Archives for category: Uncategorized

Lord Green’s Concert

February 16, 2015 //

Sermon for the Sunday before Lent, Quinquagesima Sunday, at St Mary the Virgin, Stoke D’Abernon, 15th February 2015

Holy Communion and Mattins – Mark 9:2-9: Evensong – 2 Peter 1:16-21

One of the nicer ways to get people, who don’t normally come to church, to darken our doors, is for there to be a concert in church. We are blessed here in Stoke and Cobham with an awful lot of good music. We have all sorts of recitals, here in St Mary’s, and down the road, St Andrew’s hosts regular concerts under the ‘Maiastra’ name.

This is where musicians who have participated in a residential master-class at Aidan Woodcock’s house, at Little Slyfield, just opposite the Yehudi Menuhin School, give a concert, led by their teacher. These are people at the beginning of their performing career, who have already graduated – sometimes more than once – from leading music schools, and have usually won some prizes as well. The Maiastra concerts – the name, incidentally, comes from a mythical Persian bird – are a real opportunity to hear the classical music stars of tomorrow, and they’re very exciting, very good.

These concerts do bring a lot of people into the church who wouldn’t ordinarily come – either because they are not local, or because they just don’t go to church. I hope that some of them, having found a warm welcome and a beautiful space, do decide to come back to worship with us later on.

So far, so good. But I had a rather disappointing exchange the other day with one of the admin staff for the master classes, who was trying to book the church for a Maiastra concert at the beginning of April. ‘How would Friday 3rd or Saturday 4th be? Would the church be free?’ Well, I was rather surprised, because of course that is Good Friday and Easter Saturday. I had to delicately remind the lady that this was Easter, the height of the Christian year, and that, I was afraid, the church was not going to be free.

‘So sorry’, she said, ‘Of course.’ She would talk to the course tutor to see whether the course could be slightly rescheduled, so as to allow the concert to take place without conflicting with Easter. Back came another email. ‘How about the Monday or Tuesday?’ Oh dear.

So I had to go back and explain that that was the Monday and Tuesday of Holy Week – all part of the most important part of the Christian year, so that you couldn’t think of having a concert in the church, unless it was a devotional performance, at all during that week.

Well, of course the concert will eventually take place at some other time. But I reflected on that a bit, in the context of our worship today, on the Sunday before Lent, when we remember Jesus’ Transfiguration. The cloud descended, and a voice said the same words as they heard when Jesus was baptised in the Jordan: ‘He is my Son, the beloved. Listen to him.’ It was a literally dazzling experience for Peter and James and John, as they accompanied Jesus up the high mountain. You couldn’t ignore that. It would be a life-changing experience.

But here’s the thing. Today, very often it would appear that people are ignoring this: that these extraordinary events no longer affect people’s lives. The nice people organising the Maiastra concert had forgotten what the main purpose of a church is. It’s not just a pretty concert venue. At the Church’s General Synod this week, one of the speakers reminded the delegates that studies had shown that, if the Church of England carries on declining in numbers at the current rate, 1% per year, overall in England (although fortunately, not in the Guildford Diocese), there will come a time, sooner rather than later, when churches in many rural parishes will be unsustainable and it will no longer be the case that the Church of England will have a parish church in every city, town and village in England.

So the Church has been embarking on all sorts for programmes of evangelisation: Messy Church, Fresh Expressions, Alpha courses, and so on. And quite a lot of it seems to be working. New people are coming to the the Church. Its interesting that it’s not always the most modern ideas which are successful in involving new people. Apparently the fastest-growing service in terms of numbers attending in the Church of England is – what do you think? It’s Evensong.

Obviously to some extent that’s influenced by the fact that cathedrals are attracting more and more people, and Evensong is seen as a quintessentially cathedral service; although of course we have lovely Evensongs here at St Mary’s every Sunday, sung just as they are in a cathedral; in fact, we sing a little bit more of the service than they do in Guildford Cathedral.

But the fact is that we are 2,000 years away from the spectacular events of Jesus’ time here on earth. It was relatively easy, when compared with our position, for the disciples to go out and spread the Gospel. As St Peter said in his second letter [2 Peter 1:16], they’d ‘been eyewitnesses of his majesty’ – they had seen Him, they’d witnessed the miraculous things that happened; and the inner circle, Peter and James and John, had even seen a foretaste of the Resurrection. The transfigured Jesus was like the resurrected Jesus. It was a glimpse into the future.

As a matter of intellect, as a matter of rational reflection, that’s still tremendously important, even 2,000 years later, even today. For us as Christians, as practising Christians, it’s something we couldn’t even think of ignoring. We have to react. We have to come and worship, and say prayers, and give our sacrifice of praise.

But what about the people who don’t get it? The people for whom church really doesn’t figure in their lives? St Paul has something to say about that in his second Letter to the Corinthians. ‘If our gospel be hid’ – if our Gospel is veiled, if our Gospel is obscure – St Paul says that it is ‘hid to them that are lost’, who are ‘on their way to perdition’, as one translation puts it. ‘Their unbelieving minds are so blinded by the god of this passing age, that the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the very image of God, cannot dawn upon them and bring them light.’ [2 Corinthians 4:3f]

It’s an easy thing to understand. If you are doing well, having a nice life, enjoying good things, you probably don’t feel there’s anything much missing in your life: that’s one kind of distraction. If you are somebody who comes from a home where nobody ever went to church, and you go to school and study at university among people who see a scientific explanation for everything; who don’t need, or feel they don’t need, any kind of reference to God, the Gospel will be veiled from you.

Later on in his second Letter to the Corinthians, St Paul says this. ‘No wonder we do not lose heart, though our outward humanity is in decay, yet day by day we are inwardly renewed. 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 Corinthians 4:16f]

I think that’s a very good message for us. We can’t see, in the same way that the disciples saw. That unseen reality, that inner spiritual reality, the working of God, is what is permanent and unchanging. It’s just as good now, as it is was 2,000 years ago, as it was in the time of St Paul.

Jesus’ injunction to us Christians was to ‘go and teach all nations, teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you.’ So what is it that we should do? I’m not really qualified to tell you a whole lot about Fresh Expressions of Church or Messy Church – although I can tell you that our Messy Church, run by Churches Together, attracts big numbers of children and their parents each time – but what I think is important and perhaps may open the idea of the Kingdom to more and more people – is the idea that we get over and over again, from Archbishop Justin and Archbishop John Sentamu, that we should be as the Lord intended us to be, and that we should live our lives in such a way as to promote human flourishing: flourishing, ευδαιμονία, something more than just passing your time without hurting anybody, something more than just keeping your nose clean: but instead actively looking out for ways to go the extra mile, to do the better thing.

It’s perhaps a bit unfair to single out anyone, particularly in the last week, for examination against that kind of background, but I can’t help thinking we will all have been a bit challenged by the sad story of the Revd Lord Green, the retired boss of HSBC, who has preached sermons and written books, preaching the virtue of observing the very highest moral standards.

But unfortunately at the same time, his bank was offering to clients a very aggressive form of tax avoidance. When I worked in the City, we were brought up to distinguish, reading the fine print, between tax avoidance, which is legal, and tax evasion, which isn’t. But this now seems to be a place where simply following the letter of the law isn’t enough. The Christian way, the Gospel way, is in fact not only not to evade tax, but also not to avoid it either. It’s rather bad luck, I think, on poor old Lord Green that in his part of the City – as indeed in my part of the City when I was there – nobody told him that the rules had changed, and he perhaps never appreciated that simply observing the law wasn’t necessarily sufficient in order to demonstrate the light of God.

Because, you see, when you do get to be able to see the light, then you will be like the Good Samaritan. You will be actively looking out for people you can help, rather than just sticking to the letter of the law. Let us pray that we will see that light: that the light will shine on us: and if we’re not transfigured, let us pray that we are at least transformed.

Tags Archbishop of Canterbury, Church of England, concerts in church, Easter, good friday, Guildford diocese, holy week, john sentamu, Lord Green, maiastra, Transfiguration

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Rufus Alexander Williamson III

By publicsquare

January 25, 2015 //

Sermon at Holy Communion at St Mary the Virgin, Stoke D’Abernon, The Conversion of St Paul – 25th January 2015
Acts 9:1-22 – ‘Now as he was going along and approaching Damascus, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him.’

