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Captain Slow

By hughdbryant
October 3, 2023 //
1

Sermon for Mattins (Morning Prayer) on 3rd October 2023 at All Saints Church, Penarth

Readings: https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=563256396

https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=563256396

It occurred to me that you might be a bit fed up if I spent the next 10 minutes talking about the Last Supper, Jesus shocking the disciples and forecasting that one of them was going to betray him, but then going on to celebrate very first Holy Communion. I think it will be a bit of an anticlimax to hear a sermon all about that and then not to receive communion, but as you know, we are not doing a holy communion service this morning.

If we look at our other lesson, the reading is from the prophet Ezekiel who was writing from exile in Babylon, making a prophecy about the circumstances under which God’s chosen people the Israelites would return to Jerusalem. Our reading comes after a few lines in which Ezekiel mentions that the existing people, who are currently in Jerusalem, have suggested that the Israelites should go away and find somewhere else. It resonates; it’s sad, even today.

It does have the well-known lines about the Lord promising to the Israelites that when they come to Jerusalem he will give them ‘one heart and put a new spirit within them’; he will remove the ‘heart of stone’ from them and give them a ‘heart of flesh’ so that they may ‘follow God’s statutes and keep his ordinances, and obey them’, so that ‘they shall be his people and he will be their God.’

In one sense the whole of the Old Testament is all about the history of Israel’s being obedient and then disobedient to the Lord their God and all the various consequences thereof. Again, I think it doesn’t really fit for me to go into that in more detail this morning. We would need a learned seminar at least.

So if I’m not going to spend a lot of time on our lessons – I hope that you will forgive me for so doing – what do I want to dwell on? Perhaps it’s not strictly true, that I am completely ignoring our readings, because I saw something in the passage from Ezekiel, which sparked a thought within me, which I hope will be worth our pursuing together. That is that after Ezekiel has finished his prophecy, we are told that the cherubim lifted up their wings ‘with the wheels beside them.’

If you go to the beginning of the book of Ezekiel, in the first chapter, he says that he was among the exiles by the River Chebar, and the heavens were opened, and he saw visions of God. He saw extraordinary visions of four living creatures, the cherubim, with four wings, and four different faces each; and there were wheels.

It was sometimes described as the vision of the chariot. ‘When they moved, [the wheels] moved in any of the four directions without veering’. Perhaps the mechanical engineers in our congregation will be able to confirm that this is, perhaps, one of the earliest references to Ackermann steering that we’ve come across in literature.

But anyway, there is something on wheels; and that’s what piqued me, because in among all the other things we have to deal with at the moment in our lives, there are a lot of people exercised about something on wheels, namely, the 20 mile an hour speed limit.

Now, I want you to be immediately reassured; I am not about to turn into Jeremy Clarkson, or side vehemently with one or other of the parties in the Senedd, on this issue: but it did seem to me that it was a good opportunity for us to discuss how we put our faith into practical effect in today’s world.

Is there a Christian way to look at the 20 mile an hour speed limit? I suppose the key to all this, if we are Christians, is to ask, what would Jesus do? If Jesus was around today, how would he approach the 20 mile an hour speed limit? What is the Christian approach to it?

This is a bit like when I was studying Latin and Greek at school and university and we had to do prose composition; you might be given the Times editorial from a couple of days earlier and asked to put it into the Latin of Tacitus or the Greek of Demosthenes. Our teachers delighted in finding modern passages with things that didn’t exist in classical antiquity, such as trains and aeroplanes. What is the Ancient Greek equivalent of Concorde?

It’s just the same problem that we have in this case, wondering what Jesus would have done about the 20 mile an hour limit. What sort of car would Jesus be driving? So far as I know, the only form of locomotion which Jesus used was a variety of ponies, starting with Shanks’ and extending to the famous ass on Palm Sunday.

Presumably there were horses and carts, but the only ones that we hear about in the Bible are chariots, predominantly in a warlike context. In Psalm 20, for instance, ‘…some trust in chariots, some in horses, but we will make mention of the name of the Lord our God.’

But I don’t think that a chariot is really a parallel with a motor car today, or even with an SUV, come to think of it. If that was the case, Jesus would have been rumbling about in a tank or an armoured fighting vehicle. I certainly don’t think that I see Jesus riding on a Challenger II on his way into Jerusalem. No, it looks as though Jesus was much more often travelling at 4 mph, walking pace, or alternatively, at maybe 5 knots in a fishing boat on the sea of Galilee.

So what is the underlying message, which we could draw a parallel with, over the gap of 2000 years? I would like to suggest that it is a message about slowing down, that whatever form of locomotion we are using, whether it is on foot or in a car, or in a chariot or on a train, or in a boat, the message of the 20 mph zone is to slow down, and moreover, to slow down for reasons given which have to do with care for our environment and so as to avoid harm to our neighbours, by not running them over.

I think that when we consider God’s creatures and caring for them, slowing down will be good for all creatures, not only cutting down the number of people knocked down on the road, but it will also be good for animals; cats and squirrels, for example.

Do you think that Jesus would go along with this sort of reasoning? I wonder if, by contrast, there were actually any experiences that Jesus would have had, which would have given him a taste for speed. On the water, the only thing I can think of again points to slowing down, when he stilled the storm, so force 10, 70 mph, winds dropped to a pleasant breeze.

As you can see, I am beginning to think that Jesus is coming out as Captain Slow, but maybe there are other factors that I haven’t taken into account. Maybe there is such a thing as Captain Too Slow. What do you think Jesus would have done? Let us dwell on that with a little prayer, every time we set our speed limiter to 20 in the car.

Amen.

Hugh Bryant

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Talking to the Archbishop

By hughdbryant
September 7, 2023 //
0

Sermon for Mattins on 3rd Sept 2023 at All Saints Church, Penarth

Romans 12:9-21

Matthew 16:21-28

https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=560606098

What does it mean to be a Christian? Is it one of those organisations that have a rule book or a constitution which you have to keep to if you are going to be a member? Some people say that they think that what’s really valuable about Christianity is that it provides a moral compass that people can live by, especially today, when even in public life people do things and say things that perhaps in the past we wouldn’t have thought possible.

I won’t try to trace that pattern through recent history, in case I say something wrong about one of your heroes; but I think one could mention in passing things like former President Trump continuing to repeat a patently untrue story about having won the last election, for example: and I think it would be fair enough to have in mind some of the things that former prime ministers of recent years have said as well, as being ‘economical with the actualité’, as somebody once described it. You hear people say, ‘Things are going to the dogs’: ‘The policeman are getting smaller’: ‘Nobody knows the difference between right and wrong any more’.

So it’s interesting to come across what almost looks like a rule book for being a Christian, in what St Paul wrote to the Christians in Rome. ‘Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good’. ‘Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers.’ It reminds us of Jesus’s own Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5). St Paul says do not repay anyone evil for evil, for example. Live in harmony with one another – and in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says don’t just go tit for tat, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, but turn the other cheek; if someone wants your shirt, give him your coat as well. If a ‘man in authority’ makes you go one mile, go with him two. Give when you are asked to give and don’t turn your back on someone who asks for a loan. Jesus and Paul are pretty similar. This is the moral philosophy of Jesus Christ. Saint Paul, writing to the Romans, was probably writing before any of the gospels were written down, so it’s pretty clear that what he was saying reflected what all the early Christians held to by way of their moral beliefs.

I was thinking about that when I started listening to one of those radio programmes where the Archbishop of Canterbury interviews various people. I don’t know whether you’ve come across them, on BBC Radio 4, but I heartily recommend them. They are absolutely fascinating. The interviews are with a very wide variety of people. I think it’s true to say that most of them are top people, leaders, in one way or another, but they’re not necessarily people who would immediately spring to mind as wanting to have a public chat with the Archbishop of Canterbury.

