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Cake and Crumbs

By publicsquare
January 29, 2021 //
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29th January 2021

A dispute has arisen between the UK and the EU concerning the distribution of Covid vaccines made by AstraZeneca. For what it’s worth I offer the following thoughts, as a long-retired English solicitor who once specialised in shipping and international trade.

There are two contracts involved: an ‘advance purchase agreement’ (the APA) between AstraZeneca (AZ) and the European Commission, (EC), acting as agent for the 27 states who are members of the European Union (EU), a redacted copy of which is available at https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/api/files/attachment/867990/APA%20-%20AstraZeneca.pdf; and a presumably similar contract between AZ and the British Government (UK govt). The terms of this second contact have not been disclosed.

UK govt are said to have ‘bought’ a certain quantity of Covid vaccine from AZ. Perhaps it is more accurate to say they have ‘agreed to buy’ a certain number of doses, when available. UK govt have bought and used some vaccines already.

In the recitals to the APA, AZ ‘has committed to use its Best Reasonable Efforts (as defined …) to build capacity to manufacture 300 million Doses of the Vaccine [defined terms], …. for distribution within the EU … with an option for .. [EC] .. to order an additional 100 million Doses …’

‘Best Reasonable Efforts’ is defined at clause 1.9.

The contract is subject to Belgian law.

Clause 5.4 specifies that AZ will use Best Reasonable Efforts to manufacture in the EU. This clause is to be understood so as to include the UK temporarily within the EU.

Clause 8.3(b) ‘In the event that … the number of Doses set forth in the Binding Allocation [as defined in 8.3(a)] does not equal 300 million, then … the .. allocation of the Initial Europe Doses shall be made on a pro-rata basis to reflect the respective populations of each of the Participating Member States …’

AZ’s obligations under the contract are to make ‘Best Reasonable Efforts’ to make and supply vaccines.

In the English law of contracts a distinction is made between an undertaking (a contractual promise) to do something, and an offer to ‘use best endeavours’ to do something, which is not an undertaking, or contractual promise – it is merely a promise to try.

What does Belgian law say about this? Is ‘Best Reasonable Efforts’ a legally-defined phrase, in the way that to ‘use best endeavours’ is in English law?

The reason why, in English law, a party may contract only to use best endeavours is because in the particular circumstances, they cannot control or guarantee the outcome. They will try to bring it about, but they cannot guarantee it.

I do not know whether there is a similar distinction in Belgian law.

Given the extraordinary circumstances of the Covid-19 epidemic and the very rapid development of vaccines, it is understandable that any supplier of vaccines would not guarantee a particular level of supply, and indeed cl 8.3(b) sets out a mechanism for distribution in the event that targets are not met, despite ‘Best Reasonable Efforts’.

In cl 13, Representations and Warranties, AZ says, (e), ‘.. it is not under any obligation, contractual or otherwise, to any Person or third party in respect of the Initial Europe Doses or that conflicts with or is inconsistent… with the terms … or would impede the complete fulfilment of its obligations ….’

Cl 13 gives some assurance that the operation of the second contract, with the UK, does not interfere. Supplies of vaccine which would otherwise have gone to the EU are unaffected.

Vaccine nationalism does not help the human race. Dr Mike Ryan of the World Health Organisation has said that squabbles among the rich nations about how the cake should be divided are particularly repugnant to people who do not have even the crumbs.

Hugh Bryant

29th January 2021

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Uncomfortable Words

By publicsquare
November 17, 2020 //
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Commentary on ‘Identities are reduced to politics’ by Angela Tilby, Church Times, 6th November 2020: https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/198908

Hugh Bryant

Angela Tilby has written about being made to feel uncomfortable. She says, ‘We are all gradually being persuaded that to make anyone feel “uncomfortable” is tantamount to a hate crime’.

What she is talking about is not comfort in the sense of warmth or a nice armchair. The contrary – what it is to be uncomfortable, in the sense she intends – is the opposite of being ‘comfortable in one’s own skin’; and that ‘skin’ is not the characteristic of an individual but of a group, of ‘class, colour, ethnicity, or religion’.

In other words, it’s not a good thing to make people feel uncomfortable on the basis of those generic characteristics, of what they are, as opposed to anything which they may have done or said. Tilby says, ‘This is why I regularly feel uncomfortable at hymns and preachy prayers that glare unforgivingly at various social injustices’.

What brought me up short in her article was this reference to a feeling of discomfort at ‘hymns and preachy prayers that glare unforgivingly at various social injustices’.

This is something I have often wondered about. For instance, I have often wondered about people who profess to be Christians in positions of power, who, in the exercise their power, do things which would seem to contradict Jesus’ commandments, (usually the commandment to love thy neighbour as thyself).

A case in point, I have thought, was Prime Minister May, who is said to be a regular churchgoer, but who created and promoted a policy of a ‘hostile environment’ for intending immigrants, leading to various inhumane consequences including the EMPIRE WINDRUSH scandal. What did Mrs May do in church? Was she asleep there? I wondered. The policy which she promoted was something which hurt people, which ruined innocent people’s lives. How could a practising Christian justify doing such a thing?

What is a preacher to say? I think that Canon Tilby is really aiming not at certain hymns and prayers, but rather at what is said from the pulpit. I’m not sure what hymns she has in mind – ‘Fight the good fight’, or maybe the suppressed verse in All Things Bright and Beautiful: ‘The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate …’ It might well be uncomfortable to sing that, and it might well be uncomfortable – certainly for the rich man – to hear it. Is there anything wrong in this? Specifically, does the hymn ‘glare unforgivingly at social injustices’? If it did, I feel, contrary to Canon Tilby, that it is a good thing. The injustices deserve to be glared at.

To pray for wrongs to be righted isn’t ‘preachy’, I would suggest. If the prayer is of the ‘Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes-Benz’ type, it’s clearly inappropriate, not because it makes anyone uncomfortable, but because you can’t tell the Almighty what to do. Thy kingdom come: Thy will be done. Thy will. Or see Psalm 115: ‘Our God is in heaven; He does as He pleases’.

Some would say that this is political, and therefore to be avoided. I have to reply that Christianity – and, for that matter, Judaism – is political. The Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55), for instance, is a revolutionary manifesto in twelve sentences, and there are many other examples. Jesus would have us sell our possessions and give money to the poor: would have us welcome strangers: become servants, rather than the masters that many of us are.

It is said, however, that a Church of England congregation often represents the Conservative Party at prayer. Bishops and clergy, by contrast, tend to vote Liberal Democrat or Labour. Perhaps this is because the ministers actually read, study and inwardly digest the liturgy and Bible lessons which they lead, whereas their flock follow, if not blindly, seemingly without much appreciation that acceptable worship does not involve a prosperity gospel!

But what if light dawns, say during a well-expressed sermon, and the hearer realises that the evil which the preacher is criticising – the social injustice, even – is something in which they, the listener, are complicit? This may indeed be uncomfortable. But surely it is all right, for ‘our God is a consuming fire’ (Hebrews 12:29). Unless our devotion is tested in that fire, it may not be worth that much.