For a couple of weeks now, I have been going to a house group, which is not one of ours, run by St Mary’s or St Andrew’s, but it’s a sort of spontaneous house group, run by some nice people who live locally, who go to the International Community Church (the American church, that was). I was invited to go along by a friend of mine who sometimes worships here but who usually goes to St Andrew’s, Oxshott.

It’s a shame, in a way, that in this Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, the ICC church is no longer a member of Churches Together in Cobham, Stoke, Oxshott and Surrounding Areas. They used to be, when they used to meet locally, but now they hold their meetings in Chertsey, so they are not local to us any more.

The house group is watching a series of videos made by an American evangelist called Rob Bell, who looks about 15 but who is apparently a bit older than that, and runs a mega-church somewhere in the USA. If you want to look up his videos, they are on YouTube under the title ‘NOOMA’, N-O-O-M-A, which he explains as a phonetic transliteration of the Greek word πνεύμα, from which we get ‘pneumatic’, for example. It’s a word for a wind or a spirit: so το πνεύμα άγιον is the Holy Spirit.

On the NOOMA YouTube channel there are a number of videos, which are really illustrated sermons by Mr Bell. The one that we watched this week [http://nooma.com/films/001-rain] involved Mr Bell going for a walk in the woods with his one-year-old son – whose name I didn’t catch, but it sounded like one of those American ‘surname’ names like ‘Spencer’ or ‘Washington’ or whatever – although his friends probably call him Spike, or Bonzo, of course.

Mr Bell hoisted the baby on to his back in some kind of back-pack affair and strode off into the woods, in true frontiersman fashion. It looked like a scene out of a holiday promotion video: beautiful warm sunlight coming through the trees, birds singing, and so on.

They were walking round a lake. Half way round, the weather changed, and it started to rain. The rain quickly turned into a full-blooded thunderstorm. Mr Bell and his offspring were both wearing tops which had hoods. Mr Bell reached behind him and pulled the baby’s hood up over his head, to keep the rain off, and did the same for himself. The baby, of course, as babies do, immediately threw off his hood. However, Mr Bell was oblivious to this, because he had the baby hitched to his back, so he couldn’t see him.

He strode on, at a military pace. He told us that he was about a mile from home. Obviously this was not the sort of afternoon stroll that you or I might get up to after lunch today, but something altogether more athletic. Anyway, there’s Bell, striding along under his hoodie top, and suddenly, Rufus Alexander Williamson III starts to protest – because he is now wet, not having his hood up.

He shouts and screams and generally makes all the usual baby protesting noises. Mr Bell, finally, rumbles the fact that all is not well with the baby. So he unhitches the backpack and he tucks the baby under his own coat in front, snuggling him up and getting him nice and warm again, out of the rain.

All the while, Mr Bell is gently repeating to the baby, ‘I love you, Rufus Alexander Washington III: and we are going to make it.’ Fortunately, they do make it; they get back home – and we have to imagine the scene in the log cabin, with the blazing fire, jacuzzi and fluffy towels which no doubt the returning father and son then enjoyed.

Cut instead to Mr Bell, who tells us that the story was an analogy, a metaphor, for how God is. God is with us in our darkest moments, when it is raining on us and our hood is not up. God will be there, and He will say that He, our Heavenly Father, loves us, and that we will make it together.

I thought it was a nice idea, but I wasn’t sure. It was a pity that it wasn’t a Churches Together house group during the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, because I would then have got a lot of points for being outside my comfort zone, but still, with Christian friends!

The leader of the group had a sheet of questions. One was, were we conscious of God being alongside us, perhaps in times of trouble? Did we have experiences like Mr Bell and his little boy, caught in the rain?

I was rather challenged. I haven’t had an experience like John Wesley, who was going to a Bible class and who suddenly felt his heart was ‘strangely warmed’, for example. I certainly haven’t had a Road to Damascus experience like St Paul.

I felt rather stuck – because I am not given to that kind of spirituality, unfortunately. I am a rather down-to-earth person and I’m not sure that I necessarily would hear a ‘still small voice of calm’ – although what St Paul experienced would surely have got through to me.

I have, however, been reading a new book, from our bookshop – and by the way, please remember, where bookshops are concerned, you must use them or lose them, and not be tempted by the likes of Amazon. Our bookshop can get you any book you like the next day, just as quickly as Amazon. (The usual disclaimers apply.)

Well anyway, I have been reading a new book, which is a series of papers assembled and edited by Archbishop John, John Sentamu, called ‘On Rock or Sand? Firm foundations for Britain’s future’. It’s a series of essays designed to inform the debate which is going to lead up to our General Election in May. It’s not meant to be party-political in any way, but is intended to inspire all our politicians to think in terms of what Archbishop John calls ευδαιμονία, the Greek word which roughly translates as ‘human flourishing’.

The idea is that it’s not enough for us to flourish in material terms, but rather we have to flourish as men and women made in the image of God. According to Genesis 1:27: … God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

We have to flourish, to reach our full human potential, according to Archbishop John. The two greatest commandments, to love God and to love our neighbour, are to be applied to our economic and political situation. The essays explore how we can become closer to how God intended us to be, and therefore to flourish and reach our full potential, in a fair, just and loving way.

John Sentamu’s book in many ways is influenced by, and perhaps was inspired by, Archbishop William Temple’s 1942 book, ‘Christianity and Social Order’ [Shepheard-Walwyn 1976, 1987, ISBN -10: 0-85683-025-9], which was one of the key documents which led to the creation of the Welfare State and NHS after the Second World War.

Archbishop Temple, R.H. Tawney, the famous economic historian, and William Beveridge, the architect of the Welfare State, were all at Balliol College, Oxford. They were sent off by the Master of Balliol, Edward Caird, in the vacations to work in the East End of London among poor and deprived people, which gave them an insight which they would not otherwise have received. People sometimes forget that, when the Welfare State and the NHS were created, the National Debt was far greater than it is today: but the inspiration which drove Archbishop Temple and his fellow students pointed to something far more important than money, or the lack of it.

In a similar vein, Jean Vanier, the Canadian theologian who founded the worldwide network of L’Arche communities where people with disabilities live together with able-bodied people, to great mutual benefit, was interviewed on the Today programme on Thursday [http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02hkfzr]. He told a story about visiting a city in South America and being told, as they drove down a main road, that on one side of the road the poor people lived, in squalor and depravity; lives full of uncertainty, hunger and disease.

On the other side of the same road were the big houses with gates and armed guards, with police patrols, in which the rich and privileged lived. Nobody from that side of the road ever crossed over to meet the people in the slums. Jean Vanier said that his whole work had been to encourage people to cross the road; to go and see, and make friends with, people who are differently situated: handicapped or poor, just not so fortunate.

It occurred to me that for me, reading Archbishop John and his contributors’ words of hope, setting out a vision according to which more things matter than just money and the market: and Jean Vanier, showing how it is possible to cross the road – they, for me, showed that God is there. For me, no bright light; no voices from heaven. Like St Paul, I haven’t been fortunate enough actually to be around with Jesus and his first disciples. But just as surely, I felt the presence of God. I’m sure we all can, too.

Tags Balliol, Beveridge Report, christianity and social order, Churches Together, Edward Caird, hoodie, Ευδαιμονία, Jean Vanier, john sentamu, John Wesley, L'Arche, national debt, nhs, NOOMA, RH Tawney, Road to Damascus, Rob Bell, St Paul, Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, welfare state, William Temple

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Melchisedec

By publicsquare

January 18, 2015 //

Sermon for Evensong on the Second Sunday after Epiphany, at the Beginning of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, 18th January 2015
Hebrews 6:17-7:10

‘Jesus, made an high priest for ever, after the order of Melchisedec’ (Hebrews 6:20). I don’t know whether you were letting things just flow over you during the New Testament lesson from the Letter to the Hebrews, or whether you followed in detail its rather technical description of what the ‘priesthood of Melchisedec’ was all about. It does seem rather complicated.

In the Old Testament, the order of priests were the sons of Levi, the Levites, and Melchisedec was a king who met and blessed Abraham in Genesis [Gen.14:18f], to whom Abraham gave a tenth of his wealth as a tithe. In Psalm 110 – ‘The Lord said to my lord – Dixit dominus, ‘The Lord said unto my lord: sit thou on my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool …’ at line 4, ‘The Lord sware, and will not repent: thou art a priest for ever, after the order of Melchisedech’. [Book of Common Prayer 1662, The Psalms: also quoted in Hebrews 7:21]

The author of the Letter to the Hebrews (probably not Paul the Apostle, but perhaps somebody writing in a similar style), addressing a Jewish audience, was introducing another dimension to the greatness of Jesus Christ: that He was a great ‘high priest’.

