Sermon for Evensong on the Sunday after Ascension Day, 2nd June 2019

Psalm 68; Isaiah 44:1-8, Ephesians 4:7-16 – see http://bible.oremus.org/?ql=426327011

‘I believe in God’ – we believe in God – ‘the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ his only son, our Lord, who was: …. conceived …. born … crucified … buried …. descended …. rose again … ascended,… and sitteth on the right hand of God the father almighty’.

On Thursday we celebrated Ascension Day. At the beginning of the Acts of the Apostles, when the disciples were all together and Jesus appeared to them, after he had been resurrected from the dead, he said to them, ‘You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you’. When he had said this, ‘as they watched, he was lifted up and a cloud removed him from their sight’. (Acts 1:9)

The first bit points to what we’re going to remember and celebrate next Sunday, that is, the coming of the Holy Spirit, Whit Sunday, Pentecost. But this is the Sunday after the Ascension, and we are still thinking about Jesus’ Ascension: up, down, ascending, descending – disappearing.

It’s quite interesting that the Ascension is only described twice in the Bible, in Acts and in Luke chapter 24, which some scholars think may be a late addition. So possibly it is only the second book of Luke’s gospel, the book of Acts, that tells you anything about the Ascension.

Prof. John Barton, in his new and very good book, A History of the Bible, [2019, London, Allen Lane], makes the point that our creeds date from the second and third centuries AD and reflect the concerns of the church at that time. (Barton pp 326-330). The things that they thought were important then, creation, the Virgin Birth, suffering under Pontius Pilate, being crucified, dead and buried, being resurrected from the dead, ascending into heaven and then sitting in judgement at the end of time, have been emphasised and at the same time have cut out Jesus’ healing miracles and his teaching – there’s nothing in the creeds about them. Raising Jairus’ daughter, bringing Lazarus back to life, turning water into wine, feeding the 5,000: nothing: turning the other cheek, loving your enemies, the Sermon on the Mount: not mentioned. Not even Jesus’ New Commandment, that ye love one another, even as He has loved you: not mentioned.

This sifting out of what the church considered to be important, what Prof Barton calls its ‘rule of faith’, is quite challenging for us. It’s not obvious to us why the Ascension should be given such prominence, should be in the creeds, whereas loving one’s enemies and being a Good Samaritan aren’t.

I think that we would all say quite categorically that, although we believe the things in the Creed, we also believe in the other things as being very important in our Christian witness. Those important things should include trying to carry out the teaching of Jesus, trying to love our neighbours as ourselves.

It’s very clear that, when we try to understand the divine, to understand how God works, what God is, that we can only grasp things in a very partial way. It may be that, although the Ascension doesn’t get mentioned very much in the Bible, there is no reason why it shouldn’t be a key belief. Our lessons today and our psalm emphasise the power and might of God – and the Ascension is one aspect of that power, an illustration of it.

There is a children’s hymn which has always made me smile, ‘Our God is a great big God’. I suppose it makes me smile partly because that sort of language, a great big God, encourages you to think of a mighty figure high above the clouds, up to whom you would go, and up to him, as his father, Jesus went.

In our Psalm, 68, we see this ‘great big God’: there are some wonderful images in Psalm 68, which I commend to you. We only sang the first six verses, but if you’d like to get your little blue Prayer Books out again and turn to page 426, you can follow it again. [Page numbering from the Cambridge edition]

‘O sing unto God, and sing praises unto his Name 

 magnify him that rideth upon the heavens, as it were upon an horse; praise him in his Name JAH, and rejoice before him.

  He is a Father of the fatherless, and defendeth the cause of the widows 

 even God in his holy habitation.

  He is the God that maketh men to be of one mind in an house’ – he makes people agree together – ‘and bringeth the prisoners out of captivity’… And then there’s a splendid line, ‘…  but [God] letteth the runagates continue in scarceness.’

I wondered what ‘runagates’ were. If you just turn that word over in your mind, listening to it, you suddenly realise that it is the same word as ‘renegades’. And indeed the dictionary confirms that. Renegades, the bad people, ‘continue in scarceness’. They have short commons.