But is it a ‘hate crime’ to make someone uncomfortable in that sort of way? The essence of a hate crime, I would suggest, is to do harm to someone because he or she represents a racial or national type and for no other reason. Because someone is black, or LGBTi, say. What Canon Tilby is suggesting is that some hymns or prayers, in praying for relief from certain types of oppression or inequality, themselves oppress some people (or make them uncomfortable).

That would require the person discomfited to be in some way oppressive or otherwise reprehensible, as opposed to their doing something oppressive.

Canon Tilby mentions being a woman; but I cannot think that ipso facto she is worthy of chastisement as such – if at all. If she is being made to feel uncomfortable, it is not because of what she is, but because of something she may feel she ought not to have done – and that she resents being reminded of.

Put another way, as the Roman Catholics say, hate the sin but pardon the sinner. So a prayer or a hymn directed against social injustice is not a ‘hate crime’. It invokes the aid of the Almighty against the evil but does not condemn the person who does that evil. It is not directed against what that person is; but rather it may well call down condemnation on what they do.

14th November 2020

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Ton up

By publicsquare
November 5, 2020 //
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Sermon for 1030 Holy Communion at St Mary, Oatlands on 14th October 2020

http://bible.oremus.org/?ql=469611667 –

Galatians 5.18-end; Luke 11.42-46

In our Gospel reading today, it leapt out at me, when I was reading it in preparation for our service today, that Jesus was saying rude things about lawyers. Although, in the Bible translation which we are using today, Jesus doesn’t actually talk about lawyers but about people who are ‘experts in the law’, in Jesus’s time there wasn’t such a thing as a ‘lawyer’ in the same sense that we understand it. Then, what you had were ‘advocates’.

You will recall that the Holy Spirit is referred to sometimes as the advocate, or even a ‘comforter’; in John 14:16, Jesus says he will send us his Holy Spirit to be an advocate and guide. If you went to the right Bible classes you may even have heard the word Paraclete, which is one of those words you only hear in church, but it means an advocate, it means somebody to be with you, to speak for you, in court.

What we have here isn’t a Paraclete, but a ÎœÎżÎŒÎčÎșός, that Jesus is being rude about. ÎÏŒÎŒÎżÏ‚, substantive, the thing, means the law; ÎœÎżÎŒÎčÎșός, adjective its characteristic, means ‘to do with law’; as a substantive, it means somebody who is familiar with the law, so the word is usually translated as ‘lawyer’.

As some of you will know, I used to be a lawyer, a solicitor. It’s now a dim and distant memory – I retired 15 years ago – but still I feel that I should stand up for my old profession. That is, if Jesus is really slagging off lawyers.

Actually, of course, when you see the other lesson, from Saint Paul’s letter to the Galatians, you will see that we are into the distinction that St Paul draws, picking up on what he learned of Jesus’ teaching, that on the one hand you have the Law, meaning the Jewish law, the first five books of the old Testament, the Pentateuch, and on the other hand you have the state of grace for those who have been saved and have come to faith in Christ Jesus. So maybe it is indeed right to talk about people who are ‘expert in the law’, meaning the Jewish Law, rather than simply about ‘lawyers’.

But as Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, he didn’t come to abolish the law, but to fulfil it [Matt. 5:17]. He said that all his teaching can be summed up in two supreme commandments, commandments taken from the Jewish Law, to love God and to love your neighbour [Matt. 22:36-40].

Galatians 5 tells you what to expect from someone who has been saved, who has had that revolution in their life and doesn’t need to have a policeman standing over them, but just does the right thing. The right thing is to love your neighbour. All those things that St Paul lists as the Fruits of the Spirit lead to various ways of loving your neighbour. So fortunately it turns out that nothing in our Gospel today is really against lawyers.

Well, I know that Folli [Revd Olokose] and Hugh [Montgomerie, Reader] have an excellent style of preaching here, which always ends with a challenge. So I thought I would try to enter into the spirit of that too; but first of all, I need to tell you a little story.

When I was starting my ministry training nearly 14 years ago, it coincided with my elder daughter Emma starting her university studies in medicine at Bristol University. Very soon in the first term I visited her to see how she was settling into her hall of residence.

When I came back, I was at church for the 10 o’clock service, and after the service I was having coffee with some of the other faithful people. Somebody asked me how I had found my trip to Bristol. Had it been an easy journey? I said that it had been a very easy journey, but that I just suddenly thought – a little cloud had crossed my brain – that it might turn out to have been rather more expensive than I had bargained for.

Why so? Because, just before I turned off on the M32 to go into the city of Bristol, I had passed under a bridge, which, too late, I’d noticed was bristling, bristling with things that looked mighty like cameras. ‘So’, my faithful friend asked, ‘surely that’s not a problem? You were doing 70 miles an hour’.

‘Hmm’, I said, ‘if only; but I did manage to get it below100!’

She took my arm and marched me off into a corner. ‘Now Hugh’, she said. ‘Now that you are in ministry training, you have to do two things. You must stop breaking the law – and the other thing is, you must stop crowing about it!’

Oh dear. She was, of course, right. The Fruits of the Spirit hadn’t quite taken root in me at that point, as you will realise. But what about you? Have you had those sort of moments? Has the Spirit taken root in you and borne fruit yet? What do you think?

And that’s my challenge to you this morning. Not just to get it below 100 – but you know what I mean.

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Theophilus the Migrant

By publicsquare
November 5, 2020 //
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Sermon for 1030 Eucharist at St Mary, Oatlands on 21st October 2020

Acts 16:6-12; 2 Timothy 4:5-17; Luke 10:1-9 (http://bible.oremus.org/?ql=470148758)

On Sunday we were remembering Saint Luke, the ‘beloved physician’, as Saint Paul describes him in his second letter to Timothy, the one who wrote not only the Gospel according to Saint Luke but also the Acts of the Apostles, I want to carry on remembering St Luke this morning, looking at the same Bible passages as we used on Sunday.

Folli [Revd Folo Olokose] treated us to a theological masterclass in his sermon on Sunday. I don’t want to go over exactly the same ground again, but he did make some points which I will just briefly mention, particularly for anyone who was not there on Sunday.

Folli took, as the heart of his sermon, the name of the person to whom Saint Luke dedicates his two books, Theophilus. Who was Theophilus? Folli argued that it is a name for a type of person, not someone in particular – not who, but what. It literally means, ‘a friend of God’. It could mean any of us.

All the other things which might seem to make us different from each other, such as our education, our physical characteristics, or the ability to run a four-minute mile, are all things which can come and go, and might depend on where you have been born, who your parents were. However, being God’s friend is something which lasts forever, and which any of us can be.

