round the corner rather furtively and look to right and left before they dart across the end of a passage, through which some daylight appears. We realise that they are afraid that there might be a sniper, who will shoot them as they cross the entrance. It sets the scene – this is how the early Christians felt, under constant threat.

The opera is set against the background of the early days of Christianity, when it wasn’t a mainstream religion, and indeed when Christians were persecuted. It wasn’t until the Emperor Constantine, thirty years after the action in this opera, that Romans adopted Christianity as their official religion.

The sentence of death, which awaited the Christians, involved being thrown to the lions in the arena, a particularly horrible death. 250 years after Christ, the situation which St Paul mentions in his second letter to the Corinthians was still going on, that Christ’s ministers proved themselves ‘in much patience, in afflictions, in necessities, in distresses, in stripes [which is floggings], in imprisonments, in tumults, in labours … as dying, and, behold, we live; as chastened, and not killed; as sorrowful, yet alway rejoicing.’ (2 Cor. 6:4, 10)

As these extremes of contradiction show, early Christians were very likely to be martyred for their faith, or if not actually martyred, certainly persecuted and subjected to all sorts of hardship.

Armenia, where the story of Poliuto is set, actually became the very first Christian country. Armenia adopted Christianity as its official religion only a few years after the action depicted in the opera, around 300AD. Armenia is to the north of Turkey in Asia Minor. It’s one of the oldest countries in the world, founded in 2,492BC.

Further south, in that other cradle of civilisation, between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates, in what was called Mesopotamia, ‘between the rivers’, in Greek, the same drama is unfolding, even today. Where the so-called Islamic State has become dominant, to be a Christian is to put oneself in mortal danger. Why would you risk your life in such circumstances?

Poliuto, in the opera, says that he is not afraid of death because he believes that eternal salvation will await him after death. Eventually Paolina his wife is so impressed by his example that she decides to convert and be baptised so she can join him in martyrdom.

It all feels very far away, both in time and in geographical distance. The Christians who are confronting persecution and death today are thousands of miles away, in the Middle East. It doesn’t really affect us. It’s only when we see young people from Moslem backgrounds in this country leaving to go and fight for Islamic State, or girls leaving to become jihadi brides, that the idea of self-sacrifice for religious reasons comes nearer home.

We don’t understand why they would want to do it. We are too down to earth, I think. We compartmentalise things. There is our spiritual, religious life, and our day-to-day practical life. For instance, when I said, from this pulpit last week, that the Bible is telling us to welcome and care for refugees, immigrants who are destitute and seeking a better life, I was met with the observation that this is all very well, but ‘we haven’t enough room for them.’

In other words, never mind what the Bible says – or even what we might think God is telling us – it comes down to practical considerations: but perhaps the Bible just isn’t ‘practical’ enough. Just think what that argument would look like in the context of one of the early martyrs. It wasn’t just a question whether following what the Bible said was a bit impractical. It was a matter of life and death: and the martyrs accepted death.

This is a mighty truth at the heart of Christianity. Jesus was prepared to die for what He was. He gave His life. The early Christians too were prepared to make that ultimate sacrifice, to die for what they believed, for their faith.

Poliuto, as one of the early Christian martyrs, says that he is not afraid of death because he believes that eternal salvation will await him after death. Would we risk death for that? What does it actually mean?

What is ‘eternal salvation’? St Paul describes what it means, in his Second Letter to the Corinthians. He writes, ‘Our troubles are slight and short-lived; and their outcome an eternal glory which outweighs them far. Meanwhile our eyes are fixed, not on the things that are seen, but on the things that are unseen: for what is seen passes away; what is unseen is eternal’ (2 Cor. 4:17-18, NEB).

For St Paul, God is, God works, through Jesus. The fact of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection is there: it is the way that God confronts us. God is not just an Unmoved Mover, a Blind Watchmaker, somehow setting the mechanism of evolution in motion and then standing back to see it destroy itself. For St Paul, ‘God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, no longer holding men’s misdeeds against them.’ (2 Cor. 5:18)

By raising Christ from the dead, God showed that He was involved with us, that He cared about us. Faith in that, knowledge of that, made the early Christians brave in the face of persecution. ‘Hard-pressed on every side, we are never hemmed in; bewildered, we are never at our wits’ end; hunted, we are never abandoned to our fate; struck down, we are not left to die.’ (2 Cor. 5:8-9, NEB).

What would make us willing to give up everything, even to make the ultimate sacrifice? Whatever it is, whatever inspired the early Christians like Poliuto, it is still at work among the Christians in Iraq, Syria and Libya in the face of Islamic State. We can be very thankful that we are not there, not exposed to mortal danger for our faith.

Even so, perhaps we ought to reflect more on what ‘the Jesus event’ as some theologians call it, [For Paul, everything depends on the whole ‘Jesus event’, and what God has done in Jesus’ life, death and resurrection.’ Burridge, R.A., 2007, Imitating Jesus, Grand Rapids/Cambridge, Wm. B. Eerdmans, p. 82] the story of Jesus, really means – and what our response to it ought to be. Is it all right just to go to church once a week, and do nothing else about one’s faith? Is it all right just to carry on our lives without thinking how our way of life has an impact, an impact on God’s creation?

For example, this is what Pope Francis’ encyclical, ‘Laudato si’,’ from St Francis’ Canticle of the Creatures, “Laudato si’, mi’ Signore”, ‘Praise be to thee, My Lord’, is all about. Some things are necessary to life, and others are optional, open to choice. If the rich and powerful keep choosing more than they need for life, the life of all of us will be destroyed. The Pope is saying that, unless we give up our appetite for luxuries, the world will be destroyed.

How will the Pope’s message be received? Will it be compartmentalised, put into a dusty box called ‘climate change’? I hope not. I hope we will all be brave enough – not to face the lions, like the early Christians – but brave enough to look at our lives in the light of Christ, in the light of Christ’s sacrifice. Can we just bumble along? And is there anything more important than the actions which begin with going to church? Let’s really ponder on it. I think it will change our lives.