It’s the same kind of god that Isaiah, as well, is proclaiming in our first lesson.

‘I will pour water upon him that is thirsty, and floods upon the dry ground: I will pour my spirit upon thy seed, and my blessing upon thine offspring’.

This is the God of creation, but also the God who sustains as well as creates. Pouring spirit upon seed; only God can make things live. Think of St Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians chapter 15, where he talks about how resurrection to eternal life works, with a seed, being fertilised again.

St Paul again, in his Letter to the Ephesians, has this wonderful sentence, quoting Psalm 68,

‘When he ascended up on high, he led captivity captive, and gave gifts unto men.’

It has two examples of what I’m sure you will all immediately identify as a Cognate Accusative – the example in the textbooks is usually to ‘die the death’. Here we have, to ‘capture captivity’, which is what it literally says in the Greek, and to ‘give gifts’. It’s a figure of rhetoric where the object in the sentence is the substantive of the verb. It’s sometimes called a ‘cognate object’. ‘Cognate’ means ‘known by’. He captured captivity, he led captivity captive – and he gave gifts.

There is a nod to the ‘man upstairs’: ‘He ascended up on high’. And that of course makes Paul, in his Letter to the Ephesians, tackle the logical implications of that. ‘Now that he ascended, what is it but that he also descended first into the lower parts of the earth?’ A number of preachers down the ages have taken this literally, and explored whether, in this period before the Ascension, Jesus went down into Hades, into Hell.

But just a minute! I don’t think I can get much further in this sermon without someone calling me out for talking arrant nonsense. The fact is that these days, or at least since Bishop John Robinson’s ‘Honest to God’ in 1960, we just don’t think of God as being anywhere in particular, located anywhere either up or down. If we talk about heaven, sitting at the right hand of God, ascending up on high and so on, we must of necessity be talking figuratively. Because the minute you allow God to be defined in time and space, he can no longer be the ultimate creator. In order to be omnipotent, to be the ultimate creator, God must be outside the confines of space and time. Therefore he isn’t up there or down there or out there, or anywhere in particular.

But there would be something terribly bleak about worshipping a god whom you could not visualise. I suppose the opposite of that is the Jewish way in which no one can speak the name of God. We see this again in Psalm 68 in verse four. God is called JAH. There are no vowels in Hebrew, so JAH represents ‘Jehovah’, the name of God. We need pictures. We need images: the picture is a picture of heaven.

There are some wonderful pictures in Psalm 68, which I commend to you. We only sang the first six verses, but if you’d like to get your little blue Prayer Books out again and turn to page 426, you can follow it again.

‘The earth shook, the heavens also dropped at the presence of God’

‘Thou, O God, sentest a gracious rain upon thine inheritance 

 and refreshedst it when it was weary.’

You can just see these people plodding through the desert. ‘Lone and dreary, faint and weary, through the desert thou didst go’ [Lead us, heavenly Father, lead us – James Edmeston, 1791-1867 – Common Worship hymn 496, v2].

Again in Psalm 68:

‘Kings with their armies did flee, and were discomfited’

‘Though ye have lien among the pots, yet shall ye be as the wings of a dove’.

The modern translations actually duck this. What is having a lien among the pots? I think it means, having a lien is being tied up, tied up with household chores. Having a lien among the pots – but you will have the wings of a dove! A dove with silver wings and feathers like gold.

Then there are these hills. God’s hill. You remember the second chapter of the book of Isaiah:

‘Come ye, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; and he will teach us of his ways, and we will walk in his paths: for out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.

And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.’

That’s what happens on the mountain of the Lord. And here in Psalm 68,

‘Why hop ye so, ye high hills? this is God’s hill, in the which it pleaseth him to dwell.’

Again, modern translations don’t try to translate the hopping business. I have a feeling that the translators of the King James Bible have introduced a glorious and rather touching image of people in a crowd, towards the back of the crowd, jumping up and down, hopping, in order to try to see over taller people in front, to see what is going on. ‘Why hop ye so, ye high hills?’ However high you are, God’s hill is higher.