So Folli argued that, in dedicating his books to Theophilus, Luke was in fact dedicating them to all of us, to all who love God. And we see from today’s lessons that Luke was a companion of Saint Paul on his travels. ‘We did this..’, rather than ‘they did it’, in the passage from Acts 16 which was one of the lessons prescribed for Sunday.

During the night Paul had a vision: there stood a man of Macedonia pleading with him and saying, ‘Come over to Macedonia and help us.’ When he had seen the vision, we immediately tried to cross over to Macedonia, being convinced that God had called us to proclaim the good news to them.

We set sail from Troas and took a straight course to Samothrace, the following day to Neapolis, and from there to Philippi, which is a leading city of the district of Macedonia and a Roman colony. We remained in this city for some days.’

Luke says, ‘We’. He was there, travelling with St Paul. In a wider sense, who are ‘we’ in this context? From Paul’s letter to the Romans, ‘… there is no distinction between Jew and Greek, because the same Lord is Lord of all…’ (Romans 10:12).

So in our lesson today, Luke reports on Jesus sending his disciples out ahead of him, to prepare people for him coming and preaching among them. Roughly the same report comes in St Matthew’s Gospel too.

You might note that Jesus instructs the apostles, ‘Do not move around from house to house’. I had a bit of an unholy thought – do you think our Lord might have had tier 2 or tier 3 in mind?

Of course they didn’t have a plague then. Sending them out they were a bit like Billy Graham’s people, arranging one of his crusades, securing the venues and booking the hotels – although Jesus stipulated that it should all be done on a shoestring – but what was the message that Jesus was going to preach?

The message wasn’t going to be about life after death. Jesus hadn’t died at this stage. Let’s look at the Gospels where Jesus sends out his disciples to do the Billy Graham thing, that is, our Gospel passage today from St Luke, chapter 10, where Jesus sends out 70 or 72 apostles, and St Matthew chapter 10, where he only sends out 12 apostles.

By the way, the word ‘apostle’ comes from the Greek verb Î±Ï€ÎżÏƒÏ„Î­Î»Î»Ï‰, which means ‘I send out’, so an Î±Ï€ÎżÏƒÏ„ÎżÎ»ÎżÏ‚, the noun from it, means someone sent out, in the same sense that an ambassador is sent out.

The other difference is that in St Matthew’s account, Jesus wanted the apostles just to go to the ‘lost sheep of the house of Israel’, and not to go to the non-Jews, the Gentiles and Samaritans, whereas in St Luke’s gospel the only thing that mattered was whether they were welcomed or not.

Given that Luke and Paul were together for some time, and that actually Paul wrote his letters, like the letter to the Romans, before any of the Gospels were written, I’m inclined to say that Luke’s account is more likely. Paul’s idea that there was no difference between Jew and Greek, between Jews and non-Jews, Gentiles, seems to me to be more in line with what Jesus was teaching.

In St Luke’s Gospel, immediately after the 70 are sent out, we read the story of the Good Samaritan. The point is, it doesn’t matter what nationality he was. He cared for his neighbour, for the person he found hurt on the road. Surely Jesus wouldn’t have warned the apostles off having to do with Samaritans, if he was going to praise the Good Samaritan in his next breath, as He did.

Bear in mind that St Matthew’s Gospel is generally reckoned to have been aimed at a Jewish readership, whereas St Luke probably wasn’t a Jew and was writing for everyone – for ‘Theophilus’. And St Paul definitely had the same idea. No such thing as Jew and Greek.

One thing that these two accounts, in Matthew and Luke, do have in common is that the apostles were sent out just after Jesus preached his great Sermon on the Mount. You know, all those great challenges: love your enemies, turn the other cheek. Think of the lilies of the field: they neither spin nor weave: yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Don’t worry about material comforts. The Lord will provide.

Surely, you might say, the sermon on the Mount is great in theory, but not really doable. Impractical instructions. How literally can we take what Jesus said? Why would we have armies, if we really always turned the other cheek?

And according to St Luke, it was all for Theophilus. For anyone who loves God. No one has any special qualification to receive God’s blessing.

So if we are thinking about Jesus’ teaching as he sent out the apostles, and the idea that in God’s sight we are all equal, neither Jew not Greek, can I pose a question for you to think about?

My question is about refugees, about ‘migrants’. If we believe that it is true that all people, from any nationality, are equal in the sight of God, why should we be entitled to live in bounteous Surrey in England whereas a person from another country – Syria or Afghanistan or South Sudan, say – has to pass rigorous checks before they are let in? Why are they not equally entitled?

Is it because they will overwhelm our public facilities, schools, hospitals and so on? Is that true? They will be a drain on our economy, some people say. The statistics say that immigrants contribute 15% more in tax than people who were born here. Or, should we sift out the applications so that we only let in people with a certain minimum level of qualifications?

But just a minute. I wasn’t born in the UK only because I’d won an Oxford scholarship. What does ‘Theophilus’ mean? Are British people more entitled to salvation than, say, Ethiopians? In St Luke’s terms, both could be ‘Theophilus’.

What do you think? It might be a good idea to imagine that we could be like the people on the road to Emmaus, that we might suddenly meet Jesus. What would we say to Him? Would we justify to Jesus what we do, keeping poor immigrants out of ‘our’ country? Even if our country is supposed to be ‘full’, how would we, who have so much, justify drawing up the drawbridge against people who have so little?

I’m not telling you what to think. We have quite a few refugees who’ve come to this area, and we have a local charity to help refugees, Elmbridge CAN. Through them I’ve had refugees and, yes, ‘economic migrants’ staying for a few months in my own spare room. I felt that I was being called to help them. They are all now settled – productively. Should we be doing more of that sort of thing for refugees?

Well, I hope that is food for thought. Please do keep on thinking about St Luke and Theophilus. Theophilus. Everyone.

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The Beatitudes – Humble Saints

By publicsquare
November 5, 2020 //
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Sermon for Holy Communion at 1030 on Wednesday 4th November 2020 at St Mary Oatlands

Matthew 5:1-12

See http://bible.oremus.org/?ql=471270293

If you had to say what was the real essence of Jesus’ teaching, the true essence of what it means to be a Christian, I think that a good place to start would be Saint Matthew’s Gospel chapter 5, the Sermon on the Mount.

In his great sermon, Jesus built on the foundations of the Old Testament. He put himself in the tradition of the prophets, like Moses. For instance, Moses went up on Mount Sinai to meet God, and Jesus, who was God, also went up a mountain to give his most important teaching.

Jesus highlighted the old teaching, according to which, if somebody did you harm, you should pay back ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’. Jesus took that much further by saying you should turn the other cheek, go the extra mile; again under the old Jewish law, the rule was to love your neighbour and hate your enemy, but Jesus taught that you should love your enemy and pray for your persecutors.

Jesus said that he had ‘not come to abolish the law but to fulfil it’. He was not rejecting the old Jewish law, but rather developing it. It would be a mistake for us to ignore what is in the Old Testament, but Jesus went much further.