The High Priest, in Jewish tradition, was the only priest allowed to go into the inner part of the Temple, behind the curtain – and that only once a year, on the Day of Atonement; but somehow Melchisedec was an even greater high priest. As it says, he had no father, no mother, no beginning and no end, so he was ‘made like unto the Son of God, an eternal priest’ (Hebrews 7:3). Perhaps effectively the idea was that Melchisedec and Jesus were in some sense the same.

But as I said, I slightly suspect – and I certainly wouldn’t take you to task if you have – I slightly suspect that you may have been letting some of this rather recondite technical Jewish religious stuff flow over your head, somewhat unexamined. It does seem a world away from our experience today. I don’t think, for example, that it’s really adequate to talk about ‘priesthood’ in this context as though being a priest – like a Levite, or of the Order of Melchisedech, or whatever, was no more than just a synonym for being a vicar today.

The ‘priestly work’ in those days – look a little further on in Hebrews, in Chapter 9 – you’ll see – was largely to make sacrifices, blood sacrifices, slaughtering oxen and sheep and goats, offering them to God on the altar. Another thing that a priest of the Order of Melchisedech could do was to make intercession. In Chapter 7 verse 25, ‘He is able for all time to save those who approach God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them’.

This is quite topical at the beginning of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, which today is. This week we are aiming to make friendly noises to our fellow Christians in the other denominations, and we will all share together in a joint service, to take place, instead of Evensong, next Sunday at St Andrew’s. If you remember, last year we welcomed everybody here at St Mary’s, and we had a nice Evensong, to show how we worship here.

Be that as it may, it does prompt me to suggest that we take a few minutes just to think about the whole topic of worship: how we approach God in prayer and praise, and in sacrament. As soon as we start talking about Jesus being a priest of the Order of Melchisedech, there are a number of issues which come up which, depending on the answers you come to, will tend to determine which denomination, which way of following Christ, you belong to.

I know that most of us go to the church denomination that we were brought up in; but I’m sure that there are moments when we look over our shoulders at other churches to see whether we are more in tune, with the way they worship and with what they believe, than we are with what’s familiar to us.

So, worship. What is going on?

‘Gracious God, to thee we raise
This our sacrifice of praise’. [F.S. Pierpoint, 1835-1917]

No burnt offerings. No dead sheep or goats, or oxen – thank goodness. If there is a sacrifice involved in our worship today, it’s a symbolic sacrifice, giving up, giving out our praise: singing hymns and making prayers and supplications.

Some of us rather like it to be done for us; for the office to be said, for the service to be done, in a decent and dignified manner by a professional. Get in an expert rather than trying to do it yourself.

So the traditional Roman Catholic way of doing things resulted, for example, in mass being said in Latin, although the majority of people present didn’t understand a word of it: but it didn’t matter to them, because they felt that the sacrifice of praise was being done appropriately and correctly. They were there simply to take part by witnessing the worship being made on their behalf by the priest.

You had people endowing chancels in which they would pay for masses to be said for their souls after they had died. It didn’t matter that they weren’t there any more, at least physically, but they felt that nevertheless it would help them to get through Purgatory to the pearly gates if there was somebody down here still praying for them.

Then along came Martin Luther and his various Reformation colleagues, Calvin and Zwingli and Co, and they brought in the Protestant idea of a ‘priesthood of all believers’, from 1 Peter 2:9, ‘… you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, that you may declare the wonderful deeds of him who called you out of darkness into his marvellous light ‘.

Martin Luther said that all Christians ‘truly belong to the spiritual estate, and there is no difference among them apart from their office’ – in German, Das Ampt, their job. ‘… We all have one baptism, one gospel, one faith, and are all alike Christians, in that it is baptism, gospel and faith which alone make us spiritual and a Christian people… We are all consecrated priests through baptism ‘. [Martin Luther, 1520, Appeal to the Nobility of the German Nation, quoted in McGrath, A.E., 2007, The Christian Theology Reader, Oxford, Blackwell, pp 505-6]

Martin Luther considered bishops and priests simply to be office-holders in the church, doing a functional job. When they retired, priests would go back to being ordinary Christians like anybody else. There wasn’t anything essentially different, spiritually different, between office-holders like ministers or bishops and their congregations as laymen.

Today if you are a Baptist or are in the United Reformed Church, that idea of the priesthood of all believers is still very strongly held. They do have ministers who wear dog-collars, but there is no concept of those ministers having a tradition of ordination handed down from St Peter, down through the ages in a continuous chain, if you like, in the same way that the Roman Catholics, and to some extent the Anglicans, do.

The Methodists are similar to the Anglicans. If you are in America you will find Methodist bishops; but you won’t find bishops in the British Methodist church – yet. The Methodist ‘chairmen of the district’ here are exactly the same, functionally, as bishops in the Church of England. On that basis, Revd Ian Howarth, the previous Methodist minister in Cobham, is now the Methodist bishop of Birmingham, which is a rather neat swap, as the Anglican Diocese of Birmingham is sending its suffragan bishop, the Bishop of Aston, Andrew Watson, to be Bishop of Guildford. That is one division in the church, between Anglicans and Methodists, where I do think we will eventually come together again. I hope and pray that we will.

Among the ‘comfortable words’ that we hear in our Holy Communion service, there are these lovely words,

‘Hear also what St John saith. If any man sin, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous: and he is the propitiation for our sins’ (1 John 2:1). The idea is that, whereas the priests of Levi made sacrifices, slaughtered animals and made burnt offerings, so that God was given presents, valuable presents, in order to keep him sweet, now the priest of the Order of Melchisedech has been himself the sacrifice.

God has given His only Son Jesus, who in his death was in fact a sacrifice for us, for our sins. In the Prayer of Consecration we pray to God, ‘who didst give thy 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 concept looks similar to the original burnt offerings. Jesus gave Himself. He was punished in our place. In some sense that substitutionary sacrifice was an atoning sacrifice; it made up for our badness, our sins.

I personally don’t think that squares with the idea of a loving God. I don’t think that God is actually a wrathful God who needs to be bought off with sacrifices. I think that we have moved on and our understanding has deepened: that Jesus in some sense was the last sacrifice.

But He rose again. He wasn’t burned up. God showed that He wasn’t a vengeful God, but that He cares for us. He raised Jesus from the dead.
Well, saying that puts me into certain categories as a Christian. Not all will agree with me. There are Christians who still believe passionately in the idea of an ‘atoning sacrifice’, but still they believe, as I do, that the important thing about Christianity is for us to try to follow Jesus more nearly every day, and in particular to follow his commandment of love: because we love Him, because we love God, we should also love our neighbours as ourselves.

There’s more we agree upon than disagree about, I’m sure. So as we meet our fellow Christians this week, let us be joyful and celebrate the different ways in which we all approach the throne of grace.

Tags abraham, Book of Common Prayer, Calvin, day of atonement, Evensong, Hebrews, Levites, Martin Luther, Melchisedec, priesthood, propitiation, Psalm 110, Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, Zwingli

Categories Uncategorized

Je suis Charlie

By publicsquare

January 11, 2015 //

Sermon for Evensong on the First Sunday after The Epiphany, 11th January 2015
Isaiah 42:1-9, Ephesians 2:1-10

‘Time was when you were dead in your sins and wickedness, when you followed the evil ways of this present age, … We too were of their number: we all lived our lives in sensuality, and obeyed the promptings of our own instincts and notions.’ [Eph. 2:1-4, in the New English Bible]

The people of Ephesus were, before they discovered Christ, debauched and decadent. There’s something in this passage, in St Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, which is rather reminiscent of things that I have read and heard in connection with Moslem fundamentalists, in places like Bradford, parts of Birmingham or even nearer to home, from where young people are going to join Islamic State – or whatever it’s now called – in Iraq.

The Western world, according to their lights, is supposed to be decadent and depraved, godless; whereas they learn, in their madrasahs, that if they follow the prophet Mohamed, this will be the real thing, the true path to salvation, to God. In St Paul’s time, decadent Ephesians became decent Christians through faith. Today, wide boys from Halifax, through their faith, can become martyrs, according to the ISIL propaganda.

This is a terrible week to have to think seriously about the various challenges to Christianity and our Western way of life, from the various Muslim fundamentalist groups, in particular, Islamic State, and from the various groups which claim to subscribe to Al Qaeda.