A person like that was a lady called Dr Susan Blackmore, whom I’m sure some of you will know far better than I do: she was certainly a new one on me. It turns out that she is a ‘psychologist who is interested in the paranormal and matters spiritual’, according to the BBC, and who is keen on ‘Zen meditation’.

A lot of the people that Archbishop Justin interviews are not actually believers but are atheists, and Dr Blackmore is one like that. What struck me was that she and Justin Welby both seemed largely to believe in the same moral principles: they would both, I think, have recognised the same things as being good and bad; and if you took the labels off I think that Dr Blackmore would have been quite happy with most of the moral ideas outlined by Saint Paul – and indeed, by Jesus himself. She certainly believes that mankind is capable of altruism, going the extra mile and so on, being generous to strangers, and also, to some extent, in being ultimately generous: ‘greater love hath no man’ and all that, sacrificing oneself for your friend.

Then a very interesting moment in the conversation happened. These two people, who appeared to be identikit decent middle-class English people, with plenty of goodwill towards their fellow men and women, suddenly came to something which clearly stopped both of them in their tracks.

That was this: Dr Blackmore asked the Archbishop, “Hey, look: what would happen if it turned out that you discovered that there was good scientific evidence that the resurrection of Jesus Christ never happened, and that Jesus had died just like any one of us – and stayed dead?” Clearly Dr Blackmore expected him to say that it wouldn’t matter too much; that he had a ‘belief in the round’ and that he would still be a Christian even if it turned out that Jesus was just another bloke, perhaps a prophet, as Muslims believe.

But Archbishop Justin didn’t say that. He said, “Well, if Jesus wasn’t resurrected from the dead, it would be over. All my Christianity would be washed up instantly.” He said that it might be possible, perhaps, that he would revert to a kind of agnostic position about whether there was a God, in the sense of an ultimate creator, but he was quite clear that, just like St Paul, he believes that the whole thing depends on the resurrection of Jesus. In his first letter to the Corinthians Paul says, “If Christ was not raised, then our gospel is null and void” (1 Cor. 15:14).

It isn’t the case that Christians believe in a sort of generalised creator, a creative force, some kind of ill-defined spiritual positive force, what William Paley in the 17th century referred to as the divine watchmaker: a creator, who, sure enough, created the world and everything in it, and just like a watchmaker he had made the mechanism and set it off, and away it went without any further interference from him. That’s not Christianity.

Christianity is about Christ; and that crunch moment is what we see in the story from Saint Matthew’s Gospel, with Saint Peter trying to talk Jesus out of going to suffer and die in Jerusalem. Jesus knew what was waiting for him, and he told the disciples about it. Peter reacted as I think any of us might have reacted if we’d been there. He didn’t want to see this good man, who’d taught him so much and had shown him so many wonderful things, hurt in any way.

But he didn’t get it. Peter acknowledged Jesus as his Messiah, as his heavenly king come on Earth. But he didn’t really know how that worked. He probably had a picture in mind of something more like an earthly king, a King David or a Roman emperor in triumph; and of course, Jesus turned everything upside down, as he always did. The triumph was a triumph over suffering. He had to suffer first, before his triumph, because he wasn’t a king who was above all suffering, but was rather a king who was at the heart of everything, suffering what his people suffered – and worse.

It might be interesting at that point just to look back to the differences between how St Paul saw morality as it affects Christians – and how Jesus himself did ; and to compare it with somebody like Dr Blackmore the psychologist, who denied that there was any such thing as free will, but seemed to be able to recognise good and evil nevertheless. She certainly didn’t acknowledge that there was a God, or that Jesus was in any way divine. I think that, although she didn’t actually say so, she didn’t believe in the resurrection.

But if you say that you don’t believe that people can choose what they do freely, because you’re determined, pre-programmed, so you are fixed by your evolution, your genes and your experience, then is there any real meaning to good and evil? Dr Blackmore is left looking down an empty hole. On the other hand Saint Paul can say, “Hold fast to what is good”, because he can point to what Jesus has said, and through Jesus, in Jesus, Saint Paul recognised ultimate reality, a justification for everything.

Justin Welby said that when he was 19, in his second year at university, a friend had taken him to church and then on to supper, during which the friend had been telling him about the cross and the resurrection of Jesus, and the Archbishop said there was suddenly a ‘sense of presence’ in the room. “I’m not sure how to explain that,” he said, and his friend had apparently said, “What do you want to do now?” The Archbishop had said, “Whatever it is, it is good – and I need to cooperate with it”.

It’s perhaps a bit like John Wesley, walking down Aldersgate Street to a Bible study meeting, to study one of St Paul’s letters, and he said he was feeling a little bit reluctant, perhaps because he had done too much Bible study that day, and then all of a sudden he ‘felt his heart strangely warmed’. He had a strong feeling that Jesus, God, was there and that He did care, personally, for him.

Dr Blackmore by contrast, when she was 19, had one of those out of body experiences – although she did say she was smoking cannabis at the time – but apparently she experienced a very real feeling of going down a tunnel with a light at the end, which is an experience which quite a number of other people have testified to, but which doesn’t necessarily lead you to believe in God.

So what is it that makes you a Christian as opposed to someone who does Zen meditation? The difference is Jesus. The difference is the unique history of Jesus. After this we will say the creed – we’ll say, “I believe”- and there is nothing like it. Maybe there are some bits that you find difficult to understand or even to believe. But taken as a whole it is like the constitutional document for being a Christian.

I believe. I believe in God the father Almighty. I believe in Jesus Christ, who was crucified, died and was buried. On the third day he rose again. There is nothing like it. Frankly we wouldn’t be here, and there wouldn’t be people in church all round the world, if that was some kind of illusion, if it hadn’t happened.

As the Archbishop himself said, there are today about 85 million Anglicans, let alone the other denominations, Roman Catholics, Baptists, Methodists, Lutherans, Pentecostals, Orthodox, and although in Western Europe and in the northern hemisphere generally, fewer people are coming to Christ, in the world as a whole Christianity it’s still far and away the biggest and fastest-growing religion.

Christ is coming to more and more people. More and more people are being confronted by this amazing story and realising that they can’t make sense of their lives without in some meaningful way coming to terms with it. And they realise that coming to terms with it isn’t necessarily a picnic.

As Jesus himself said, ‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me’. It’s not a prosperity gospel. It can be tough, but once you’ve confronted it – once it’s confronted you – then your life is changed forever. If you do the things that St Paul recommends, your love will be genuine, you will rejoice in hope, you will be patient in your suffering; and, so far as it depends on you, if it is possible, (because Paul is a realist), you will live ‘peaceably’ with all.

That’s a perfect context for this service. What we are doing is celebrating, praising, the God who came to us in the form of a man, went through terrible suffering, died, in the most horrible and undeniable way, and then, on the third day, he rose again. So today we must give him our praise; and we must show our love, love for God and love for each other.

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A Thousand Years

By hughdbryant
August 21, 2023 //
0

Sermon for Evensong on 20th August 2023, the Eleventh Sunday after Trinity, at All Saints Church, Penarth

Psalm 90
2 Kings 4.1-37
Acts 16.1-15

Lessons: see https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=559621754

Psalm: see https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=559621924

‘A thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday’, says Psalm 90: or as we sing in Isaac Watts’ beautiful hymn, ‘A thousand ages in thy sight are like an evening gone’. I actually think that Isaac Watts’ version of psalm 90 is a bit more positive than the Psalmist’s. The psalm seems to me to be pretty fixed on the frailty of human life – ‘The days of our age are three score years and ten’ and so on – on which basis I have been on demurrage for two years. I know it ends up with a plea for God’s lovingkindness, so that we may rejoice and be glad all the days of our life – quite a contrast with how it starts out. However bleak its message might seem originally, in Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer Psalm 90 is given the Latin name Domine, refugium, ‘Lord, thou hast been our refuge.’ 