The ‘blessed are they’ sayings, these Beatitudes, are at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount. I’ve always thought the first one was rather difficult to understand. ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.’ Or, as the New English Bible translates it, ‘Blessed are those who know that they are poor.’ Poor in spirit – what does that mean? Is it really that they ‘know that they are poor’?

I’m not really sure what it means to be ‘poor in spirit’. It might have connotations of lack of character, being weak-willed or spineless, not, on the face of things, what Jesus might want to give a prize for, in the kingdom of heaven.

The Greek word which many Bibles translate as ‘spirit’, as in ‘poor in spirit’, is the same word, πΜΔύΌα, that is used for the Holy Ghost, sometimes as a translation for the Hebrew word ‘ruach’, meaning a sort of rushing wind, reminiscent of the events on Whit Sunday, when a sort of rushing wind came upon the assembled disciples, lighting tongues of fire on their heads (which didn’t burn them, just as the burning bush which Moses came across was not burned up: again, another parallel between Old and New Testaments in the Bible: it’s a sign of God’s presence.)

That word in Greek, πΜΔύΌα, is related to the word that you have in French for a tyre, pneu, or for something inflated like a tyre, pneumatic; they all involve wind or breath. So, what are the poor blessed in? – they are blessed for being short of wind. Blessed are the people who don’t know which way they’re blowing, don’t know whether they’re blowing hot or cold, say.

Or is it in fact better translated the way the New English Bible has it,‘Blessed are those who know that they are poor’? There, the translation has taken the ‘in spirit’ bit and turned it into a sense of consciousness, knowledge. They know that they are lacking, deficient – but deficient in what? On this interpretation, it doesn’t say. They are just ‘poor’.

But the word which means ‘poor’ in this passage goes grammatically with the word for ‘spirit’ the other way. You are not spiriting out the poverty, the being poor, but being poor, deficient, in spirit. In Greek it says, ‘Blessed are the deficient in wind’. To say they are simply ‘poor’ isn’t really right. They’re not short of money, but short of puff.

On Sunday, the preacher said it meant, ‘Blessed are the humble’. Humble. Not people who think they are big-shots. People who know their limitations. Again, that’s not what the Greek says literally, but you could argue that it’s closer to what the words really imply. In need – lacking; in spirit – in self-esteem, say: so, humble, lacking in self-esteem.

Blessed are the poor in spirit. Think about it a bit, and think what it means for you. Are you humble? Are you running out of puff? Never mind. You are blessed.

But when are you blessed? The other thing you can say about the Beatitudes, and obviously specifically about this first one, is that they are a vision of the future, a vision of the kingdom of God, which Jesus is promising to his followers, but which hasn’t happened yet.

Things may be awful now, but in the world to come it’ll all come right. There might be a snag in this; because you might think, on the basis of this passage, that it was all right to tolerate slavery and oppression in this life, keeping people oppressed, but pacifying them by giving them an assurance that they are on target to inherit heavenly blessings later. That would conflict with what I think is the the heart of the revolutionary message that Jesus gives us.

Those bits of the Sermon on the Mount don’t mean, put up with bad things now because you will be all right later in heaven; but rather, you must do this extra thing, go the extra mile, and not just pay back evil for evil: you must even love your enemy. And the reason for doing that is because it’s the right thing to do, not because it leads to a payoff in heaven.

People often say that the Sermon on the Mount is all very well, but it is just not practical. It demands more than mortal man is capable of. But then you read about people like Nelson Mandela. People can do those impossibly generous things that Jesus recommended. They really can. Really? People like that must need to be saints, you might say.

It’s a good point to make, especially at this time in the Christian year, when we do think about saints. Sunday was All Saints’ Day and the list of the various Beatitudes is, if you like, a list of the things which mark out a saint. Saints – in Latin the word is ‘sancti’ – are people who are marked out, distinguished, holy – holy, which is another word which means the same thing, separate, kept apart from the general run of people. But not necessarily marked out because they’re exceptionally virtuous.

The things that Jesus blesses are all characteristics of saints; but they aren’t superhuman; they are ordinary characteristics, ordinary virtues. Anyone can be a saint. Anyone in any of our churches could be a saint.

St Paul addressed his letters to the ‘saints’ in the various churches he was writing to, and it’s clear that he was just writing to the people in the pews. For example in his First Letter to the Corinthians he wrote: [This is from] ‘Paul, 
. unto the Church of God which is at Corinth, to them that are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints’. Sanctified – there’s the ‘sancti’ word – but I don’t think there’s any suggestion that he was only writing to part of the congregation, just to the good guys. He was writing to all of them.

When you work through the list of the Beatitudes you will realise that it is far from being a catalogue of success or perfection; it’s a catalogue full of weakness and need, the sort of thing that ordinary people suffer from. Jesus is affirming that. He is saying that in the kingdom, people like that, ordinary people, will be saints. Just as they are, they will go marching in.

So be a saint: be a peacemaker; be gentle in spirit, care about justice; you are allowed to be sad; people may make fun of you or even actively persecute you for trying to do all these things as a Christian. But don’t worry; you are a saint; you are blessed, and you do have a place in heaven.

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St Michael and St Francis

By publicsquare
October 8, 2020 //
0

Sermon for 4th October 2020 – St Michael and All Angels (transferred from 29th September); St Francis of Assisi: Animal Welfare Sunday: on Zoom

Revelation 12:7-12; Luke 15:3-7 (see http://bible.oremus.org/?ql=468720899)

St Francis of Assisi (unknown artist), from https://www.britannica.com/biography/Saint-Francis-of-Assisi/images-videos, accessed 8th October 2020

Today we commemorate St Michael and All Angels, and St Francis and his love for animals. 

Blessings of the animals and pet services are usually great fun, especially for the children – although perhaps a bit less so for their parents, who have to catch the hamsters, cats and other exotic creatures which escape from their baskets during the service. We don’t have that problem, because all our pets are with us at home and they are only appearing and being blessed, like us, on Zoom. But I still think that it is important that our beloved animals, our furry friends, should have the benefit of a blessing at least once a year. In saying Saint Francis’ prayer and in blessing the animals, as we’re going to do, we are giving thanks for all God’s work in creation. 

But what about those angels? I am what is called a liberal theologian, which means (among other things) that I am not wedded to taking everything in the Bible absolutely literally. I think this passage about war breaking out in heaven and the battle between Michael and his angels and the Dragon, known as Satan and the Devil on other occasions, is a good case in point. I dare say if we were in the south of Italy, where they are more used to miracles, we would hear this lesson from the book of Revelation without batting an eyelid. We wouldn’t be too troubled about exactly where heaven was or what the Dragon really represented – or indeed possibly who the Devil was. But we do understand the contrast between good and evil and the way in which frequently, in order to uphold the right and the good, there has to be a battle. 