The events in Paris and Northern France have been truly shocking, and they come on top of extraordinary brutality and cruelty shown by the ISIL terrorists in beheading people that they have kidnapped, and in forcing people to do things for them on pain of death. We must not forget the terrible atrocities of Boko Haram in Nigeria as well.

St Paul’s great message was that the gospel of Jesus was a gospel for the Gentiles just as much as it was for the Jews. There are these slightly recondite discussions in his letters about whether it’s necessary to be circumcised or not, and what the status of the Jewish Law is: must you, in effect, become a Jew before you can become a Christian?

It was, if you like, a very early example of inter-faith dialogue. True, St Paul was actually trying to proselytise, was trying to convert people, which is something which is not supposed to happen in inter-faith communications today. Rev Richard Cook, the recently retired vicar of Goldsworth Park in Woking, who was very much the Diocese’s expert on Islam, and is a good friend of the imam of the Shah Jahan Mosque in Woking, which I believe is supposed to be the oldest mosque in this country, used to say that, whenever he met his friend the imam, for a cup of tea or something, the first thing that the imam always said, after he had inquired after his health, was whether Richard was ready to convert to Islam or not.

He didn’t get too upset when Richard politely declined. Trying to persuade each other of the relative merits of their particular understanding of God is something that happens all the time. We can still talk to people of a different religion, exchange ideas with them, try to understand their position better, even if they are at the same time trying to convert us.

This civilised dialogue is a world away from the murders at Charlie Hebdo. The terrorists’ assault, which some of our newspapers characterised as ‘an assault on free speech’, an ‘assault on democracy’, was indeed an assault on the way of life of a civilised country.

The hallmark of free speech is said to be that, even though I disagree with what you say, I would defend to the last your right to say it, your freedom of speech. Equally, as a consequence of our all being God’s creatures – or just our all being human – as a matter of human rights – we are democrats: we have the right to choose our own government, by majority voting. To the extent that our voices are silenced, by people like the terrorists who attacked Charlie Hebdo, it is an assault on democracy.

But amid this outpouring of grief and solidarity, solidarity with the journalists at Charlie Hebdo and with all journalists, who not unnaturally feel that this has been an attack on them all collectively, alongside all that, there have, perhaps unfortunately, been some notes of discord.

Earlier in the week, in his LBC radio phone-in programme, Nick Clegg encountered a questioner called Omar, who asked him whether he didn’t agree that the journalists at Charlie Hebdo had in fact brought their demise on to themselves, by their blasphemy. Nick Clegg was very angry on air, and insisted that the attack on Charlie Hebdo could not be defended under any circumstances or on any grounds.

But it was plain that the questioner, Omar, either didn’t understand what he was saying or, certainly, didn’t agree with it. And there was a piece on Radio Four involving some vox pop interviews with people in Bradford. They were British; they had Yorkshire accents, and were probably second or even third generation since their ancestors came over from the Indian subcontinent. Nevertheless they also commonly came up with the view that the Charlie Hebdo attack was brought on by the journalists themselves, by their blasphemous publications.

There was no concept, in these people on Radio Four or in Omar on LBC, that somehow the principles of human rights, of free speech, of democracy, could trump the seriousness of any alleged blasphemy. We say that the merits of democracy, of free speech, are self-evident: we all live by them. Anyone trying to contradict the principles of free speech or democracy is, in effect, attacking our society.

At which point I ask myself where we get our sense of human rights, of free speech, free will, of democracy, from. Because it seems to me that in fact they are not simply true or desirable in themselves. It’s not necessarily true that, because you’re a human being, you will automatically agree that democracy is a good thing, or that free speech is a good thing. Omar and Co are evidence of that.

There are many nations in the world today where democracy, the rule of the people, is subservient to the idea of theocracy, rule by God or by God’s representatives, by mullahs for example. It’s not the case that everyone, simply by virtue of being human, will assent to the proposition that democracy is pre-eminently a good thing, or that free speech is a good thing.

Even we to some extent accept restrictions on free speech – sometimes for commonsense reasons, so you are not allowed to shout ‘Fire!’ in a cinema – but also, ironically, for the purpose of collective security, in order to prevent the attacks on our way of life which terrorists have made and have threatened in future. We accept limited restrictions on free speech in order to preserve the right to free speech in general.

We justify the idea of free speech, the idea of human rights and so on, I think, not on the basis that they are self-evident truths, but rather ultimately because of our Christian belief. We believe that God made us equal in His sight, and that He gave us the freedom to choose good or evil. Muslims also believe in God, and possibly, in the same God. But they believe that free speech doesn’t come into it. If you blaspheme, according to them, you forfeit your right to life.

So we are in disagreement with Muslims, disagreement over something very important, about how God works. Although I would stress that this is not an argument for anti-Semitism, one could draw a parallel with the disagreements between the Jews and the Christians in the time of Jesus. The Jews and the early Christians were in disagreement. Jesus was a threat. He challenged the orthodoxy of the Pharisees and the scribes, their cherished beliefs. They dealt with the problem by killing Him.

In an evil way, the terrorists in Paris may also have felt that they were somehow solving the disagreement that they felt, between their own vision of the good life and what they perceived to be the contradiction to it in decadent Westernism, by killing what they saw as a major source of the decadence and blasphemy which they so disagreed with. That is not in any way to excuse the evil of what they did, but it might explain it.

What is our way of dealing with people we fundamentally disagree with? In so many cases, unfortunately, as a matter of history, it has involved warfare. If as a country we can’t agree with someone, or we feel that their view needs to be overturned, there is, always not very far from the surface, a resort to warfare.

We disagree with the Syrians. We are at war with them. But I do feel that we are not likely to change their minds by bombing them. I feel that instead, the solution to all this trouble must lie in the development of mutual understanding.

But, as St Paul has pointed out here, there is a limit to what we can do; there is a limit to how we can bring about the Kingdom. Everything depends on our believing and trusting in God, and in God responding with His bountiful grace. Are we prepared to risk that, or are we going to carry on as though we had never heard the Gospel message, of peace and forgiveness? Peace and forgiveness leads to repentance and reconciliation.

I pray that, as we defend our way of life, our gifts of free speech and democracy, we will remember how our prophet, the prophet Isaiah, foretold the coming of God’s kingdom, and how gentle our Messiah is to be.

Here is my servant, whom I uphold,
my chosen, in whom my soul delights;
I have put my spirit upon him;
he will bring forth justice to the nations.
He will not cry or lift up his voice,
or make it heard in the street;
a bruised reed he will not break,
and a dimly burning wick he will not quench;
he will faithfully bring forth justice.
He will not grow faint or be crushed
until he has established justice in the earth;
and the coastlands wait for his teaching. [Is. 42:1-4].

Tags Al Qaeda, Charlie Hebdo, Ephesians, free speech, imam, inter-faith dialogue, Isaiah, ISIL, islam, Islamic State, Je suis Charlie, jesus christ, prophet, Rev Richard Cook, St Paul

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An Open Letter to Catherine Bearder MEP

By publicsquare

December 31, 2014 //

Dear Mrs Bearder

Thank you for your recent ‘Update’. You mention the importance of a pro-European voice in the next election – and I passionately agree with you.

The problem, so far as the LibDems are concerned, is that you have lost the electors’ trust – and there appears to be no recognition of this by the LibDem leadership.

I was a member of the Liberals and LibDems for over 40 years. I resigned my membership because the leadership of the party seems to have decided that the ‘coalition agreement’ with the Conservatives – for which there was no democratic mandate – somehow allowed them to ditch policies – such as on university tuition fees, and on the need for extreme ‘austerity’ – which were manifesto pledges.

It just is not good enough to say that the LibDems have prevented some of the worst excesses of their Tory partners. It should have been recognised at the start that manifesto commitments could not be contradicted in government: the coalition partners should have agreed to disagree on those matters, so that no action on them would have been taken.

Why would anyone vote for any manifesto which the Party may adopt for 2015? What guarantee will there be that its policies will not again be discarded? At the very least, the Party should acknowledge publicly its great breach of trust with those who voted for it in 2010, and make a specific promise never to do this again. Otherwise, there will be no reason at all to trust the Party with one’s vote in the election.

I have written to Nick Clegg and to Sir Menzies Campbell to make this point, but my messages were not even acknowledged.

It will be a loss to this country if the LibDems’ voice on Europe is lost – but that is entirely foreseeable, for the reasons I have mentioned above. Are you and your colleagues going to do anything about it?