And then,

‘Thou art gone up on high, thou hast led captivity captive, and received gifts for men’.

The wording which St Paul quotes from this in his letter to the Ephesians is ‘he gave gifts to men’ (ἔδωκεν δόματα τοῖς ἀνθρώποις). I think it’s one of those reverse meanings, ‘that’ll learn you’ rather than ‘that’ll teach you’. You have given gifts, is the right sense, I think, rather than ‘received’ them.

What a wonderful picture of God this all is! But where does it leave us? We have this wonderful picture of God, which we have to admit is pretty fanciful. Have we just invented God, in fact, ourselves? That takes us back to the bare bones of our belief in the Creed. Those startling statements about Jesus, that he was born of a virgin, died, rose again from the dead, and ascended into heaven.

It’s not facetious to say, ‘You couldn’t make it up!’ But whereas it is completely beyond our human capabilities to understand the nature of the divine, God, and we have to resort to figurative language about being in heaven ‘up there’, ascending and descending, even so, we can grasp what happened to Jesus, in a much more straightforward way. We know what it was for him to be born and to die. We can understand what the resurrection looked like, through the eyes of Doubting Thomas.This is God among us. But to say that Jesus ‘ascended into heaven’ brings us back to the figurative, to the divine realm which is beyond our comprehension. But we can see enough to realise that it is perfectly coherent to say that the fact, the history, of Jesus, invites us to have faith in God, in the divine nature. We didn’t make it up. And then we can progress in faith so as to become the body of Christ, not ascended, but here on earth, just as St Paul so elegantly puts it:

‘Till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.’

Sermon for Evensong on the Second Sunday after Easter, 5th May 2019

Isaiah 38:9-20, John 11:17-44; see http://bible.oremus.org/?ql=423915548

If you had to say just one thing about our Christian belief, I think that it would have to be that Jesus was resurrected from the dead. There are all sorts of striking things, miracles and sacred truths, rules to live one’s life by; but there is nothing like the resurrection from the dead. It is the most amazing thing – the most challenging thing – but also the most reassuring thing.

Last week we were reading the story of doubting Thomas. This week, the second Sunday of Easter, we have the story of the raising of Lazarus, coupled with an Old Testament lesson about King Hezekiah, recovering from illness after his triumph over the Assyrian king Sennacherib, a passage in the Bible sometimes called the Psalm of Hezekiah, in which Hezekiah gives thanks for his recovery from what he had thought was terminal illness.

Hezekiah was ill in the first half of the 8th century BC. Isaiah the prophet, who was also one of the king’s counsellors, at first said that God had told him that the king would definitely die; but after Hezekiah, who had been a good king and faithful in his worship of the one true God, had prayed to the Lord and shed tears, Isaiah received another prophecy to the effect that the Lord had heard his prayers: after all, the king would not die, but would live another fifteen years. The proof of this was that time on a sundial would run backwards, the shadow would go back on itself. So Hezekiah did not die, for another fifteen years.

But the story of Lazarus is much more like the story of Jesus later on. Lazarus clearly was dead. He had been in the tomb for four days and his corpse had begun to decay and smell; but nevertheless Jesus asked for the stone sealing up the tomb to be rolled away, and he commanded the dead man to come out, which he did, still wrapped in his burial shroud. This is different in detail from what happened to Jesus, in that he had left the tomb and his burial clothes were neatly folded and left in the tomb for Simon Peter to find them.

Just as the Lord was moved by Hezekiah’s prayer, ‘I have heard your prayer and seen your tears’, said the Lord, and the Lord was moved to spare Hezekiah, so ‘Jesus wept’, which is supposed to be the shortest verse in the King James version of the Bible, but more importantly is a sign that Jesus was moved by ordinary human compassion and by the sadness of the occasion. His friend Lazarus seemed to have just been snatched away in death. So Jesus asks God to help him, in effect; to give people a reason to believe, in the same way as Hezekiah asked for a sign.

You know sometimes, when I’m in church, listening to someone preaching, I feel that they are saying extraordinary things rather too easily. How can we just talk about people being raised from the dead, sundials being reversed, and so on, without at least to some extent acknowledging that this is far from the sort of thing that we come across in our normal lives? And indeed, as Doubting Thomas dared to say, these things are, on the face of them, actually incredible, not believable: so why are we able just to take them in our stride?