‘Guido Reni’s resplendently theatrical depiction of St Michael, part Roman soldier, part ballet dancer, was painted in 1635 and can be seen in the church of Santa Maria della Consolazione in Rome.’ (Andrew Graham-Dixon at https://www.andrewgrahamdixon.com/archive/itp-238-st-michael-archangel-by-guido-reni.html, accessed 8th October 2020)

We will notice in passing that it is not George who slays the Dragon but Michael, although the stories are a bit similar. Also there is seemingly a second fight. It’s not just Michael. The good angels have conquered the serpent as well, the Dragon, ‘by the blood of the Lamb, by the word of their testimony and by their willingness to die’ for the cause.

So there are perhaps two stories here. One is the story of the war in heaven between Archangel Michael and the great dragon, a.k.a. Lucifer, the devil; and the other, where salvation is achieved and victory over evil by the blood of the lamb. 

In Jewish tradition there is this idea of a scapegoat, which could also be a ‘scape-lamb’; you read in Leviticus chapter 16 how this is supposed to work sacramentally, where all the sins of the people are symbolically loaded on the back of a lamb or a goat which is then cast off into the desert. In a sacramental sense, the scapegoat ‘takes the burden’ of the people’s sins, and dies for those sins. You can say that the lamb died for the sake of the people’s sin. It is very similar to the idea of what Jesus has done, ‘dying for our sins’ on the cross.

The Scapegoat, by William Holman Hunt (1854-1856) in the Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight

Liberal theologians like me have difficulty with the idea that a loving God would have demanded a human sacrifice, but certainly we can follow the development of the idea of the ‘atonement’, as it is called, by Jesus on the cross, by looking at the Jewish tradition of the scapegoat. 

You might think, from this story of the scapegoat, that people at the time of Jesus might not have been very nice to animals. But I don’t think we can necessarily draw that conclusion. There are many instances in the Bible where Jesus appears to love and care for animals. In the sermon on the Mount: ‘Behold the fowls of the air: they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them’ [Matt.6:26]; and as we can see in the parable of the lost sheep and indeed the other parable of the good Shepherd, Jesus certainly didn’t just think of lambs in the context of sacrifice, but rather as animals to love and care for. 

And this is one of the things which produced Saint Francis of Assisi’s distinctive theology, his famous preaching to the animals and his love for all creation. ‘Brother Sun’ and ‘Brother Moon’, for instance. So on this feast of Saint Francis of Assisi it’s entirely right that we should bless the animals and bring them before the Lord in prayer. In a minute I will ask you to find your pets or pet pictures and put them up for a blessing.

But first, a final thought. This is the last of these Zoom Eucharists and we have become, I think, a proper little congregation. A proper little flock. Soon we will return to the various churches that we came from, as they are able to reopen for worship.

It seems to me that it would be nice to do something, to give some tangible expression to our gathering in the name of the Lord, every Sunday for the last few months. We could, of course, pass the plate round, and we would have to do it virtually using PayPal or something similar. But I think I’ve got a better idea. 

It occurred to me that on the day when we are blessing the animals, we should try to help our various zoos – Regent’s Park,  Whipsnade, Chester and Bristol (where I still hear Johnny Morris in my head) and all the others. They are all having a very hard time. Feeding all the animals at Regent’s Park, at London Zoo, for example, costs ÂŁ1 million per month. So my suggestion is that, as we give thanks for creation and all the wonderful animals that the Lord has created, we should all consider taking a trip to the nearest zoo to where we are in the next week or two. I think that zoos are eminently safe places to visit even in the Covid epidemic, and the price of admission, if enough people turn up, will help to restore their finances. [Donations – https://tinyurl.com/y2m75jd4, https://www.chesterzoo.org/support-us/, https://bristolzoo.org.uk/save-wildlife/bristol-zoological-society-appeal, or to help a wonderful zoo in Hamburg, https://www.hagenbeck.de/de/_news/tierpark/Unterstuetzung_FAQ.php ]

We shouldn’t forget that the animals themselves will be very pleased to see us, because, as we ourselves have found, being locked down in quarantine with nobody to see is very lonely and no fun. I think that Jesus the Good Shepherd would want you to find out where your nearest zoo is and go and see all the lovely animals in it, very soon. 

Blessing of the Animals

Now we are going to bless all animals. If you have any with you, or any pictures of animals whom you used to have, please do bring them into the picture.

Blessed are you, Lord God, maker of all living creatures. 

You called forth fish in the sea, birds in the air and animals on the land. 

You inspired Saint Francis to call all of them his brothers and sisters. 

We ask you to bless all animals, and those which are or were our pets. 

By the power of your love, enable them to live in peace and harmony. 

May we always praise you for all your beauty in creation. 

Blessed are you, Lord our God, in all your creatures!

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Loose Talk

By publicsquare
September 6, 2020 //
0

Sermon for the 13th Sunday after Trinity, 6th September 2020

Matt. 18:15-20 – see http://bible.oremus.org/?ql=466402456

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about people and things that I disagree with. Not just because I’m a cantankerous old bloke – although that may well be true – but because I think that we seem to be going through a period when attitudes are hardening and people seem less inclined, in some areas, to try to meet each other half way and settle their differences.

You know, what do people think about some of the controversies out there today? What do people think about refugees? Immigration? Black Lives Matter? What about Cecil Rhodes – that one’s near to home for me, as I’m the secretary of the Oriel College alumni. Do people think the government is doing a good job? Does an MP represent all their constituents, or just the ones who elected them? I’m not asking you to express a view, but just to focus on the thought that these are some of the things that people disagree very strongly about today.

Jesus was telling his disciples how to deal with disputes in the early church. ‘Try to reason with someone; if they won’t come round to your point of view, take a couple of the others with you and see if they’ll be impressed by the fact that it’s not just you who thinks in a certain way, so they’ll realise they’re the one who’s got it wrong. If that doesn’t convince them, put it to the congregation, and see what they all think.

But of course, if the person still won’t change, you’ll have to kick them out, and once again they’ll just be like the great unwashed, not with us anymore; beyond the pale.

And if you follow this plan, you’ll be doing the right thing. However you play it, it will be made in heaven. Because whenever two or three of you get together for something to do with the church, I’m going to be right there alongside you.’

It sounds good. Just follow these simple ideas and all will be sweetness and light. But unfortunately, it isn’t. As well as the controversies that I’ve mentioned, what about the ones which are in the church itself, even today, about same-sex marriage, for example?

You might say, see what the Bible says. But finding a definitive answer is more complicated than just turning up our Bibles to find out what Jesus told us, and trying to carry out literally what we find there.

That’s partly because the Bible often needs some interpretation. Translations can get in the way. For instance here: ’Try to reason with someone’ – what sort of someone? Someone who, according to what we’ve just read, is ‘a member of the church’, who ‘sins’ against you.

Actually what the Greek original says, is, ‘If your brother makes a mistake’. In recent years we have adopted a translation which says that the word ‘brother’ in this kind of context, about the early church, means ‘brother or sister’, and that they were called that as a way of identifying them as Christians, members of the church.