Best regards

Hugh Bryant

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Little Children

By publicsquare

December 28, 2014 //

Sermon for Evensong on the Innocents’ Day, 28th December 2014
Isaiah 49:14-25, Psalm 128, Mark 10:13-16

On Thursday, Christmas Day, we celebrated the baby Jesus, the happy event, the most important baby ever. Tonight we are continuing to think about children, children in the Kingdom of God. This morning we have marked a complete reverse: the terrible story of the Massacre of the Innocents by King Herod the Great (Matt.2:13-18). Tonight our spirits can rise again as we remember how Jesus welcomed the little children. He said, ‘Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God.’

When I was in Toronto a couple of years ago to visit my daughter Emma while she was completing her undergraduate medical studies at the Hospital for Sick Children there, we visited the Art Gallery of Ontario, and saw among other things, Rubens’ picture called ‘The Massacre of the Innocents’.

I can’t say you should rush off and look it up on Google. Although it’s a ‘great painting’, in the sense that the figures in it are beautifully drawn and coloured – the light is wonderfully captured, and the brutal Roman soldiers are terrifyingly strong and violent – it really isn’t something that I want to look at much, because all that vigour and strength is being used to tear little children from their mothers, then batter and stab them to death.

The same goes for Giotto’s painting of the same topic which you’ll find in the lower basilica at Assisi. Those are the two great masters’ versions which I have seen – there are also pictures of the Massacre of the Innocents by Lucas Cranach, Cornelis Van Haarlem, Guido Reni, Bruegel, and Nicolas Poussin. They’re all beautiful, until you realise what’s going on in them.

Herod the Great, who perpetrated the awful crime, was a client ruler, a king appointed by the Roman Senate to rule over the Jews. He was called ‘King of the Jews’, although he wasn’t an ethnic Jew – he was from Idumea, the land of Edom in the Old Testament. His mother was an Arabian princess. He had her, his mother, together with his first wife, and his three sons, all killed. The emperor Augustus was reported by the Jewish historian Josephus as having said that it was safer to be Herod’s pig than to be his son.

Some eminent scholars, for example Geza Vermes and E.P. Sanders, consider that it’s possible that the massacre of the innocents may not really have happened. It’s not mentioned in any other gospel apart from St Matthew. Josephus the historian doesn’t mention it in his history, his ‘Antiquities of the Jews’, written about 94AD. That could be because the number of 2 year-old boys in Bethlehem wasn’t very great – perhaps twenty or so only – and therefore, although dreadful, it wasn’t a big enough massacre to be considered worthy of mention; although later Christian tradition in the Byzantine, Syrian and Coptic churches puts the number of innocents at much higher numbers, in thousands.

Scholars have pointed out that perhaps the story is based on Herod’s appalling murder of his family, and on the gospel writer Matthew wanting to show how Jesus fulfilled the Old Testament – Joseph and Mary’s flight into Egypt with the baby Jesus, to avoid Herod’s persecution, reflects the story of the birth of Moses in the Book of Exodus, Pharaoh’s killing of the firstborn of the Jews, and the prophecies, of Hosea (referring to the exodus from Egypt) and of Jeremiah, referring to the Jews’ exile in Babylon.

Whether the Massacre of the Innocents really did take place or not, it is a type of story which, unfortunately, is not unique in history. The idea of decimation (which literally means choosing one in ten), randomly selecting innocent people to be killed ‘pour encourager les autres’, (to encourage the others), is something which despotic rulers have done all down the ages. Usually it is because they are afraid, they are insecure.

Certainly Herod was insecure. The Sanhedrin, the Council of the Jews, had suggested that he wasn’t a proper Jew, and therefore not entitled to be king. So Herod had some of them killed as well. Now the wise men had told him that they were looking for a child, a child who had been born ‘king of the Jews’: Herod’s normal response would have been, on past form, to seek to eliminate the challenge by killing the challenger, who could have been any one of those Bethlehem two-year-olds.

There was, of course, no real logic in this. At Christmas we saw that this ‘king of the Jews’, Jesus, was a baby, just a teeny little baby, and the whole point about that was, is, that this king-baby was not mighty, not powerful in a conventional way. In Jesus’ world, the last shall be first, and the first last. Children are welcome.

Why then should Herod have been so afraid of this baby? I think you could ask the same question in parallel, about all those cases where Christians, not just Christ Himself, have been – and are – targeted by persecuting authorities.

Indeed I think you can understand the evil logic of many persecutions of Christians even today, in terms of power, or a perceived challenge to power. The government objection to Roman Catholicism in the time of Henry VIII was not particularly theological: it was all about the idea that Catholics owed their allegiance to the Pope rather than to Henry VIII. In the time of the early church, the Roman Emperor Diocletian demanded that all his subjects should acknowledge him to be a god, and worship him accordingly. The Christians very bravely refused, and were fed to the lions.

Now in many places in the Middle East – indeed most sadly, in some of the earliest Christian communities, such as Mosul in Iraq – Christians are being persecuted again for their belief. Canon Andrew White, the Anglican Vicar of Baghdad, has been ordered out of the city, because there is such a powerful threat to his life, and it is probably not a good use of church funds to pay for a private army to protect him.

But what is it, what is it about these helpless, innocent, babies, that makes them such a threat in the world? In the mind of a man like Herod, there was a fear that one of the innocents would grow up to challenge him as king. But what about the poor Christians in the Middle East today, who might as well be innocent children for all the power they have?

The thing about the baby, the baby Jesus, is that we believe that He is God, God in human form. That is what is so threatening to people outside, people who don’t believe in him. They fear that He may show them up, expose their power and authority as based on nothing. They know that Jesus is said to be the Real Thing, and they have a little private nightmare – what if it’s true? Best to eliminate the possible source of embarrassment, they think.

‘Can it be true?’ is the title of a new carol, written by Susan Hill [http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/radio3/carolcompetition/carol_competition_can_it_be_true.pdf], with music by Jacqueline Burley, which has just won a competition to find the best new carol, organised by BBC Radio 3 [http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio3/carolcomp/carolcomp_20141216-0856b.mp3]. It’s good – I hope that Robert and the choir get it up for us here as an anthem, at least in time for next Christmas. But what seditious words they are. What if? Can it be true?

What if the other half, the other dimension, to the Christmas story, the God bit – not just the baby bit – what if it were true? Then indeed none of these oppressors, with their gunpoint demands, would have a leg to stand on. Their God may be – quote/unquote – the ‘one true God’ – but they are wrong in saying that Jesus was just a prophet, and nothing more. Of course they want to resist such a thing.

But it may be difficult to understand what the ‘God bit’ is. We know what a human being, what a baby, is. But the idea of God is so big that we find it difficult to understand.

I believe that whatever and wherever God is – and I don’t think He’s a nice old bloke with a white beard sitting on a throne above the clouds – there is a real sense that He is in all of us.

So if we pray to God to ask for wrong to be righted, for peace to break out, for healing to come: actually we have the means, we have the power, the skills, to do all those things already. We are praying for God to come in the Holy Spirit to inspire us, to call out those gifts which we already have.

That, I think, is why the Innocents are still relevant to us today, and why Jesus welcomed the children. Innocent children: they had no political stance, they had no weapons: but they were important – even dangerous – all the same. And they were members of God’s Kingdom – ‘of such is the Kingdom of God’.

And that’s true of Canon Andrew White and his congregation in Baghdad, and the little bands of Christians trying to survive all over the Middle East. It’s not what they do, what their military capacity is: it’s what they are. The oppressors can see the threat. The ISIS, the Taliban, can guess the power of ‘Can it be true?’ Those modern innocents are not just innocent Christians. They have God in them.

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Could you eat a whole one?

By publicsquare

December 25, 2014 //

Sermon for Christmas Day 2014 at St Andrew’s, Cobham
Isaiah 9:2-7, Titus 2:11-14, Luke 2:1-14

Happy Christmas! This is a special time, a time to celebrate. I’m not going to give you a hard time about being too preoccupied with presents and shopping, the razzmatazz of Christmas: I’m sure that a little of what you fancy does you good – provided you don’t spend more than you can really afford, as the Archbishop of York pointed out on the Andrew Marr show last week.

No, what I want to talk about is the baby Jesus. ‘Unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder’. That looks almost like a contradiction. On the one hand, he is a baby: the most vulnerable, the least powerful form of humanity. On the other, he is a king – ‘the government shall be upon his shoulder’.