Or to put it another way, are we right just to take them in our stride? Is it one of those things, like how old Methuselah was when he died, that we can explain away as being a metaphor, a figure of speech, just a graphic way of illustrating a profound truth, rather than being literally true?

I must confess that those sort of thoughts do occur to me when I read about the sundial: ‘I will bring again the shadow of degrees … ten degrees backward’. Frankly that looks to me more akin to a magic trick than evidence of the existence and power of God. But then again, the story of Hezekiah and his recovery from illness is not such a massive miracle as the story of Lazarus – or indeed, as massive as the story of Jesus himself. And it is 3,000 years old. So perhaps we can allow some licence there. Nothing very big turns on it now.

But Lazarus is different. The story of Lazarus comes in St John’s Gospel but not in the other gospels. St John’s Gospel has an overriding theme, or a dominant purpose, if you will, which you’ll find in the words at the end of chapter 20: ‘But these are written that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God .. and that believing, that ye might have life through his name’.

There’s a version of that, in a way, in what Jesus says to the disciples at the beginning of the story of Lazarus. ‘Then Jesus said unto them plainly, Lazarus is dead. And I am glad for your sakes that I was not there’. It’s almost as though Jesus is saying, ‘If I’d been there, when Lazarus was about to die, I could have stopped him dying; I could have healed him. But then you disciples wouldn’t have had such a dramatic demonstration of my divinity as I’m now going to give you’.

I do slightly wonder whether that’s something which the gospel writer has added, rather than it being a verbatim quote from Jesus himself. It doesn’t seem to me to be too likely that the man who told the parable of the Good Samaritan would have said, ‘You know, it’s better that Lazarus should actually be dead; because raising him from the dead makes for a more cogent proof’. I think Jesus, indeed the Jesus who ‘wept’, would really have cared much more about Lazarus himself, than about whether he was making a great theological proof or not.

I don’t think that these stories need any extra embellishment. There are a number of factual details – whether the grave clothes were left in the grave or whether the dead person came out wearing them; rolling away the stone; how quickly dead bodies decay in the Middle Eastern heat. And Doubting Thomas’s story itself, with the explicit challenge not to resort to rationalisation, to plausible explanation – because Jesus is not a ghost. Thomas can touch him. These are amazing things. Maybe they are so foreign to our normal way of thought that very often we just keep them out of our minds.

But if we do that, we are keeping the essence of Christianity out of our minds at the same time. For much of our lives we can, I suppose, somehow manage without really worrying too much about God, if I can put it that way. I know that you might well be affronted if I said to you that we don’t bother with God much in the normal course of our lives. What I mean is, we don’t very often focus on what the resurrection to eternal life might really mean. That is, except when we are confronting somebody’s death; maybe our own, maybe someone dear to us whom we’ve just lost, or whom we’re about to lose.

Then of course the church’s teaching about the ‘sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life’ is something that can give us real comfort. You may be a bit challenged by that expression ‘sure and certain hope’. On the face of things, if something is something we hope for, that’s not the same as something which we confidently expect, or have rational grounds for being certain about. If we hope that something will happen, that something will be true: then we want it to happen, but we aren’t certain about it. St Paul makes a similar distinction in his letter to the Romans [8:24f]: ‘For we are saved by hope: but hope that is seen is not hope: for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for? But if we hope for that we see not, then do we with patience wait for it.’ If something is right there in front of you, then you can’t say you are hoping for it to be there.

But I wonder whether that is a real, genuine distinction, between things hoped-for and things actually experienced. We expect confidently that we will wake up tomorrow morning, and that our world will still exist. Could we not say that we have a sure and certain hope of our waking up tomorrow, in Stoke or Cobham or Oxshott, in the normal way? Some of the great Bible passages which are used at funerals come to mind here. From St John’s Gospel, from his 14th chapter, ‘In my father’s house are many mansions’, where again he’s talking to our hero Thomas; and St Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, chapter 15.