Maybe it doesn’t really matter. But to me, the word ‘brothers’ (and certainly I would accept that ‘brother’ in this means also ‘sister’) means a relationship much closer than mere ‘membership’. I’ve paid my subscription; but do you know? I hardly ever go to that club.

What has the other member, or the brother, even, done? Have they ‘sinned’? The word is a Greek word (áŒ€ÎŒÎ±ÏÏ„ÎźÏƒáżƒ) which is often translated as to ‘sin’. It means originally to ‘miss the mark’, or miss the target. Theologians today interpret the idea of ‘sin’ not so much as a mistake, a missed target, but as a separation from God, which is much more serious.

If someone is up the pole, or has got the wrong end of the stick, you may well want to put them straight. But how can you convince them that you are right and they are wrong? Jesus suggests that there is power in numbers. If loads of you all think that black is white, maybe I should believe you.

People dig in and become stubborn when they think that fundamental truths are being challenged. But I just wonder what would become of some of those entrenched views, if we were a bit more tentative rather than always being dogmatic. Is it really so fundamental that if you don’t come round to my way of thinking, I may have to ditch our friendship and have nothing more to do with you? If it’s really a ‘sin’, maybe so. But if it’s just an honest mistake? Surely not.

Just in passing, this passage in St Matthew does have in it a phrase which came from the translations – it started in the King James Bible, or perhaps with Tyndale – which bugs me. That is verse 18 of chapter 18: ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.’

What is this ‘binding’ and ‘loosing’? To ‘loose’ something isn’t even English these days. We might ‘loosen’ something; but the real sense of the word is something like to ‘untie’ or ‘release’ something. And I don’t mean that common spelling mistake where people write ‘loose’ when they mean ‘lose’. I don’t think that’s what it is here. And ‘binding’? The idea is the same as the making of an agreement or a contract, a symbolic binding – or indeed a throw-back to parchment scrolls, mementoes of old agreements, bound, tied up, with string – just as barristers’ briefs are still bound up with pink string today.

So it’s something serious, so serious that its documents are bound up in pink string. But the modern translators must have been having a tough day somewhere else when ‘binding’ and ‘loosing’ came up. Those are no longer the right words. Something like ‘forbid’ and ‘allow’ is better. Not ‘loose’, please.

So – how are we to know, who is right or not? It makes me think a bit about what the Archbishop of Canterbury said about Brexit, that we should learn to ‘disagree well’. One commentator (the former Dean of Exeter, Dr Jonathan Draper, in ‘Modern Believing, 61.2 2020 at p.120, see https://doi.org/10.3828/mb.2020.7)’ has written, for example, that ‘The process of Brexit has exposed our failures to listen’. He’s saying that we aren’t agreeing with one another because we haven’t really listened to each other’s point of view. That sounds good. But surely there is no point listening, if what is being said is nonsense.

I’m a bit puzzled also by the words that, according to St Matthew, Jesus used to describe people whom we can’t persuade, who are therefore to be kicked out, beyond the pale. You must treat them as you would a ‘heathen or a tax-collector’. But surely Jesus was quite happy to hang around with tax collectors and sinners, wasn’t He? Maybe, given that he was talking to his disciples, who were Jewish, it made sense to use a description they would recognise of people whom they wouldn’t have anything to do with, such as unbelievers and the hated taxmen.

So what did Jesus say we should do, to resolve these knotty disagreements? I think that that’s the point of His famous saying about where two or three are gathered together.

He’s saying that as Christians we should act in the knowledge that He, the risen Christ, is there among us. And our churches should not shy away from confronting those things which are not consistent with his commandments of love.

Sometimes people do say, ‘What would Jesus have done?’ Or ‘What would Jesus do?’ And it’s not hard to know, really, if we feel him present with us, in His Holy Spirit. Then as St Paul put it, we are ‘in Christ.’ Christ is in us. So come, Lord Jesus. Two or three of us are gathered together in your name.

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Rule, Britannia?

By publicsquare
August 26, 2020 //
1

‘Rule, Britannia,

Britannia rules the waves,

And Britons never, never, never

Shall be slaves.’

The fuss about not having the words to ‘Rule, Britannia’ and “Land of Hope and Glory“ at the Last Night of the Proms this year is not something which should be dismissed as “cringing embarrassment about our history“, as the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, has described it. 

This is not something which only bleeding-heart liberals, so-called, have raked up; it is, though, a surprise. These quasi-national anthems, thumpingly delivered to 6,000 people in the Royal Albert Hall, are deeply embedded in our culture. It feels a bit unnatural to be parsing them in detail to see what they actually mean. 

They are surely, it will be said, just harmless noise, collectively joined in by everybody at occasions like the Last Night of the Proms, where we celebrate our Britishness. Why make a fuss? The problem is that when the Prime Minister talks about our stopping ‘our embarrassment about our history’, we ought to ask, “Who are ‘we’, who are being told not to be embarrassed about ‘our’ history?”

Nesrine Malik, of the Guardian, has written a very cogent article (see https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/aug/24/british-hypocrisy-migrants?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other) about British hypocrisy in the context of questions of race. There is widespread support for the idea behind Black Lives Matter; and I think that most British people are appalled at what has come out about the WINDRUSH scandal; but, as Nesrine Malik has pointed out, very few people seem to make the connection between Black Lives Matter, racial profiling by the police, the ‘hostile environment’ so-called (euphemistically retitled the ‘compliant’ environment) pursued by the Home Office in relation to immigration, and the fact that there is a huge majority in parliament for the party which is responsible for these reprehensible policies. This has done nothing to improve the lot of black people, and indeed the situation is arguably worse now. 

So who are “we”, for whom Boris Johnson thinks “
 it’s time we stopped our cringing embarrassment about our history”? And who are the ‘Britons’ who ‘never 
 shall be slaves’? I’ve been to the Last Night of the Proms. There were very few black people there. To the extent that a cultural tradition is being celebrated it is not the cultural tradition of everyone in the UK. The ‘we’ that Boris Johnson refers to are not black Britons. To “rule the waves” (something which modern maritime law, for reasons of safety at sea, makes very difficult in the English Channel, for example), is an expression which can only make sense in the context of empire. 

But why on earth should one nation have any right to rule over any others? This is a completely outdated concept, susceptible to the usual zero-sum analysis: forasmuch as it is good to rule, it is correspondingly worse to be ruled – and in this country today we have representatives who have experienced both. 

Only one side could worry about having any ‘cringing embarrassment’ about their history. For the other side, their history is all about the indignities of being ruled. 

By all means let us learn about it, not in unthinking celebration, but in the same way that Germans are encouraged to ensure that they do not forget the history of the Holocaust. By the same token, we should not forget what we did to our colonial subjects in the past. 

You see, it’s absolutely vital to identify your point of view. 

If you are a white Anglo-Saxon you have a view of history which is entirely different from what a black person of African or Indian or West Indian heritage will have. Neither white nor black is inherently more worthy.