Is the prophet Isaiah imagining a figure like Edward VI, a boy king? Jesus never became a king, even in that sense. There was only the ironic inscription on his cross, ‘This is Jesus, the king of the Jews’ [Matt. 27:37 and in all the other gospels]. There are scholars who have claimed that he was some kind of rebel leader, a Zealot, and certainly one way of understanding Jesus’ passion and death is that he was seen by the establishment, both in the Jewish client administration and in their Roman overlords, as being a potential troublemaker, almost a terrorist.

But really there’s no tradition, in the Bible or since, that Jesus was a powerful, secular leader. He wasn’t a general, he wasn’t a king in the tradition of the Jewish kings. Isaiah’s prophecy, ‘Of the increase of his government and peace there shall be no end, upon the throne of David, and upon his kingdom, to order it and establish it with judgement and with justice… ‘, certainly doesn’t square with the circumstances of Jesus’ birth, life and death.

So much of what we learn from Jesus goes against the exercise of power. ‘The first shall be last, and the last shall be first’. ‘Love your enemies,’ and so on. But nevertheless, even though He didn’t throw His weight around or behave like a mighty warrior, He was the Son of God. How to show this: quite apart from the miracles in Jesus’ life – the virgin birth, His resurrection from the dead – another miracle is that Jesus hasn’t gone away.

Christianity is still huge; still the biggest religion, with the greatest number of believers worldwide, 2,000 years on. Apparently 3 million people in this country will go to their local parish church this Christmas – and then there are the Catholics, Methodists, Baptists, URCs and all the other denominations. I can’t think offhand of anything else which happened 2,000 years ago which still has the power to draw people out in such enormous numbers all round the world in celebration, in the same way as Christianity celebrates the birth of Christ.

Something clearly is going on. Arguably something more than we can hope to understand or explain. Any kind of collective hysteria or craze would have played itself out within a few years. This is God at work. We are celebrating the birth of the Son of God. Someone who was at the same time a man, human, and also divine: ‘Begotten, not created’.

We can understand what it is to be human – we understand babies. We like babies. A rather awful maiden aunt of mine once said, ‘I love babies – but I couldn’t eat a whole one!’ No, seriously. We know what a human being is.

But what is it to be God? I think if we think about it, we know more about what God does than about what God is. God is the ultimate creator, the creator of everything from nothing. We infer from that that God is all-powerful and all-knowing – omnipotent and omniscient.

So far, so good. But then if we try to work out what God is like, what God is, it’s much more difficult. Obviously as a result of the word-pictures in the Book of Revelation, and indeed as a result of the various pre-Christian myths – the Greek myths, the gods on Mount Olympus for example – the idea of God or gods, as supernatural beings living above the clouds or on the top of a very high mountain, was very commonly held. There is a lot of imagery in the Bible about God in heaven. We talk about our ‘Heavenly Father’.

So there is this picture of a benign old man with a great white beard in a golden throne room above the clouds. But of course, as our understanding has deepened – and certainly after man conquered space, and didn’t bump into God – there has come a realisation that God is not a benign old man with a white beard, sitting on top of the clouds. Indeed if he were located in time and space in that way, that would not square with his being the ultimate creator, omniscient and omnipotent, outside the laws of physics.

That’s where ‘In the beginning was the word’, gives an insight. ‘In the beginning was the word’ is a pretty clever way of talking about a pure principle, an essence of creation. No good to talk about a first man, or a supernatural man, some kind of superhero who started everything off – because then there is the question who started him off.

So it’s easier to identity what God does than what God is. Manifesting Himself as a baby meant that God rejected the idea that He was going to be a powerful general or a warlike king. Instead Jesus stood the concept of being God on its head. St Paul described him as having ’emptied himself’, emptied himself of all the trappings of His being the Son of God, and becoming instead a servant – the ‘Servant King’ as the hymn puts it. [Phil. 2:7]

How does this all work? It’s all very well us talking about the nature of God, but how does it affect our lives in practice? If we still have the idea that God is ‘deus ex machina’, a sort of Tardis which comes to the rescue of Dr Who when he’s in a sticky spot, then I think we’re always going to be disappointed.

If we pray to God simply that He will favour us, that He will fix everything for us, then clearly that won’t always work. Both the armies in the First World War were praying to the same God, and making the same prayer. As a matter of logic, one of them was going to be disappointed.

I think there’s a danger that, if one continues along those lines, one’ll end up disappointed and disillusioned. It’s noticeable that, at the end of the First World War, there was a rise in atheism. How could God allow the dreadful things which happened? Didn’t He listen to all those prayers? But the first chapter of St John’s Gospel gives us a clue. ‘In the beginning was the word’ – and that’s not a man with a white beard above the clouds.

When I was preparing the prayers for the Nine Lessons and Carols at St Mary’s in Stoke D’Abernon the other day, I started off by writing prayers for peace, for all those people who are unwell or in difficulty, who are suffering hunger, being refugees or homeless. In that first draft of the prayers, I was calling on God to fix things. I didn’t know how He was going to fix things, but I was sure that He had a way of doing it.

Then I thought about it: I thought about the baby. How could a baby leap in and tackle all those intractable problems? I changed my prayers. Instead of asking God to do things, I asked Him to help us to do what was necessary. We have the wealth to feed the hungry; we have the medical skill to heal the sick; we have spare rooms and spare houses to shelter the homeless.

All we need is the Holy Spirit to come and inspire us, to fill us with God’s love. ‘Come, Holy Ghost, our souls inspire’; ‘Make me a channel of your peace’. ‘God be in my head’. St Paul talked about being ‘in Christ’ – meaning, having Christ in you.

I wish you a very happy Christmas, with lots to eat: but I want you to have some Jesus in there too. Remember my maiden aunt. Love that baby – could you – at least in a Eucharistic way – eat a whole one? Draw near with faith!

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Butter and Honey

By publicsquare

December 21, 2014 //

Sermon for Mattins on the Fourth Sunday of Advent, 21st December 2014, at St Mary the Virgin, Stoke D’Abernon
Romans 1:1-7. Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle,… To all that be in Rome, beloved of God, called to be saints …

Sixty years after Jesus’ death and resurrection, St Paul is writing to the Romans, giving them his version of the Gospel: ‘… the gospel of God, … Concerning his Son Jesus Christ our Lord’.

We know that there was a strong Christian community in Rome, which itself was a massive city, over a million people even 2,000 years ago, which had become the centre of the ancient world. In 64AD, the emperor Nero blamed the Christians for the great fire which took place in that year in Rome. It’s in the Roman historian Tacitus, in his Annals, 15.44.2.

The Christians in Rome, by definition, knew the gospel – otherwise they wouldn’t have been Christians. Paul goes on, in his letter to the Romans, to set out most of his understanding of Christianity: he deals principally with what he calls ‘righteousness’: whether the Jews, as the chosen people of God, are righteous, and the Gentiles are not; how God has righteously dealt with Israel, and how righteousness shows itself in the lives of true believers.

‘Righteousness’ may not be an adequate word for what St Paul is talking about; the opposite of righteousness, sin, is being separated from God, being forsaken by God. To be righteous is to be in tune with God.

St Paul distinguishes between Jesus as a man, and Jesus as the Son of God. Divine Jesus is ‘a spiritual being, transcendent, something altogether greater than a human being’. He says that the evidence for that, the sign by which one recognises Jesus’ divinity, is the fact that he was raised from the dead.

But that’s really the Easter message; now at Christmas, we are just about to embark on the Christmas story: God with us, Immanuel. ‘Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us.’ That’s what St Matthew says in his gospel: it refers back to our first lesson, the passage from the prophet Isaiah, ch. 7, which says, ‘The LORD himself will give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.’

That sign, Isaiah’s sign, was given not about a messiah, but in the context of Jerusalem being threatened by two warlike kings: King Rezin of Syria and King Pekah of Israel. A saviour, a great leader, will come to protect Jerusalem.Six hundred years later, St Paul pointed out that the gospel, the ‘good news’ of Jesus Christ, was forecast in the Jewish holy scripture, the Old Testament: he wrote about ‘The gospel of God, .. Which he had promised afore by his prophets in the holy scriptures’.

So what Isaiah prophesied, as a sign given to the people of Judah, of Jerusalem, to indicate that their God was with them, and that the two kings threatening them would come to a sticky end, was reinterpreted by St Paul, and the early Christians. It moved on to being taken as a sign, a prophecy, of the Messiah, the Son of God. St Matthew also, in his gospel, linked Isaiah’s prophecy with Jesus.