I think that does set the tone. Life is tough; all sorts of things can easily go wrong; our lives are precarious and impermanent; and if you are a Daily Mail reader, there are always dreadful stories to make you cross about people coming to sticky ends in various ways. But as Isaac Watts says, God is our refuge. ‘O God our help in ages past and our hope for years to come’.

As I look round at you all faithfully gathered here for Evensong, I know that we all have a story, a story that we might or might not want other people to know about. Everybody has good and bad things in their lives. Some of us are probably sitting here wrestling with things that are really worrying or really upsetting or things that really make us afraid. The two stories from the Old Testament about Elisha the prophet, the man of God, give you examples, pretty terrible examples, of the sort of thing that people might be quietly living with, even today.

The first one is all about the poor widow who hasn’t got enough money and a creditor has come to take her two children to be slaves. I’m sure there are people stuck in the cost of living crisis, and some of them may even be here, who just don’t know where the money is going to come from to pay for the basics of life.

Even in The Guardian, which is not usually as gloomy as the Daily Mail, there was an item reporting that bailiffs have experienced a huge boom in their business because people have suddenly become unable to pay their debts. In the poor widow’s case, Elisha fixed it by giving her a miraculous supply of oil which she could sell in order to raise money to pay off her debts. God, through his prophet Elisha, had given her a refuge from destitution. 

Again, for the Shunammite woman, Elisha came to the rescue, twice. First of all he made it for her and her husband to have a baby, and then when the boy suffered some kind of brain fever and died, he raised him to life again. Through his holy prophet, God was a refuge and strength to her.  The Shunammite woman became friends with Elisha. She offered him a meal regularly on his travels through, and she invited him to stay with them. 

In the New Testament that’s what another rich woman, Lydia, the dealer in purple cloth, did for Saint Paul and his party – who seem to have included Luke, the author of the Gospel and also of the book  Acts of the Apostles;  you notice half way through this passage it stops being written in the third party (‘When they had come opposite … they attempted to go into Bithynia… ‘) and changes to ‘we’:  ‘We set sail for Troas …’ ‘We’; so the author is there, so the story is even more vivid. 

But the key thing is that Lydia and her household were listening to what Paul and the other disciples were saying as they were gathered outside the gate by the river. She and her household were baptised, and then she said, ‘Come and stay with me’. She persuaded them: ‘She prevailed upon us’.

So the refuge, God’s refuge, is a literal refuge. It’s a place to stay. Both Elisha, the man of God, and St Paul and St Luke with him and Timothy, that he had brought from Lystra, who had a Greek father. There’s a big tradition for prophets and preachers to be travellers, spreading the word as they go from town to town. In that connection I wanted to mention that, not too far away from here, is Wesley’s Chapel in Bristol. 

It’s a beautiful church – which is configured rather differently from our church, in the sense that the Lord’s table, the sanctuary, where communion is taken, is not actually the most important feature: the most important feature is the pulpit and the lecterns below it; a triple-decker, for prayer, reading the lesson, and preaching; because to the Wesleys and the early Methodists, the ‘Word’ was the most important thing. (As you know, I was brought up a Methodist originally, and I always feel most comfortable when I am six feet above contradiction in the pulpit, as I am now). 

But the really interesting thing about Wesley’s chapel in Bristol is that it contains almost a built-in hotel. There are bedrooms for visiting preachers to stay in, a library and a study where the preacher can write his sermon. Somewhere to stay, a refuge.

Does that ring a bell with you? I’ve mentioned the cost of living crisis and debts and things, and the need for us to pray for God’s lovingkindness in those difficulties. But what does ‘refuge’ put you in mind of? It puts me in mind of refugees. 

I want to tell you that someone, who has become a friend of All Saints (although he is a Muslim), the Jordanian refugee who was living with me for nearly the whole of my first year here in Penarth, is going to be in front of the Immigration Appeal Tribunal in Newport on Tuesday. I would really like to ask you all to bear him in your prayers, to pray that there will be a fair outcome finally to his long quest for asylum here. The alternative, which the Home Office has been trying to achieve for the last four years, is to send him back to Jordan, where he faces at least a year in jail, for a political offence.

I believe that his case falls fairly and squarely within the provisions of the Refugee Convention 1951 and he does now have a good legal team representing him. But he still needs our prayers. He needs our prayers and our willingness to continue to support him and all those others like him where it’s not safe for them to return to their homes for one reason or another – to support them by providing a refuge. 

This is not necessarily the time or the place to discuss in detail the merits or otherwise of government policy in relation to refugees, but suffice to say that it is somewhat questionable whether the latest legislation conforms with the Refugee Convention (which was itself largely drafted by British lawyers at the prompting of Winston Churchill). 

There is no obligation under the Convention on people to claim asylum in the first country they come to. The Convention provides that the country where they arrive, even if their mode of arrival is deemed to be illegal, is not to punish them in any way for that illegal arrival, and there are strenuous provisions against what is called ‘refoulement’, which is a French term which means returning people to another country. If anybody would like to see the text of the Convention, see https://www.unhcr.org/about-unhcr/who-we-are/1951-refugee-convention.

But let’s go back to Domine, Refugium; God, our refuge. We, the faithful people, have been commanded by our Lord to love our neighbour. I don’t know where the idea of the ‘hostile environment’ comes from, but it certainly didn’t come from Theresa May’s visits to her parish church. There is nothing Christian about it. 

What is Christian is a refuge. There is a charity that I support, called Refugees at Home, and I commend it to you. Because you might say, it’s all very well talking about providing a refuge, but there isn’t an awful lot that we as individuals can do. That may be true; but I can tell you that I have had several refugees staying in my spare room from time to time. I’ve had delightful Turks, Syrians, and Jordanians, and I would say that I have learned a lot and made new friends by being able to put refugees up for a few weeks in my spare room. 

Not everybody is fortunate enough to have a spare room; but if you are wondering what you might be able to do practically, and if you do have a spare room, do consider contacting Refugees at Home.  Again, I can give you details, if you ask me at the end of the service. 

Lydia said, ‘If you have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come and stay at my home.’ And ‘she prevailed upon us’. I wonder if there will be a Lydia around among here in the next few weeks. I hope so. And I pray so. 

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GWR

By hughdbryant
August 1, 2023 //
0

Sermon for Parish Eucharist on the 8th Sunday after Trinity, 30th July 2023 at All Saints, Penarth

1 Kings 3:5-12

Romans 8:26-39

Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=557551823

‘Can I have a second-class single off-peak with a Senior Railcard to the kingdom of heaven?’ A second-class single off-peak with a Senior Railcard to the kingdom of heaven. That’s what I said to the man in the booking office here in Penarth. 

‘I beg your pardon?’ he said.

Now the fact that he was a bit stumped is, I should hasten to add, not a reflection on how useful it is to have a booking office at the station, as I am sure you will know very well from listening to Mick Lynch. But if we’re on this journey to the kingdom of heaven, where is it? What sort of a place is it? 

The first thing to say is that it’s a kingdom. We’re in the United Kingdom here in Wales. I think that I am risking having some of you shoot me on the way out if I add to my Mick Lynch reference with any ‘Yes Cymru’ allusions, so I won’t. 

But is the set-up in the kingdom of heaven like that of the United Kingdom? We can look at the story of the beginning of King Solomon’s reign over the people of Israel; it may not exactly be the kingdom of heaven, but surely it might give us some pointers. Solomon chose wisdom rather than long life or riches. No big increases in the civil list for King Solomon! 

But in one important respect he was similar to our king, and that is that actually, King Solomon wasn’t the top man. King Solomon got his authority and his power from God; our king, our Monarch, gets his power from the people. He is a constitutional monarch. In these senses, neither he nor King Solomon are absolute monarchs. In both cases they look to a higher authority. But in the kingdom of heaven, the king is the king. The king is God.