So if people come forward to say that it is wrong to suppress ‘wholesome songs which draw the nation together’, such as ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ and ‘Rule, Britannia’, this should be challenged. They do not draw all the nation together, but only some of it, the white Anglo-Saxon bit. The others, a substantial minority, are not drawn together so much as repelled and made to feel alien in their own country.

I freely admit that, because I am an elderly white Anglo-Saxon, it hadn’t occurred to me that there was a bad side to ‘Rule Britannia’ and ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. But (apart from the fact that they are hopelessly corny, and ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ is horribly pompous) they are bad; in the light of our raised consciousness now, perhaps as a result of Black Lives Matter, we know better. Just as racist football chants have been outlawed on the terraces, middle-class colonialist racist and nationalist anthems equally should be put aside. 

Surely there is a challenge for the Poet Laureate or another poet – Roger McGough, say – to bring out some new words to the old tunes. What would a modern ‘Rule Britannia’ celebrate? Surely not world domination. 

Instead, a national anthem (or its surrogate) should surely be celebrating our friendship with other nations and our reliability as trading partners; our upholding the rule of law, both internally and internationally; and our charitable outlook, welcoming refugees. Now where is John Betjeman, when we need him most?

Hugh Bryant

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And Mary said …

By publicsquare
August 16, 2020 //
0

Luke 1:46-55 – The Magnificat – see http://bible.oremus.org/?ql=464171095

‘And Mary said, ‘My soul doth magnify the Lord’. Really? Is that really what Mary, the mother of Jesus, said? Now what Mary is reported by Luke as saying, saying to the other rather unlikely mother, Elisabeth, the wife of Zechariah, was, of course, not transcribed from a dictaphone recording. Dr Luke was writing it up, 40 or 50 years later. These are the words that Luke felt that Mary would most likely have said, after the angel Gabriel had visited her and told her that she would have a baby who would be the Son of God. Picture the scene. ‘Hello Mary! I’m an angel. Call me Gabriel. You’re going to have a baby. He is going to be the Son of God.’ Y’know. As you do.

As you do? No – you don’t. It’s not a normal thing. What would you have said, if you were in Mary’s place? Some of Mary’s words are, indeed, what you’d expect her to have said: but other bits are more hypothetical, more speculative; they come more from St Luke, from Luke reflecting on the true meaning of the earth-shattering event which Mary was about to undergo. On the one hand, there is nothing too far-fetched about having Mary say, ‘My spirit rejoices’ because ‘.. he has looked with favour on the lowliness of his servant’. She’s saying, God has chosen me, an ordinary girl, to do the second most important thing for the world after its original creation. That is the sort of thing you’d have expected Mary to have said.

But what about this other bit: ‘
 he has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts’, or ‘He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly;

he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty’? Is that really something that Mary would have said? Because those are really quite revolutionary ideas. Let’s think a bit about them.

When Mary was visited by the angel Gabriel, so far as we know, the rich were still comfortably situated; the Emperor, the Roman emperor, still had his clothes – and his mighty armies. The lowly were still poor and lowly. The hungry were still hungry. God hadn’t actually done any of the things which Mary was supposed to be celebrating.

St Luke was putting words into Mary’s mouth, thinking what Gabriel’s visit to Mary really meant. It meant that God wanted to upset the established order. Luke knew what Jesus was going to do, what the true values would be, in the Kingdom of God. No more inequality; no more rich people getting more in one day than whole countries’ worth of what ordinary people could earn in their lifetimes.

You know that Jeff Bezos, the boss of Amazon, is said to have ‘earned’ – well, earned; perhaps a better word would be ‘come by’, or ‘trousered’, or ‘blagged’ – $14billion in one day, recently. And, incidentally, he tried to reduce the salaries of his employees on the same day. What a hero. Now God, according to Mary in the Magnificat, would definitely ‘send the rich away empty’. That means Mr Bezos. Amazon Prime to Amazon Zero. God will send the rich away empty.

Mary’s words, Mary’s rant, even, is a vision of the Kingdom of God. What do we think about that? Do we just hope, and pray, that things will eventually, miraculously, become fairer, and no-one will want for anything? Because if so, after 2,000 years, we’re still waiting. Or do we believe that God needs people, people to be His hands and feet, to be his eyes and ears?

If that’s how it’s supposed to work, then what the the Kingdom needs is activists. It needs people who are prepared to work really hard to change things for the better. Maybe their activism will even verge on being revolutionary. Activists. So who are these activists? Are there any activists about today?

I found some the other day, in what might seem to be a rather unlikely place. They were in ‘Vogue’ magazine. Yes really, ‘Vogue’. I’m hoping we can show the cover of the latest edition on our screen. There it is.

There on the front cover with the supermodel Adwoa Aboah, is Marcus Rashford, the Manchester United footballer, who made a fuss and persuaded the government to provide school meals for poor children during the holidays; and inside there are many more people who are called the ‘faces of hope’, working in many ways as activists to bring hope where previously there was none.

I assure you that I’m not a secret employee of the publishers CondĂ© Nast. I’m not on commission based on how many copies of Vogue you buy. But it is worth a look. There are many inspiring stories – and, reflecting the rise of Black Lives Matter, for once the stars in this glossiest magazine are all black. Beautiful black people.

Hmm. In the Song of Songs the bride sings – as you can hear in Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610 – ‘Nigra sum, sed formosa’, ‘I am black, but beautiful’. ‘But’ beautiful. That’s the only false note in that beautiful song. Not ‘but’ beautiful, but ‘and’ beautiful is what it should be. And the editor of ‘Vogue’ has celebrated that. He is Edward Enninful, and he is an activist.

What else about these activists? A common feature of all their stories is that they all say their activism builds a sense of community, or having values and friendship in common with each other. So would the Blessed Virgin Mary count as an activist today?

I’m sure she would – maybe in a similar way to some of the beautiful people portrayed in ‘Vogue’, as icons to be followed, to be copied. Faces of hope.

Because what else does this make you think about? Surely we can loop back from our world today to the first century AD. The stories of the activists in Vogue are very reminiscent of the stories of the early Christians. They were activists; they were a community; they had everything in common. They would lift up the lowly and fill the hungry with good things. Build up your community – support your local food bank, say – isn’t that just another way of saying, ‘Love your neighbour’?

That might prompt you to think again about Mary’s song, Mary’s rant, the Magnificat, as it’s called. Because ‘magnificat’ is Latin for ‘bigged up’, ‘magnified’, ‘made more of’; as the hymn puts it: ‘Tell out, my soul, the greatness of the Lord’. And the Magnificat, sung by a cathedral choir, is one of the highlights in Evensong, that lovely service, that you can hear on Radio 3 twice a week – this afternoon at 3 and then on Wednesday at the same time – or on any day in the Cathedral at 5.30 (in normal times). It’s something you might just let flow over you in its beauty. Well, you mustn’t stop enjoying the Magnificat – but do remember that it is a call to action, to be an activist, for God.