‘But some man will say, How are the dead raised up? and with what body do they come?

Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die:

And that which thou sowest, thou sowest not that body that shall be, but bare grain, it may chance of wheat, or of some other grain:

But God giveth it a body as it hath pleased him, and to every seed his own body.

All flesh is not the same flesh: but there is one kind of flesh of men, another flesh of beasts, another of fishes, and another of birds.’ …. And

‘So also is the resurrection of the dead. It is sown in corruption; it is raised in incorruption: ….

It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body.’

This is a mystery. Indeed St Paul says it. He writes:

‘Behold, I shew you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed,

In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.’

Before it goes off iPlayer, I should mention to you that in Holy Week Radio 3’s Composer of the Week was Georg Frideric Händel. George Frederick Handel. One of the delights of those Holy Week programmes is that pretty well all the ‘Messiah’ was played. Maybe if you don’t get round to reading the various passages in the Bible which I’ve spoken about, you can listen instead to some of the wonderful arias and recitatives in Handel’s Messiah. ‘The trumpet shall sound’, for example. You will get the same message, with that great music. I pray that, however you do come to it, you will indeed have that ‘sure and certain hope’ of the resurrection to eternal life.

I am standing for the Labour Party in Cobham and Downside. I’m general manager of Cobham Area Foodbank. The Tories’ Universal Credit has increased demand on our food bank by over 50% since UC came in at the end of  November. 

I am campaigning to stop the night closure of Painshill Fire Station.

Surrey’s consultation proposal, ’Making Surrey Safer’ foresees ‘savings’ (actually, cuts) of between £2m and £2.5m. 

Closing fire stations at night and relying on risk prevention is not an answer if it is your home that is on fire, perhaps with children or disabled elderly people trapped inside. Your home may not catch fire at night very often, but if it does, you do not want to find that the nearest fire station is shut. 

Animal rescue is to be classed as ‘non-emergency’ and charged for. How does this square with our love of and basic decent instinct to care for animals? 

As a former marine insurance underwriter, I understand catastrophe risk – and I don’t agree with Surrey CC’s proposals.

VOTE FOR HUGH BRYANT LABOUR PARTY X

I am the Vice-chair of the local constituency Labour Party and I’m presenting the petition today.

I am also the General Manager of Cobham Area Foodbank. The Foodbank parks its van at Painshill Fire Station, which is also one of the Animal Rescue centres. Because of our regular contact with our firefighters, I believe I am well-placed to know how well-founded the public anxiety about possible cuts is.

We understand that the narrow focus of our petition – that Esher Fire Station should not be closed – may no longer be moot, as I understand that there is currently no longer a proposal to close it – although there has been no confirmation of this. I understand that a new County safety plan will be open for consultation next week, on 4th March.

Our petition is aimed wider than this. We do not think that the fire service – or the animal rescue service – in Surrey should suffer any further cuts. We acknowledge that there has been some new recruitment of fire fighters following the very critical report of HM Inspectorate [for Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services], which found that Surrey was the worst of the first 14 fire brigades they inspected.

We have very old fire engines – the one at Painshill is 13 years old – and shifts not fully manned, which prevents the fire engines from going out. The previous proposals included ideas of replacing proper fire engines with converted Transit-type vans loaded with fire extinguishers, and further closures of the animal rescue service. This would be saving money at the expense of safety and cruelty.

What if it was your daughter’s pony which had fallen into a ditch and was in distress? If, as happened recently with a cow in a local farm, you had to wait, with the animal in pain, for a Sussex animal rescue team to come out, because the Surrey teams were not sufficiently crewed? What if, when you came home from a nice supper out, it was your house which was on fire because the electrics had shorted or someone had left a pan on by mistake, and the fire engine had to come from the other end of Surrey – or worse, if it wasn’t a proper fire engine at all?

It isn’t right to deny our fire-fighters adequate staffing levels, or to deny them the proper equipment – which means up-to-date proper fire engines with full crews of firefighters. Far from further cuts, local people need the Council to prioritise the necessary extra investment in order to keep us and our animals safe.

Hugh Bryant

26th February 2019