Remember that originally, in the story of Israel, the prophet Samuel was pestered by the leaders of Israel to appoint for them a king. Initially he was very reluctant to do so because he thought that a king would exploit his people in all sorts of ways. 

So Solomon was a pleasant surprise, as he chose wisdom over riches, although as you will no doubt remember he wasn’t perfect; he was what used to be called a ‘ladies’ man’, having at the last count 700 wives. They are supposed to have distracted him a bit from the duties of government, somewhat unsurprisingly.

So I think we can infer that the place we are going to is run by a good king, somebody who has all the wisdom of Solomon, without his bad side. That makes sense, because we understand God to be all-powerful and all-knowing.

But have we got the right ticket? Are we going to be on the right train? Will we get to this marvellous place? It looks from Saint Paul’s letter that perhaps the train to the kingdom of heaven is something like the Orient Express, very exclusive – although of course, if it starts from Cardiff Central, it will run on the GWR, God’s Wonderful Railway.

But look what St Paul says. ‘For those whom he foreknew he also predestined… [T]hose whom he predestined he also called’. You need to be ‘predestined’. So it looks a bit as though not everybody can ride on this train. It isn’t really up to you whether you can book that kind of ticket. So is that really the case, that unless you are somehow given a golden ticket, you can’t get on the train? Is that what it means to be predestined, to be called? 

No. I don’t think it is. St Paul says, ‘We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.’ God’s covenant, God’s agreement with his people the Israelites, is based on their love for him; to love God and love your neighbour. If you love God and follow his commandments, then, St Paul says, God will choose you; you can get on the train. And it will indeed be a very special ticket. ‘If God is for us, who is against us?’ 

And who is going to decide whether God is for us and whether we will get a ticket? That is what Jesus does. St Paul says that Jesus intercedes for us, that He speaks up for us. ‘And who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or the sword?’ 

Then we will have this wonderful, blessed assurance that we are on the train. ‘I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord’.

I may have tried to buy a second-class ticket with a senior Railcard, but it looks as though actually I am in an all-first-class Pullman, on the up main line to heaven. And what’s the station for the heavenly destination like? Is it one of Brunel’s temples of steam, Paddington or Bristol Temple Meads perhaps? Or Santa Maria Novella in Florence or Zürich Hauptbahnhof or the Gare du Nord in Paris? Perhaps I’m not on a Pullman, in fact, but on the Train Bleu, headed by Pacific 231, speeding towards the Côte D’Azur. Whatever – but for sure, we are approaching a divine destination.

But you have to realise that God’s Wonderful Railway came a little bit later than Jesus; and during the time of Jesus, He wasn’t into locomotion in the way that some of us like me are today. 

When Jesus was describing what your destination would be, He offered other sorts of images, comparing it with a market garden with a mighty mustard seed, or yeast in a loaf of bread or a trader on the Silk Route dealing in pearls, or on a deep sea trawler, with a hint that in the Kingdom of Heaven only the best fish would get on to the overnight train to Billingsgate. 

Now it is just about possible that one or two of you might not immediately picture this wonderful railway, and it is possible that you might see heaven without steam locomotives or even Trains à Grand Vitesse; and I think that you will all have rumbled the fact that, just like the man in the booking office, I can’t say exactly where the kingdom of heaven is to be found, at least in the sense of pinpointing it on Google Maps or finding it in Bradshaw.

That’s true: but Graham Kendrick, the great hymn writer today, has written a hymn, or perhaps it’s more properly called a worship song, which could give you another clue. It’s called ‘Heaven is in my Heart’. One thing is for sure. 

That is that when you do get there, nothing will separate you from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.  

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Heavenly Dissonance

By hughdbryant
July 18, 2023 //
0

Sermon preached at St Peter’s, Old Cogan, on 14th May 2023: the Sixth Sunday after Easter

Zechariah 8.1-13
Revelation 21.22 – 22.5

See https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=556703225

‘The third day he rose again from the dead;

He ascended into heaven’…

This bit of the Creed neatly marks where the church is after Easter and before Ascension Day, which is this coming Thursday.

At first, when I was thinking what I was going to say to you at this point, I had a real feeling of cognitive dissonance, if I can call it that, between our Bible readings, with their visions of heaven or the Heavenly City, and what seems to be going on in the world around us today. 

Archbishop Justin made an impassioned speech in the House of Lords the other day, pointing out how a Bill intended to stop people crossing the Channel in little boats contradicts morality and international law as well as being profoundly inhumane; and then I read in the paper that we are going to supply to the Ukrainians cruise missiles called Storm Shadow which cost

 £2 million each. 

So many thoughts were swirling around in my brain. On the one hand there is no price which one can put on preserving freedom and defeating invaders: on the other, it is interesting to know that apparently we in the UK have about 1000 of these missiles, £2,000m, £2 billion-worth, and yet we are told we can’t afford to pay our doctors and nurses and all the other public servants properly. 

They say that, if you met all the public service pay demands at present being put forward, in full, it would cost about the same amount, £2 billion. How to judge which is the right course to take? Missiles to defend Ukraine, or paying our public servants? 

In the face of these terrible dilemmas maybe the thing to do is to clear one’s head by drawing close to the Lord in prayer and coming to the Lord’s house at 3 o’clock on Sunday, as we have, and bringing our worship and prayers.

But isn’t this just escapism? Maybe not. Our Bible readings today have, I think, a heavenly flavour. 

‘On the holy mount stands the city he founded. 

Glorious things are spoken of you, city of God.’ 

‘Glorious things of thee are spoken, Zion city of our God’, as the hymn says.

And we have Zechariah’s prophetic vision of the city of God. 

‘I will return to Jerusalem, and will dwell in the midst of Jerusalem; Jerusalem shall be called the faithful city and the mountain of the Lord of hosts shall be called the holy mountain.’

Or you could stay in heaven itself and follow the vision of John in the Book of Revelation. 

‘I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb. And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb’.

I think these days we tend to rather shy away from talking much about heaven, because we feel that it is very much beyond our comprehension. What would you say, if somebody tackled you as you were coming out of the church today, and said, “It looks like you are a churchgoer, a Christian, can you tell me anything about heaven?” Well certainly if that was me being tackled in that way, I think I’d find it quite challenging. 

One might start to say things like, ‘That it is where God lives’ – and then immediately you’d worry that God lives everywhere, by definition. There isn’t a particular place where he lives. Or perhaps, ‘It’s where people go after they die’.  Again, it’s quite difficult to work out the geography of that. Or just, a place above the skies, out of our sight. Again, mundane considerations might intrude.

When Yuri Gagarin, the first astronaut, returned to earth (and he was a Christian), President Khrushchev asked him whether he had seen anything above the clouds in the realms of space. Did he encounter God? Gagarin said, no, unfortunately he hadn’t seen anything divine up there.

Well maybe you can do better than I can, but I think that in principle it’s quite a tricky question. If we stay with the idea that heaven is where God is at home, say, if that’s not too vague, here in these Bible readings we have two versions; it seems that Zion, where not only God, but God’s chosen people, the Israelites, live, on the one hand is heavenly and on the other hand, earthly.

On the one hand we have the city and temple of Zion; that seems to be an earthly place; and on the other hand we have the vision of heaven in Revelation, where the heavenly city has no temple in it. It’s not a place for God to visit like the temple on Earth, because God is the temple. 

God’s presence gives it its light and makes it glorious. It has the river of the water of life flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street and on either side of the river is the tree of life with its 12 kinds of fruit, reflecting the 12 tribes of Israel, and the leaves of the tree of life for the healing of the nations. Naturally-occurring medicine, like aspirin.