In the letter to the Romans you have a skeleton outline of Christianity, from the earliest prophecies in Isaiah to Jesus’ death and resurrection, as recounted by St Paul.

I wonder what it would look like, if St Paul was writing today, writing a letter setting out the gospel to the saints in Stoke D’Abernon.

We here today are not particularly concerned about some of St Paul’s themes. Whether you need to be Jewish, to be circumcised and so on, in order to be saved; it doesn’t really bother us.

But some things that Paul was writing about to the Romans are still relevant to our lives today. Righteousness, justification, being all right with God, is still a big thing – not being separated from God, not being cast out into the outer darkness. To be saved from that terrible fate, St Paul emphasises the need to believe and trust in Jesus.

St Paul preaches justification by faith; not by good works. Believe first, then do good. He says that, if you truly believe, then that will change your life. You will do good things: good deeds will come naturally.

But the story in Isaiah has a bit of it which St Paul didn’t refer to, which raises another question which is also relevant today. Isaiah says that Immanuel, the virgin’s son, will eat ‘butter and honey …., that he may know to refuse the evil, and choose the good.’ (Is. 7:15)

Does this mean that butter and honey have special properties which enhance one’s ethical sensibilities? Before considering that, we should note that this passage gets translated differently in different Bibles. If we had been using the New Revised Standard Bible (Anglicised edition), which we use at other services here, the passage says, ‘He shall eat curds and honey by the time he knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good.’ The New English Bible says, ‘By the time that he has learned to reject evil and choose good, he will be eating curds and honey.’

So God-with-us, Immanuel, will get to know the difference between good and evil, but probably not as a result of eating butter and honey, or curds and honey, if you like. I prefer to think that it’s butter. I’ve always thought that Little Miss Muffet, sitting on a tuffet, eating her curds and whey, was, at least so far as her diet was concerned, a particularly disgusting vision – but I know that many people do like those sort of puddings. For my taste, butter and honey is just a step away from the land of ‘milk and honey’; and when I was little, ‘milk and honey’ was the name of a very nice biscuit.

Is it the idea that the boy will get to an age when he can recognise certain luxury food as being particularly good? Or is it just a rite of passage, that he will graduate to eating these luxury foods, at the same time as he learns to distinguish between good and evil?

But just a minute – Immanuel is God-with-us. God. It seems a bit odd that God should grow into knowing how to distinguish good and evil. Surely God would know good and evil right from the start, wouldn’t he?

This is an important question for us even today. This is, I would suggest, one of the things that St Paul would be writing to us about, if he was writing to the saints at Stoke D’Abernon. Think of the very sad – and very shocking – story of the US Senate report which has just come out, detailing the way in which numbers of people were tortured by the CIA; or, as they described it, were subject to ‘enhanced’ interrogation techniques.

Is it justifiable to torture somebody if, by so doing, you will elicit information from them which will save lives? Or is torture always wrong, by its very nature? Or are there circumstances where torture is, in fact, permissible? Are there circumstances where doing something wrong is preferable to not doing anything at all: because by doing something wrong you may avert some other, possibly greater, harm?

You would think that Immanuel, God-with-us, would always have known what was the right thing to do, because He is God. But there are philosophers and theologians, called deontologists, who argue that good and evil are, by their very nature, good and evil, and they don’t depend on being declared to be good and evil by God or by a prophet: that God, who knows everything, will recognise that good and evil are absolute concepts, not dependent on somebody’s interpretation.

What do you think Jesus would have done? The grown-up Jesus, able to distinguish between right and wrong, that is. It doesn’t look as though Jesus did in fact get involved in calculations of the relative merits of different courses of action. Think of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus’ radical interpretation of the 10 Commandments. In Matthew 5:[43-44]:

‘Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy.
But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.’

Jesus never says that it is OK to do harm, if to do so would prevent a greater mischief.

So I think that, if St Paul were writing to the Saints at Stoke D’Abernon, he would be reminding them of what Jesus said about right and wrong. As we go into the happy times of Christmas week, think about all the terrible things that are going on in the world today – children killed in Pakistan and in Australia; the siege of the café in Sydney, with more people killed; people not having enough money to buy food and having to turn to food banks; all these things are subject to moral judgements.

The heart of the gospel message is God-With-Us, God in the form of a man, a baby in a manger. What difference that makes to us, how it affects our behaviour, our judgment of right and wrong, is the important question. That’s what St Paul would be writing about, to us, the saints at Stoke D’Abernon.

I do wish you a very happy Christmas – but I do urge you to reflect a little bit on what Jesus would say and do, if indeed he came and saw how we are today.

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Lo! he comes

By publicsquare

November 30, 2014 //

Sermon for the First Sunday in Advent, 30th November 2014, at St John’s Episcopal Church, West Hartford, Connecticut

Isaiah 64:1-9, Psalm 80, 1 Corinthians 1:3-9, Mark 13:24-37

Yesterday I asked your Rector and her Assistant, Hope and Bill, ‘Is today still part of the Thanksgiving season? Or is it the beginning of the run-up to Christmas – Advent?’ I needed a bit of technical advice – both on the Thanksgiving part, and of course also on the theological side.

As you will realise, I can claim to be at all qualified only about the theology. As a mere Englishman I don’t know enough about Thanksgiving – although, as this is my third Thanksgiving here in Hartford, I am getting the hang of it. It’s a lovely time. I have to tell you that at home in England, a supermarket chain, Waitrose, in their in-house newspaper, are claiming that 17% of Brits – yes, Brits – are now celebrating Thanksgiving – or at least having turkey dinners on Thanksgiving Day. Perhaps – and I hope this is not too cynical – this is some variation on the idea of turkeys voting for Christmas, but this time promoted by the farmers.

Hope preached a lovely sermon here on Thursday about remembering: looking back at the year and giving thanks for all the blessings we’ve received. At our Thanksgiving dinner, she went round the table and we all had to tell the others about something we wanted to give thanks for. Both the lovely thoughts the sermon brought out, and our stories round the table, were gentle and kind and good. Good memories, good feelings; real thanksgivings.

But now, as members of Christ’s church, we are called to be in a different mood. The secular world and the Christian one have different calendars here. If we’re not churchgoers, Christmas marks the end of the year, and Christmas, not Thanksgiving, leads to the new year.

But as Christians, Episcopalians, Anglicans, we mark the end of the church year and the beginning of the new one now, just after Thanksgiving, at the end of Ordinary Time, as it’s called in the Lectionary, at the beginning of Advent, today. This is the beginning of a new church year.

And Advent is a season not of unmixed jollification, but of penitence. As Isaiah says, we have rather forgotten God. ‘There is no one who calls on your name.’ We are caught up in Black Friday, and in ‘so-and-so many shopping days to Christmas’.

But if we change our point of view, and see things through the prism of our Christian faith, then Advent is the beginning of a new year, the time of anticipation, looking forward to the Christmas story, to the momentous events which show that God is with us. With Isaiah we say, ‘You are our Father, we are the clay, and you are the potter; we are all the work of your hand’. But God is not just the divine watchmaker, a creator who has simply wound up the mechanism, put it down and let it run, without any further interference. Instead God has become incarnate, become flesh and blood, become a man like us.

So in Advent we are waiting to celebrate the coming of Jesus, the coming of God as a man, that was His first coming. That is certainly something to look forward to, and surely it’s all right to be quite jolly about it. Of course the children – and maybe some of us grown-ups too – get pleasure out of thinking about the nice things they hope to get as presents. But for us the biggest present, the most generous gift, is the one from God, the gift of Jesus.

That should also make us pause and reflect. In the face of this, in the face of the fact that God didn’t just make the world and then ignore it, didn’t just leave it to get on by itself, we have to reflect on the fact that God knows about us, God cares about us. What do we look like to Him? What sort of shape are we in to meet God? That’s why Advent is a time for reflection, for penitence.

Just after my sermon we will say the Creed together. We will say, ‘He will come again’. Jesus will come again. We will pray in the Lord’s Prayer, ‘Thy kingdom come’. In both cases, we will imply that Jesus, and Jesus’ kingdom, haven’t come yet. The coming of the Kingdom, the Second Coming is still ahead.

Jesus talked about these things in his sermon which we heard in our Gospel reading today. ‘Lo! he comes, with clouds descending’ as Charles Wesley’s great hymn, which we just sang, puts it. The last trump, the Day of Judgment, the end of the world.