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The Feeding of the Five Thousand

By publicsquare
August 2, 2020 //
0

Sermon for the Eighth Sunday after Trinity, 2nd August 2020

Matthew 14:13-21 – see http://bible.oremus.org/?ql=463368596

When I saw that the Gospel reading for today was the story of the feeding of the 5000, my first reaction was to be very pleased. Everybody knows that story, and there are lots of things that you can say, that it illustrates, about Jesus and his teaching. It’s in all the gospels, but in St Matthew’s version, which Gail has just read for us, we have the least detailed version. For example it does not talk, as some of the other gospels do, about Jesus getting the people to sit down in groups of 50. 100 groups of 50 people – that really brings home the scale of the feeding problem.

There are lots of things that you can talk about. Bishop Jo, in her sermon for today, which you can see on YouTube, (see https://youtu.be/EqGmtC-Rlio) concentrates on Jesus’ order to the people to sit down. She spends quite a lot of time on the theology of sitting down, and also how to tell people how to sit down. Apparently when she and her husband Sam Wells were working in the United States, at Duke University in North Carolina, he got taken to task for saying to people, ‘Please sit down’, which apparently is not sufficiently polite. In the southern States the correct thing to say is, ‘You may sit down’. Sitting down and taking it easy for a moment has its benefits.

And then again, you can make a lot out of Jesus looking up to heaven, blessing and breaking the loaves of bread, (and, presumably, doing something similar with the fish), and then distributing them; it certainly could remind you of Holy Communion, and perhaps is supposed to be a sign that Jesus was pointing forward, towards that sacrament.

We use the expression ‘to break bread together’ as a shorthand for having a meal, and I have heard preachers deliver long and abstruse analyses of the menu on the shore of the Sea of Galilee that day; that Jesus was handing out fish and chips, or rather, not literally fish and chips, but the Palestinian equivalent.

It’s interesting that there has been some fuss on social media recently because Mr Rees-Mogg, the MP, has a sister, who rejoices in the name of Annunziata, who has been giving advice to poor people about the virtues of making their own chips as opposed to buying them ready-made. It doesn’t touch on the question whether poor people, or indeed any people, should be eating chips, especially these days, in the light of the Prime Minister‘s campaign for the people to lose weight.

As some of you know, two weeks ago I ceased to be the general manager of Cobham Area Foodbank, after seven years, right back to the foundation of the Foodbank. I still have a tendency to see things relevant to food banks in all sorts of different contexts.

So obviously, Jesus feeding the 5000, in fact feeding them with something that Burger King used to refer to as a Fish King, a piece of fish in a burger bun, (or anyway wrapped in bread) – which was much loved by my children when they were little – that reminds me of all those times when I had to answer questions about what food people should donate to the food bank.

A Fish King from Burger King

What do poor people eat? Well, I would explain that the Foodbank gives out a nutritionally balanced parcel intended to sustain a family until the next time that the Foodbank opens. In our case this was one week. It is not the case that we just provide pasta and beans and other cheap things, because, as I tried to explain, the Foodbank clients, poor people who can’t afford to buy food, are human beings.

They are not a special breed of people who only live on pasta and beans. They are human beings just like you and me. So the real answer to the question, ‘What shall I give to the Foodbank?’ is not what’s cheap, but rather, “What would you like to eat?” And what would you think would be good to eat and nutritious? You don’t live on baked beans all the time – or at least I really hope that you don’t – and it’s the same with food bank clients. They need a variety of things. They need protein, even if it comes in tins.

Well I could have gone into great detail about that, and compared Annunziata Rees-Mogg’s recommended diet for poor people with what a food bank actually provides, noting on the way that Jesus followed the same principles as our Foodbank. ‘Man shall not live by bread alone’ – because, He provided some fish as well.

But the thing is that I bet that none of you actually think of this story as being just about all those rather abstruse points. Indeed I get a bit fed up when I hear sermons which don’t deal with the obvious things which I think leap out of stories in the Bible.

The obvious thing, that you would notice when you read it for the first time, is that Jesus somehow managed to feed 5000 people – or actually more than 5000 people, because it says that it was 5000 men, plus women and children – with five loaves of bread and two fish. How on earth could He do that?

I can’t honestly remember what my Mum or my Dad said in answer to that question when I first asked it when I was little, but I bet you that it had something to do with miracles. Miraculum, a Latin word – something to admire, something the be astonished at. Are we allowed to talk about miracles, or are we too grown-up? Do you believe in miracles?

When I went to Rome in October for the canonisation of John Henry Newman, I was reminded that Newman was only allowed to become a saint in the Roman Catholic Church when they had discovered and verified two miracles that he had performed, miracles of healing. Many people today do still believe in miracles. They believe in what Saint Athanasius or Saint Thomas Aquinas argued, that miracles are there to demonstrate that Jesus was not just a man like you or me, but he was also God and he had divine powers.

It’s not all straightforward. Think of Jesus being tempted in the desert, to jump down from the pinnacle of the temple for example. Satan wanted him to do all sorts of miraculous things which only someone with divine powers would be able to do. But he didn’t do it. But Jesus does go around healing people. Indeed, in this story it begins by Jesus ‘having compassion’ on the crowd and healing some people who were sick. No details. It’s just very simply said, in one word, ‘he healed’.

People say that scientific knowledge has pushed out the need for us to explain things by talking about God. CS Lewis however wrote a whole book, ‘Miracles’, against what he called the ‘naturalistic’ as opposed to the ‘supernatural’, the more-than-natural. Laws of nature, by themselves, don’t explain everything: that if nature governs everything, there is a contradiction at the heart of it. That is, who created nature? Was that creator subject to the laws of nature?

So over against that is the argument that there is more to it than what we can discover by scientific enquiry. More to it – let’s say, that ‘more’ is God. We can fairly uncontroversially define God as the ultimate creator and sustainer of life, all powerful and all knowing. Present everywhere: omnipresent.

But he could be what Richard Dawkins calls the blind watchmaker, the ultimate creator, who set the mechanism of the world in being, and then let it get on by itself. We as Christians bring up against that things such as the feeding of the 5000. We bring up the fact of Jesus Christ. The fact that Jesus Christ lived and died, in the early years of the first century of the Common Era, is very well attested in conventional history.

We can argue that the story of Jesus would not still be so well-known today and it would not be the case that the Christian religion would be growing so strongly as it is (you have to remember that growth in South America and the Far East is far greater than in the north of Europe) – Christianity would not indeed be the fastest growing religion in the world, if Jesus Christ had been just an ordinary human like you or me.

So the point of this sermon, in case you had not realised, is that the feeding of the 5000 is a miracle, and as a miracle it is a sign of God at work in Jesus.

So in a way I hope that you don’t have a Fish King from Burger King for lunch; but if you do, please do remember that a forerunner of the Fish King was Jesus’ favoured menu.

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