You could miss that word ‘nations’ – it means not just the chosen people, in fact, not the chosen people at all, but all the other people who are cut off from from the Jews, the Israelites: people like us. Both the new Zion on earth and the sort of heaven that we perhaps naturally think of beyond the skies are open to the ‘nations’ as well as to the Israelites. 

Maybe neither of them is literally true, in the sense that you could go there and take pictures, but nevertheless I think there are real things we can see which are very relevant in our lives today.

In Psalm 87:  ‘Very excellent things are spoken of thee, O Zion, the city of God. I, the Lord will record Egypt and Babylon as among them that are my friends. Behold the sons of Philistia, Tyre and Ethiopia.’

These are not just Israel or Judah, and in some instances they even look like enemies of the Israelites. Philistia, Philistines, Egypt – where they were enslaved. Babylon – where they were enslaved, again. Enemies have become friends in the new Zion, in heaven on earth. Strangers in our midst. Refugees. ‘Behold the sons of Philistia, Tyre and Ethiopia.’

Look again at Zechariah’s vision. ‘Old men and old women shall again sit in the streets of Jerusalem.’ It’s been pedestrianised. ‘And the streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing in its streets.’ An idyllic scene; but here’s the thing. Even though it actually seemed impossible to the ‘remnant of this people’ in those days, ‘Should it also seem impossible to me?’ says the Lord of hosts. 

Think of all the politicians, not just on one side, who tell you that something or other which would otherwise improve the lot of the people, isn’t possible, isn’t practical.

For instance, ‘I would love to abolish student fees,’ says Keir Starmer,  ‘but I can’t make a commitment because it may be that practical considerations get in the way’. It seems impossible. 

But the Lord of hosts points out that he is God, and nothing is impossible for him. ‘For before those days there were no wages for people or for animals, nor was there any safety from the foe for those who went out or came in’. It sounds like today. Cost of living crisis. War. Crisis in our public services: not enough money. But look:

‘ There shall be a sowing of peace. The vine shall yield its fruit, the ground shall give its produce and the skies shall give their dew; and I will cause the remnant of this people to possess all these things.’

The chosen people had been taken off to Babylon. ‘By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept.’  The Temple had been destroyed and quite a lot of them had drifted away and married local girls. The ones that were left were called the ‘remnant’ of the chosen people. 

Remember what happened in 1945. Our country was completely broke. But somehow the National Health Service was founded, millions of council houses were built and the welfare state started. 

Zechariah could have been forecasting, prophesying, about that as well as, instead of, what he actually was forecasting about, which was what would happen to the Israelites as they returned after their exile. He was writing in about 530 BC; but what he was saying, that there should be a ‘sowing of peace’, could apply today. 

‘Should it seem impossible to me?’ asks the Lord of hosts. Surely not: God can do anything, and with his help, so can we.

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God in your Pocket

By hughdbryant
July 18, 2023 //
0

Sermon for Evensong at All Saints, Penarth, on the 6th Sunday after Trinity, 16th July 2023

2 Samuel 7:18-29

Luke 19:41 – 20:8

See https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=556283310 

When I was little, my folks, especially my Dad, were very fond of a TV show which I think went out on Sunday nights, called the Dave Allen Show. It featured an Irish comedian called Dave Allen. I remember the way the shows always ended. Dave Allen would be sitting on top of a high stool, nursing a glass of Irish whiskey and, somewhat improbably, smoking a cigarette. He would say some warm words of farewell to his audience, and as the applause died down, he would sign off with the same greeting every week: – “May your God go with you”. 

I’ve always found that rather intriguing. It seemed to me that Dave Allen had this picture of everyone having their own private God in their pocket, almost like some kind of super talisman or a piece of ‘Kryptonite’, if you prefer a Superman analogy. Maybe he just wanted to acknowledge the fact that, in his audience of millions, there would be people who had many different beliefs, followed different religions – which is perhaps another way of saying that they followed different gods.

And certainly, when we look at the story of King David making his prayer to God, after he had asked the prophet Nathan to consult God about whether he should make a house for God, now that he himself as a king had a nice house made of cedar wood, in that context, in those days, it looks as though when David was thanking him, for all that he had done for him and the people of Israel, that he was their God, and not a god for anyone else. Indeed it did look as though your religious belief then was all about finding a god who was stronger than your enemy’s god or even your neighbour’s god.

The people of Israel had come in to the promised land out of Egypt; and they had quite a lot of fighting to do against the indigenous people whom they displaced. I don’t want to get involved in discussing Zionism on this occasion, but I did want to point out that people have seemed to have understood what it is to be a God, or to be God, in a fairly local, parochial, sort of way. So they worshipped the one true God partly, we could say, in a Dave Allen sort of way. He was their God, and it was the foundation of their success, or at least of the survival of Israel.

The prophet Nathan told King David that he had consulted God and God did not want David to make a house for him, but David did bring the Ark, the Ark of the Covenant, to Jerusalem, to his capital city, so there was a sense in which God was local; the Israelites’ God, supporting them against the other people and their gods. But God told Nathan that up to that time he had never lived in a house, but rather had lived in a tent or a tabernacle. 

There was a sense in which God and the king were tied up with each other. God wasn’t based anywhere, but He was with the king. It’s a very persistent idea, the idea of the divine right of kings, even in our history. So by having the Ark of the Covenant in his capital, David, in one sense, had God behind him, or possibly, in the Dave Allen sense, somewhere even closer.

But we might feel that’s not quite right, I think. Because surely God is much bigger than that. If he is all powerful, all knowing, the creator – and he may not be ‘he’ or just ‘he’ alone; for instance he could be he, she, they – or all of them. And indeed when David makes his prayer – which was our Old Testament lesson – you can see that he understands how much bigger God is than anything else. 

‘Therefore you are great, O Lord God; for there is no one like you, and there is no God besides you, according to all that we have heard with our ears’. 

But at the same time David also thinks that God is in his pocket too:

‘Who is like your people, like Israel? Is there another nation on earth whose God went to redeem it as a people, and to make a name for himself, doing great and awesome things for them, by driving out before his people nations and their gods?’

My God is mightier than you other people’s gods.

Then along came Solomon and built the first temple. So although God had told Nathan that he didn’t need a house, nevertheless eventually he got one. That temple lasted 400-odd years from 957BC till 587 when the Israelites were captured by the Babylonians and taken into exile. ‘By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept.’ And the temple was destroyed. Fortunately, 70-odd years later, Cyrus, the Persian king, liberated them from the Babylonians and let them go back and rebuild the temple. It was finished in 515BC. It was God’s house, the place where the Ark of the Covenant was kept; where worship took place and sacrifices were made.

We come back to it 500 years later, when we read in our New Testament lesson from Saint Luke’s gospel, which is a passage taken just after the Palm Sunday story, and Jesus prophesies the overthrow and destruction of Jerusalem. He went on to throw out the moneychangers and people doing business of one kind or another within the bounds of the temple. “My house shall be a house of prayer; but you have made it a den of robbers”. It was an accurate prophecy because the Romans destroyed the temple in 70AD.

The beginning and end of the story of the Temple, the House of God, and the two different ways of thinking of God, living in a house or being over all houses, not confined, were mentioned in one of the first great Christian sermons, when St Stephen went through the history of the people of Israel and their God in the Book of Acts chapter 7. He said, 

‘Yet the Most High does not dwell in houses made by human hands; as the prophet says,
 “Heaven is my throne,
   and the earth is my footstool.
What kind of house will you build for me, says the Lord,
   or what is the place of my rest? 

Did not my hand make all these things?”’ 

He’s quoting Nathan, from our Old Testament lesson.

So where does God live? Is he defined by time and place? Today I don’t think we worry much about asking that question. It seems pretty obvious to us, I think, that the divine can’t be limited in time and space. By definition, someone who is all powerful, all knowing, eternal. But still, I don’t know whether we spend enough time – or any time really – thinking about who it is that we are praying to. Is it God who lives in a house, or is it that God who is characterised by those ‘omni’ words; omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent?