Now I suspect that for most of us that’s a vivid image, a powerful picture – but nothing really more than that. In any case Jesus must surely have been mistaken when He said, ‘Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place’: even if we don’t actually contradict that, or reject it, we are tempted not to try to understand it at all. It’s too far-fetched.

But Jesus clearly did want us to keep it at the front of our minds, not at the back. ‘Wachet auf! (‘Keep awake!’) as the music at the beginning and end of the service says. ‘Keep awake, the voice is calling’. There might even be a contradiction between Jesus’ first statement, that ‘this generation will not pass away’ until the end time has come, and His second statement that ‘about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.’

What would you do if you encountered the risen Jesus, now? To put it another way, are we right to keep all this talk of the Kingdom of God conveniently separated from our normal lives? Are we right to think of it as something that might happen in thousands of years, but definitely not something that will happen to us? Can we be absolutely sure about that?

Jesus definitely wanted to make us less certain. I would suggest that He wasn’t necessarily talking about a Second Coming which was all in the future. Remember the wonderful passage in St Matthew’s Gospel, chapter 25, when Jesus has come in his glory to judge the nations, dividing the sheep from the goats; and He says to the righteous people, the good sheep who are going to heaven, to eternal life, ‘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.’ They didn’t understand. ‘When did we do all this?’ they asked. ‘And the King shall answer and say unto them, “… Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”‘

How really important that is. It means that in one sense, the Second Coming, the Kingdom of God, has actually happened already. Jesus is with us. He is in everyone we meet. If you do it to someone else, you do it to Jesus. You may have difficulty believing in some kind of supernatural Flash Gordon riding on the clouds. But you’d be far less wise to rule out seeing the Holy Spirit in the people you meet.

So do keep awake. Look out for someone who is ‘an hungred’, hungry; someone who has no clothes; who is sick, or in prison. But I would dare to say, don’t worry about the four horsemen of the Apocalypse. No-one knows when they will be coming. Have a happy and blessed end to the Thanksgiving holiday, and I pray that this time of Advent will be for you a time of prayerful – and joyful – expectation.

Tags Advent, Anglicans, Black Friday, Charles Wesley, church, Creed, episcopalians, Hartford, Lord's Prayer, Matthew 25, Second Coming, Thanksgiving, turkeys, Waitrose

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Prince Charles, an Eagle and the King Eternal

By publicsquare

November 23, 2014 //

Sermon for Evensong on the 25th Sunday after Trinity, the Feast of
Christ the King
2 Samuel 23:1-7, Matt. 28:16-end

The other day in the Guardian there was an extended article, in a section which they now call ‘the long read’, about Prince Charles, and what sort of a king he would be when eventually he accedes to the throne. Apparently it’s not something he likes to talk about, because to do so would necessarily mean that he would have to be thinking about the death of his beloved mother, the Queen.

I think that’s rather endearing. I read the article with extra interest, knowing that I was going to be preaching tonight, on the Sunday when we celebrate Christ the King. It’s a relatively new festival in Christianity – it began in the Roman Catholic Church in 1925. Pope Pius XI instituted the Feast of Christ the King as a reaction against what he perceived as a rising tide of secularism. People had forgotten the importance of God.

Actually I preached only last week about the text from the Gospel according to St Matthew which was our New Testament lesson tonight, Jesus’ Great Commission, to go and make disciples of all the world.

It isn’t the Gospel reading which one most readily associates with the idea of Jesus as King. This morning the lesson was Matthew 25, ‘Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you for the foundation of the world: For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat, …’ You remember, when they asked when they had done this, Jesus replied, ‘inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me’ – one of the most powerful social justice and charitable love messages that Jesus ever gave.

Jesus the King was King in heaven, and He was dividing the sheep and the goats in the Last Judgment. The Gospel writer expected Jesus to be an absolute monarch, splendid in majesty and power.

We are not used to absolute monarchs now, today in England. After Magna Carta our kings are ‘constitutional monarchs’ with powers constrained and restricted. The will of the people, expressed in Parliament, is sovereign.

King David, the greatest king of the Jews, in his last words, in the first lesson, from 2 Samuel, affirmed that God had told him that ‘One who rules over people justly, ruling in the fear of God, is like the light of the morning, like the sun rising on a cloudless morning, gleaming from the rain on the grassy land.’ That’s the poetry of the man who wrote the Psalms, describing kingship in a similar vein to Magna Carta. The king is subject to higher authority, and, respecting that higher authority, he must rule justly: not capriciously or cruelly.

Reading the article about Prince Charles,[http://gu.com/p/43dtt, ] I found that the author was concerned that perhaps Charles, who has a habit of writing to people in public life and expressing very forthright views, would be much more assertive in public than the Queen has been, and is. The thrust of the article was to ask whether Charles would throw his weight around in an anti-democratic way.

I confess that I was somewhat uneasy about the Monarchy when I was a young man. What was it that made the Queen and her family better than you or me, so that we owed her respect – reverence, almost. What was her strength? Why would we go through elaborate rigmaroles when she was about?

That feeling in me changed completely, when my Father got the OBE. My mother, my brother and I went with him to the investiture in Buckingham Palace. We sat no more than a few feet away from where Her Majesty was standing. She had someone standing next to her to pass her the medals, but no notes or prompts.

She bestowed medals on about 75 people. What was amazing was that she seemed to know about every single one that she was giving a medal to. She spoke to my Father for a couple of minutes – which felt much longer, of course – and clearly she had carefully researched all that Dad had been doing.

She had done this thorough preparation for every single person that she decorated that day. It must have been a big task of preparation – and just think, she must have to do a similar job several times a year. It speaks volumes that, after so many years, the Queen still takes it upon herself to prepare and get to know exactly what her loyal subjects have been doing, the reason why they have been awarded the medals.

The Queen is reported to say that this hard work is just part of the job. She has a very strong ethic of service. The Queen is modest enough to do masses of homework, so that she can serve her people in a professional way. My Dad was really impressed. Although he was dying, the whole thing really bucked him up. He really did walk taller after getting his OBE from the Queen.

And I ceased to have republican leanings. In a minute we will pray for our Queen; I will lead the prayers; and I’ll really mean it.

I do hope that Prince Charles will be similarly imbued with an ethic of service. He has had to lead a rather odd life so far. In the article which I read, for example. It describes Prince Charles visiting Chester Cathedral.

‘Inside the cathedral, the strangeness of Prince Charles’s life came into focus. … Some modernist choir stalls, installed 15 years ago, caught his disapproving eye. “Doesn’t quite go,” the prince announced, locking eyes with the senior churchman. “It may be time for a review.” …. Finally, in the cloister, Charles was invited to hold Grace the golden eagle, a magnificent bird who, moments earlier, had evacuated her bowels explosively on to this reporter’s notebook.’ A close shave for the Prince.

Apart from the eagle, Charles seemed to act as though he was in charge. Telling the Dean of a cathedral that his seating ‘didn’t quite go’ and that it was ‘time for a review’ doesn’t sound like someone whose prime object is to serve.

But that is it. The Servant King. That is a modern hymn which we can like. Think of the passage in St Mark chapter 10: ‘You know that among the Gentiles [in the context, it must mean, among the Romans], those whom they recognise as their rulers [their kings] lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. But …. whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, …’

Jesus’ kingship was not like a Roman emperor’s. Not even like Herod, the puppet king, king of the Jews, who would soon condemn Him. These men had considerable power in the secular sphere, we say, ‘on earth’. They had the power of life and death. Jesus, Jesus the man, didn’t have that kind of power.

‘Pilate said to Jesus, “Are you the King of the Jews?”… Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.” So Pilate said to him, “Then you are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say I am a king. For this I was born and for this I came into the world,to testify to the truth.”‘ (John 18:33b, 36-37).

So we come back to this question, what makes a real king. King David said that he must fear God and deal justly; our Queen is giving her service, committed and faithful to her people. Prince Charles already does a great deal of charitable work – but he must not stray into autocracy. He needs to be a Servant King, just as his mother is a Servant Queen.

And the Servant King, the original Servant King, will be with us till the end of the age. As Bob Dylan sang, ‘You’re gonna have to serve somebody.’ Christ the King. Let us indeed serve Him.

Tags Buckingham Palace, Chester Cathedral, Christ the King, Grace the eagle, Herod, Jesus, King, king david, OBE, Pilate, prince charles, Psalms, Romans, Servant King, St John, St Mark, St Matthew, The Guardian, The Queen

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