I don’t think people will necessarily fight you, these days, about whether God is a partisan God – whether our God is stronger than your God – as opposed to tackling you about whether he exists at all. If that happens, if you encounter Richard Dawkins, or one of his acolytes in the new atheists, then it might be tempting to say that your belief is divinely sanctioned; you, as a Christian, sense His real presence. 

But how do you know? How do you know it’s God? It’s the question Jesus was asked. ‘Tell us by what authority you are doing these things. Who is it who gave you this authority?’ Jesus gave quite a tricky answer.  

But we wouldn’t hesitate, surely, knowing what we do. We would say he got his authority from heaven. Then the question is the question Jesus asked. If you think that I get all this stuff from heaven, why don’t you take any notice? 

Fortunately that’s not where we came in. Instead we are back with Dave Allen. Where is our God? Does our God go with us? I pray – I believe – that He does. The Lord is here. His Spirit is with us. Everywhere.

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Gone up with a Merry Noise

By hughdbryant
July 7, 2023 //
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A sermon preached at Evensong at All Saints Church, Penarth, on the seventh Sunday of Easter, 21st May 2023

Readings: see https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=555734170

’God is gone up with a merry noise: and the Lord with the sound of the trump’. Do you recognise that line? I try not to preach on texts which have not been read as one of the lessons or haven’t been sung by the choir as one of the psalms, canticles or motets. You haven’t had those words, ‘God is gone up with a merry noise’, in tonight’s lessons or in the psalm. And sad to say, you won’t get them.

I think they are among the most jolly words in the whole of the Bible. God is gone up with a merry noise. It always gives me a somewhat irreverent picture of a little boy letting off a balloon which makes its way towards the ceiling accompanied by a ripe raspberry as the air comes out.

The Church in Wales has adopted a translation of Psalm 47 which says, ‘God is gone up with a shout of triumph, and the Lord with the sound of trumpets’. Just so’s you know, the ‘merry noise’ version, ‘God is gone up with a merry noise’, comes in Miles Coverdale’s translation of Psalm 47 in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer.

Apparently the trumpet, or the ‘trump’, was in fact an ancient shofar, which is literally a ram’s horn. When you look at the American Episcopal Church’s Book of Common Prayer, they say ‘God has gone up with a shout, the Lord with the sound of the ram’s horn.’

We often use Psalm 47 when we’re celebrating Ascension Day, which as you know was on Thursday, as if that psalm reflected Jesus’ ascension into heaven, but I’m not sure that this wonderful line really is about God physically ascending. The expression to ‘go up’ in the Old Testament is usually used in the context of an army setting out to attack another army. David prayed to the Lord, ‘Shall I go up, and fight the Philistines?’ (2 Samuel 5:19).

And anyway, being raised up, being hoisted up in the sense that Jesus was raised up on the cross, was a sign of something disgraceful, not a mark of triumph. You will remember the story of the plague of serpents afflicting the Israelites in the wilderness, in the book of Numbers, and Moses being instructed by God to make a brass serpent, putting it on the pole and holding it up in the middle of the camp.

People who looked up at the serpent were healed. It was all referred to in St John’s Gospel chapter 3, showing how Jesus had turned the thing on its head:

And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up; that whoever believes may in Him have eternal life. [John 3:14-15]

So ‘God is gone up with a shout of triumph’ (and not with a merry noise). It isn’t so memorable – or funny – and it isn’t a reference to Jesus’ Ascension, but it does fit with the rest of the psalm, which is a celebration of God’s power.

Clap your hands together, all you people.

Oh sing unto God, for the Lord is high and

he is the great king on all the Earth.

That’s the message we get from the letter to the Ephesians, which may not actually be by St Paul, but rather it may have been written by someone who was writing almost as a tribute to St Paul.

Quite a lot of the letter to the Ephesians actually looks a lot like the letter to the Colossians, which is accepted by scholars as having been written by St Paul. Neither letter actually mentions the story of Jesus’ Ascension. If you do a bit of reading around as your homework, and have a look at Acts chapters 18 and 19, and a quick canter through Colossians, I think it becomes clearer what the point of the message in Colossians and Ephesians is, that they are about the greatness of God and the glory of God in the church: the glory of the one who, in that wonderful phrase, ‘fills all in all’.

The Colossians needed Paul to reassure them that the one true God, the one revealed in the person of Jesus, was all you needed, all in all. You didn’t need other mini-gods to do other jobs, for example.

It is rather doubtful whether Saint Paul himself actually wrote the letter to the Ephesians. At the beginning of the passage we had as our second lesson the writer writes, “I have heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love towards all the saints”. In Acts chapters 18 and 19 we have read that St Paul spent two years in Ephesus, so I don’t think he would necessarily talk about his having ‘heard about’ the faith of the Christian community, as though he’d never met them, because he had been living among them and was deeply involved with them for two whole years. But nevertheless, whoever did write Ephesians said some important things.

The context is that, at the time of Jesus or just after Jesus, in the classical world, among the Greeks and Romans there were many gods being worshipped. We heard last week about when the Apostle Peter made his speech on the Areopagus, on Ares’, Mars’, Mount, when he gave that great sermon about the Athenians worshipping many gods, but that they had been particularly smart because they had left a space for worshipping the unknown God – and that was the one that Peter decided to praise.

In that context, of lots of gods, lots of competing gods, and a basic sort of theology, that my God can beat your God, the emperor Constantine had the cross painted on his soldiers’ shields before the battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312, and his army won. That led to Christianity becoming the official religion of the Roman Empire, becoming a world religion. But being some kind of battle-winning superman wasn’t – and isn’t – what Christians really believe about Jesus.

The one true God, the one revealed in the person of Jesus, isn’t just a powerful specialist, but He is all you need; He is ‘all in all.’ That line, ‘[God] has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things’ in Ephesians reminds us about Psalm 110, Dixit Dominus: ‘The Lord said unto my Lord: Sit thou on my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool.’ God, and God in human form, Jesus, is supreme. Nothing came before or is in any way above Him, above God.

And so although the lesson that we have from Ephesians at first sight looks just to be a hymn of praise – and in one sense, it certainly is – it’s a particularly good one containing some really important theological truths. Somebody has commented that in the Greek, Paul’s prayer is the longest unbroken sentence in the whole of the Bible.

The prayer is a prayer for wisdom, that wisdom should be granted to the Ephesians, so that they will appreciate that although Jesus is no longer there, his body, the church, is all in all, that is, all they need. They don’t need any other gods. That’s a pretty good message for us too. Let us pray that, in being the body of Christ, here at All Saints, we are fulfilled, we are, and we represent, the one who is all in all. Our church will be just like David’s prophecy:

Is not my house like this with God?
   For he has made with me an everlasting covenant,
   ordered in all things and secure.
Will he not cause to prosper
   all my help and my desire?

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Can you ‘Stop the Boats’, Minister?

By hughdbryant
June 4, 2023 //
0

Minister Robert Jenrick was interviewed this morning (4th June 2023) by Laura Kuenssberg. The Conservative government wants to deter ‘illegal’ immigration, defined as people arriving without visas on boats crossing the Channel. The Home Office says the cost of carrying out their proposed policy, in the ‘Illegal Migration’ [sic] Bill, of detaining and deporting these ‘migrants’ will be between £3bn and £6bn per year.

Some Assumptions

Let’s assume that the current backlog of asylum applications is c.150,000 and average time waiting for decision is 2 years.

Let’s assume that each asylum seeker is put up in a hotel, pending decision on granting asylum or deportation, for one year at an overall cost, including legal and admin charges, of £100 per day. ⅔ of asylum seekers have been and will continue to be granted asylum. So say these 100,000 were processed more efficiently – say by allowing them to claim asylum while en route – you could save £10,000,000 per year.

Do we really want to break international law?

But the government definition of ‘illegal’ migration conflicts with the definitions in the Refugee Convention 1950 of asylum seekers and the lack of any obligation in the Convention to seek asylum in any particular country (say, ‘the first safe country they enter’; this is not a Convention requirement), so it is highly likely that there will be successful legal challenges to the operation of the proposed Bill.

The figures don’t add up – immigration is good for the economy

The government’s declared intention to reduce net migration ‘because of the pressure on public services’ is economically illiterate, because immigrants contribute on average 10% more in taxes than indigenous people (according to the Refugee Council and Resolution Foundation), so the real problem is that public services have been run down and are not sufficient for the needs of the population as a whole. Austerity, not immigration, is to blame for deficiencies in public services.

Other things we could spend £6bn on

TUC has estimated that it would cost £2bn to give all public service workers including NHS and train staff the pay rises currently being sought.

The Storm Shadow missiles being supplied by our government to the Ukraine cost £2m each. The UK has a stock of 1,000 missiles – cost £2bn.

Would it not be better to make it easier for asylum seekers, as defined in the Refugee Convention, to gain asylum and start to become taxpayers here, thereby saving all or most of the £3-6bn cost of implementing the Illegal Migration Bill, and to spend the saving on rebuilding our public services and continuing to provide support for the Ukraine?

Hugh Bryant

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The Lion of Judah

By hughdbryant
April 17, 2023 //
0

A Sermon for Evensong at All Saints, Penarth, on the First Sunday of Easter, 16th April 2023

Lessons: https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=548333336 

Daniel 6:1-23; Mark 15:46 – 16:8

This is the first Sunday in the 50 days from Easter to Whitsunday, Pentecost. So where are we now, one week on from Easter Sunday? Well, leaving aside for a minute the story of Daniel in the lions’ den, in our Bible readings, in the Lectionary, we are at the very end of Saint Mark’s gospel. 

But before we start looking at that, you might wonder why our first lesson was the wonderful story of Daniel in the lions’ den, and you will, no doubt, be relying on me to pull out a suitable lion story.

Many people see lions in their mind’s eye as just bigger versions of ginger tomcats, and just as lovable. Just like the lion you can see on YouTube in a lovely little documentary which was made in the 1960s (https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLx1gRyewAnQZhBqiNNP-u9V9sUsi36ebK), about a couple of likely lads living in swinging London; in Chelsea, who acquired a lion cub from Harrod’s pet department. In those days the ‘well-known Knightsbridge corner store’ even had a pet department, where you could buy a lion cub. 

And they christened him Christian, Christian the Lion, which was rather nice, and took him home to their flat. Once he’d settled in, they put him on a lead and took him for walks up and down the King’s Road, perhaps stopping to exchange the time of day with Mick Jagger as he stepped out of his elegant house on Cheyne Walk.

Christian the Lion stopped being a lovable cub and got rather too big to go out safely without the risk of his taking a leaf out of Hilaire Belloc’s book. 

I am sure you will remember Hilaire Belloc’s ‘Cautionary Tale’ of Jim, who ran away from his nurse and was eaten by a lion. Shall I read it to you?

There was a Boy whose name was Jim; 

His Friends were very good to him. 

They gave him Tea, and Cakes, and Jam, 

And slices of delicious Ham, 

And Chocolate with pink inside, 

And little Tricycles to ride,

And read him Stories through and through, 

And even took him to the Zoo- 

But there it was the dreadful Fate 

Befell him, which I now relate.

You know – at least you ought to know, 

For I have often told you so- 

That Children never are allowed

To leave their Nurses in a Crowd;

Now this was Jim’s especial Foible, 

He ran away when he was able, 

And on this inauspicious day

He slipped his hand and ran away! 

He hadn’t gone a yard when – Bang! 

With open Jaws, a Lion sprang, 

And hungrily began to eat

The Boy: beginning at his feet.

Now just imagine how it feels 

When first your toes and then your heels, 

And then by gradual degrees, 

Your shins and ankles, calves and knees, 

Are slowly eaten, bit by bit.

No wonder Jim detested it!

No wonder that he shouted “HI!‟

The honest keeper heard his cry, 

Though very fat he almost ran

To help the little gentleman. 

“Ponto!” he ordered as he came

(For Ponto was the Lion’s name), 

“Ponto!” he cried, with angry Frown. 

“Let go, Sir! Down, Sir! Put it down!”

The Lion made a sudden Stop, 

He let the Dainty Morsel drop, 

And slunk reluctant to his cage, 

Snarling with Disappointed Rage. 

But when he bent him over Jim 

The Honest Keeper’s eyes were dim. 

The Lion having reached his head, 

The Miserable Boy was dead.

When Nurse informed his parents, they 

Were more Concerned than I can say:- 

His Mother, as she dried her eyes, 

Said, “Well- it gives me no surprise, 

He would not do as he was told!” 

His Father, who was self- controlled, 

Bade all the children round 

attend To James’ miserable end, 

And always keep a hold of Nurse 

For fear of finding something worse.

Hilaire Belloc (1907) Cautionary Tales, 

included in Cautionary Verses, Omnibus Edition, (1993) London, Jonathan Cape

Thinking of Daniel’s escape from the den of lions, the story  of Jim is a very good illustration of the fact that lions are not nice pussy cats; although in distinct contrast the story about Christian the lion does have a happy ending – perhaps I should issue a spoiler alert at this point. 

The two chaps gave Christian to Joy Adamson of ‘Born Free’ fame for her to introduce the lion to the wild in Africa. A couple of years later they went to Kenya, and perhaps showing that touching faith in leonine good nature, which they had originally exhibited when they adopted Christian, they went for a walk in the bush in the hope of seeing lions, and, incredibly, a large male lion did appear, and he came bounding towards them. I think any normal people would have turned tail and fled; but not these two. They stood there, and this mighty king of the jungle leaped up and put his paws around their necks, licking them and embracing them. He was Christian, he remembered them, and he loved them.

Well, in the middle of all these nice lion stories, we mustn’t forget where we came in, which is, after all, one of the nicest lion stories, the one about Daniel in the den of lions. King Darius is tricked by jealous courtiers into having to condemn Daniel to what was normally a bloody fate, by being locked up in a den of lions overnight. 

The great king Darius was terribly distressed. Should he uphold the law which he had made, his interdict, or should he spare Daniel who had become his most trusted administrator? And he decided he had to uphold the rule of law, the immutable law of the Medes and the Persians. 

Poor Daniel had to be condemned. It was pretty ironic that Daniel had been condemned for worshipping the one true God, but the king figured that the only way Daniel could be saved was by praying to that same God, and indeed so he was, protected by an angel from being eaten by the lions.

But why do we remember Daniel at Easter? I think because, here again, after shutting somebody up in a place of death they rolled away the stone blocking the entrance and the dead man came out alive. 

What about Jesus’ empty tomb? What happened to Daniel was nothing like as mysterious. Certainly if all you have to go on is Saint Mark’s gospel and this original so-called short ending, what happened is that the three ladies, the two Marys and Salome, found that the stone sealing the tomb had been rolled away and a young man in white was  sitting inside, who told them that Jesus had been raised and that he was not there. 

The young man was presumably an angel too; he had been promoted from lion-taming duties by this time, and he told the ladies to go and tell the disciples and Peter that Jesus was going ahead of them to Galilee where they would see him. And they fled in terror, and in fact told no one. The last words were, “…and they said nothing to anyone; for they were afraid”. 

The original Greek words have intrigued scholars ever since. Literally it does not say, “for they were afraid”. It says, “they were afraid, for…” Or “they were afraid, because…”. It looks as though something is missing; but is that something all the material that’s in the other gospels, for instance about the two men in white and Mary hearing a familiar voice, thinking it was the gardener and and then recognising her teacher, and so on? Perhaps not. Then Mark would have made a gospel which really spoke to people like us, people who haven’t experienced the miracle of resurrection with their own eyes. 

It is generally accepted that Mark is the earliest gospel, so this is the one which most closely reflects what the earliest Christians said about what happened on Easter morning. There is a lot more to come, when we do look at the other gospel accounts, in the weeks to come. 

But I expect you’re not really sitting down and reading great tomes about it just now. One week on from a really happy Easter Sunday, as we come back to church today, it has still got a gently vague, happy buzz to it. 

The Lord is risen; he is risen indeed! We’ve just sung ‘Jerusalem the Golden’, but perhaps in this Easter season we will also sing ‘Ye Choirs of new Jerusalem’, which has this splendid verse: 

How Judah’s Lion burst his chains,

and crushed the serpent’s head;

and brought with him, from death’s domains,

the long-imprisoned dead.

The lion. The Lion of Judah. We haven’t even mentioned C.S. Lewis, and Aslan, the lion who stands for Jesus in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The Lord is risen. He is risen indeed. 

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Toy Soldiers

By hughdbryant
March 13, 2023 //
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Sermon for Evensong on the third Sunday of Lent, 12 March 2023, at Saint Peter’s, Old Cogan

https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=545542568‘

Put on the whole armour of God…; the breastplate of righteousness…; the shield of faith…; the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit.’

My favourite toy shop – yes, my favourite toy shop – isn’t Hamleys in Regent Street but it’s in Zürich and in a number of other places in Switzerland under the name Franz Carl Weber. It’s a very old shop; it’s been going since 1881. It is a truly wonderful toy shop. 

The top floor is very well stocked with model railways at one end and dolls at the other end, so there is no sexist hierarchy. Then on the floors going down, are pedal cars and bikes, dressing up clothes, board games and construction toys: there is Lego and Playmobil but, alas, no more Meccano. There’s absolutely everything for kids in there and indeed there is quite a lot for their grandpas to enjoy as well. 

But there is one small category of stuff that Franz Carl Weber does not stock. I wonder if you can imagine what it is. Well, the answer is that Franz Carl Weber, the best toy shop in the world, I think, does not stock anything to do with war or weapons. There isn’t even a spud gun to be had in there. No toy soldiers; no World of Warfare games, no Airfix kits of warplanes; nothing to do with war or weapons. 

I’ll come back to the toy shop without any toy soldiers in a minute. But I just want to look at something else we haven’t got at the moment, which is any hymns today. Sometimes that’s quite a good thing; because it’s rather like listening to the radio – you know, ‘the pictures are much better on the radio’ than on the TV – because they are in your head. That goes for other things that you can hear in your mind’s ear, if I can put it that way. So what would be our hymn?  I would suggest the one that immediately springs to mind is a great one of Charles Wesley’s, 

Soldiers of Christ arise, 

and put your armour on. 

Strong in the strength which God supplies 

through his eternal Son. 

…

Stand then in his great might, 

with all his strength endued, 

but take to arm you for the fight 

the panoply of God.

The panoply, the complete kit of weapons, the suit of armour; for this is a hymn based on our reading from Saint Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. And it’s a rousing hymn: that I certainly remember being very popular with us when I was at school.

And in one sense, what’s not to like? Either about our lesson, or about Charles Wesley’s poetic rendering of it? Stand up to evil; be armour-plated in your resistance, use the best weapons you have, to stand up for the good guys. It’s pretty topical, in the context of the Ukraine. There’s lots in the newspapers, on the TV and on the radio, comparing the weapons used by the Russians with those supplied to the Ukrainians by the Western nations. 

There’s something quite celebratory about the respective descriptions of the Russian and western tanks that we and some of the other European nations – and, indeed, the United States – will be sending – in fact I think that we are already sending, for the Ukrainians to use. 

There has been quite a lot of learned discussion about the relative merits of the Western weapons as against the weapons used by the Russian invaders. I am sure that most 15-year-old boys would be able to give you a detailed rundown of the respective specifications of the Russian T90 as against the Challenger 2 or the Leopard 2 tanks, or the Abrams.

You know, I used to rather like playing with toy soldiers and those Britain’s model field guns which shot out a sliver of lead as a shell. My friend John DeVille, when we were eight or nine, had the most marvellous model 18 inch ‘naval howitzer’ which reproduced all the main things that a real field gun did. You could lay the barrel at the right elevation and tracking; the shells were little masterpieces of brass with a spring inside them and the lead projectile which you put in the breach and then fired, then ejecting the casing. The whole thing was about eight or 9 inches long and it went with our toy soldiers, which were predominantly lead or die-cast, painted in enamel and colourful in their fine uniforms. 

But there was a problem. The problem was, what to do if there was a battle. Then you would actually shoot your wonderful naval howitzer or model 25-pounder at the army which you had lined up against them. But I didn’t want to break any of my soldiers and I didn’t want to damage the opposition’s half-track truck that I was very proud of. So this was a war without casualties. 

And after a bit it began to dawn on me that there is no such thing, that those beautiful soldiers would get smashed up. Some of them would lose arms and legs – and heads. Some of them would not get up again. 

And I want to suggest to you, in all humility, that St Paul may have been a bit up the pole here, in this famous passage from his letter to the Ephesians. In celebrating weapons of war, even when they are used in a good cause, he is missing what Jesus himself said. ‘Love your enemies. Turn the other cheek.’ 

Oh, but surely, you will say, Saint Paul is being a realist. The way of love is just not practical, and you do need the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation and the sword of the spirit; and indeed you may say that this is exactly in line with the Old Testament as well. 

Look at our lesson from the book of Joshua, where God says to Joshua, 

‘There shall not any man be able to stand before thee all the days of thy life: …Be strong and of a good courage: ..Only be thou strong and very courageous, … that thou mayest prosper whithersoever thou goest.’

And you will remember that this led on, once the Israelites had crossed over the Jordan, to their encounter with the Amalekites where, rather surprisingly, God took them to task for having shown mercy to the people whom they defeated. 

But the thing that perhaps St Paul didn’t really get, but which Franz Carl Weber, when he set up his toy shop in 1881, did understand, is the point about my not wanting any of my toy soldiers to be broken. Mr Weber realised that you can’t have a war without breaking soldiers; that the use of weapons does not bring about victory, but it is, rather, a sign of failure. 

Paul paints a picture which looks like a Roman centurion in his armour, and perhaps, as he was the ‘ambassador in chains’ imprisoned in Rome when he wrote the letter, he might have seen a victorious general coming back from a campaign and being granted what was called a triumph, leading the people whom he had conquered, their kings and generals, in chains through the streets of Rome. His centurions would be in their best uniform.

But war never really leads to triumph. Away from the soldiers marching in their dress uniforms there are the broken ones, maimed and dead on the battlefield. And at this time, when we are now confronting again the feeling that we have to wage war, in order to defend civilisation against the attack of the Russians, we don’t know what victory should really look like. 

And at this time of Lent we have to realise that the conflict that Jesus entered into, in trying to bring about his kingdom of love, ended on the battlefield. Jesus was one of the fallen. 

But the other message of Lent points to the triumph, the real triumph, of Easter. Be of good cheer and I will support you. Do the right thing and I will support you, is God’s message to Joshua. The prophet Isaiah, (or perhaps more correctly the first of the three prophets writing under the name), had a vision of the kingdom in which they would ‘beat their swords into ploughshares, and they would not learn war any more.’ 

Then, on God’s holy mountain, the sword of truth will have more truth than sword; the breastplate of faith, more faith than breastplate, and the helmet of salvation, more salvation than helmet. Let it be so! Let us pray for peace and love in place of war. With that peace and love, we can have the ‘sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life’ which comes at Easter.

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