Sermon for Evensong on the Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity, 1st October 2017

[Ezekiel 37:15-end], 1 John 2:22-29

Please click on http://bible.oremus.org/?ql=373669534 for the readings

You remember the ‘comfortable words’, in the Communion service. ‘Come unto me, all that travail and are heavy laden, and I will refresh you’ – and, ‘Hear also what St John saith: If any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous; and he is the propitiation for our sins’. I’m going to talk about the things that ‘St John saith,’ in his first Letter.

There could be a sermon just about that phrase in the Comfortable Words, what it means for Jesus to be the ‘propitiation’ for sins. Some theologians say that it means a ‘ransom’, ‘paying the price to get us out of jail’: others would argue that, for that understanding to be right, you would have to think of God as a kind of terrorist taking hostages – which doesn’t seem to fit with the idea of a loving God. Another translation of this word, which is ίλασμος in Greek, has been that it is a ‘remedy for the defilement’ of our sins. It almost has the connotation of a ‘solution’, a solution to the word translated as ‘sin’, but which literally means ‘missing the mark’, making mistakes. A ίλασμος is a fix, a solution. But I’m not going to talk about that, tonight.

This little letter, the first Letter of John, is supposed to have been written by the disciple whom Jesus loved, the author of the fourth gospel. The same John, in his old age living in Ephesus, wrote this letter, which is where our second lesson came from, and it is pretty full of well-known passages. Indeed it’s a pretty good revision guide to some of the most important questions and teachings in Christianity.

Even in the short passage which was our second lesson, St John deals with who Jesus is: how He relates to God – and what is true in this area; he goes on to explain how a believer should react to this theological truth – and what it means for a theological proposition to be true, how to tell it’s authentic.

You will recall at the beginning of the service that I have read to you one or two passages from the Bible which are known in the Prayer Book as the ‘sentences’. It says, in the stage directions, in the ‘rubric’, in the Prayer Book – you can find it on page 16 – ‘At the beginning of evening prayer the minister shall read with a loud voice some one or more of these sentences of the Scriptures that follow’: and there’s another quote from this important letter.

The last one which comes up, which I read out before the service tonight, is, “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us: but if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness”. That is also from the first letter of St John.

In the communion service, after the sermon, in the bit called the ‘offertory’, when the collection is taken up, there are more sentences.

It starts “Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your father which is in heaven”, from Saint Matthew’s Gospel; and, “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon the Earth where the rust and moth doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven;…”

There are a number of sentences, all of which go to point out the difference between spiritual and worldly wealth; but a couple of the sentences bring to mind Jesus’ teaching about love. And then the most important one comes, from St John’s first letter.

“Whoso hath this world’s good, and seeth his brother hath need, and shutteth up his compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him?” [1 St John 3, BCP]

Put another way, “If a man has enough to live on and yet when he sees his brother in need, shuts up his heart against him, how can it be said that the divine love dwells in him?” [1 John 3, NEB]

Chapter 3 goes on, ‘Love must not be just a matter of words and talk, it must be genuine and show itself in action’. [verse 18]

So this little letter, the first letter of Saint John, contains some very important theology. It gives you a big clue about the nature of God, what God is and how God works. Like a lot of the letters in the Bible, it’s a bit like overhearing somebody on the telephone. You don’t know what the other person is saying.

It’s clear from the context that St John may have written this letter because he disagrees with somebody. Indeed he disagrees with them so much that he calls them the ‘antichrist’. The opposite to Christ, opposite, because, according to St John, his opponent is denying that Jesus is Χριστός, anointed: denying that Jesus is the Messiah, the chosen one of God.

John’s argument is that the liar, the antichrist, the person who is saying something that is not true, is saying that Jesus is not the chosen one of God – not indeed God himself, in human form, God incarnate. So John reasons like this.

God has anointed Jesus as his son, as the Christ.
God and Jesus are two aspects of the godhead, as it is sometimes called; two aspects of being God, inseparable.
Antichrist denies that Jesus is part of the godhead.
Therefore, if he is right, there is no godhead;
you can’t have Jesus without there being also God.

In the passage in 1 John 2, in verse 23, “To deny the son is to be without the father: to acknowledge the son is to have the father too”.

There was a huge fuss in the early church about what precisely the relationship between God the father and God the son is. The relationship described as father and son in, for example, this letter of St John. Does that mean that Jesus is really God, or whether instead Jesus was created by God and therefore somehow Jesus is lower than God and not actually part of God himself? That was the argument a scholar called Arius put forward In the fourth century, and it’s one reason why the Orthodox Church differs from the Western Church, Protestant and Catholic.

We in the Western Church understand God as the Trinity, father, son and holy spirit, in the way in which we say, in the creed, ‘I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son.’ In the Eastern Church, they just say that the Holy Spirit ‘proceeds from the Father’.

After the Council of Nicaea and Council of Constantinople in the fourth century, the western churches added the words ‘and the son’ – in Latin, ‘filioque’, to make it plain that it wasn’t a chain of creation, from the Father to the Son to the Holy Spirit: but that the Father and the Son were consubstantial, part of the same Godhead.

Actually we might be tempted now not be hugely bothered about this argument. For instance, I can’t help thinking that the nature of God must be far more complicated than you could describe simply as involving being a father, or being a son. We might well find it quite compelling instead to think of all this language as being a myth, a picturesque way of describing something that is beyond description. You could say that you only get into trouble, philosophically, if you take it literally that God had a son. If on the other hand, God and Jesus are two expressions of the same, ineffable, thing, then the question doesn’t arise whether one created the other.

But again, as St John points out, if you don’t believe in Jesus, you can’t really get to God. Think about how you would describe your belief in God, your faith, if you didn’t know about Jesus. Think about what the Jews and the Moslems, who both say they worship the same god that we do, but who deny the divinity of Jesus, think how they justify their belief.

They look to prophets to be conduits of communication between the deity and mankind. There’s no real direct contact. There’s always an issue, whether the prophet in question is genuinely passing on the words of God or not. Running through the Bible, especially the Old Testament, before Christ settled the argument, very commonly there is the question, ‘Is it true?’

Christians have a great advantage. The question need not be, ‘Is it true?’ Instead, it’s just, ‘What did Jesus say?’ or ‘What would Jesus do?’ To know Jesus is to know God.

And in an important way, once Jesus ‘abides’ in you – ‘abides’ is a sort of church ‘railway word’; you know, like ‘alight’; ‘Alight here for Stoke D’Abernon’: you never see the word except on the railways – well, apart from rugby matches, singing ‘Abide with me’, you only come across ‘abide’ in church – if Jesus abides, stays, in you, once you’ve come to faith in Christ, there’s no risk that your faith will need to be revised or corrected or changed in some way. ‘.. the anointing which ye have received of him abideth in you, and ye need not that any man teach you’ – verse 27 of chapter 2. You need not chase after the latest fashionable fad. (I nearly ended that sentence, ‘.. like mindfulness’, but perhaps that’s a bit hard).

This theological wisdom is all in this little letter. If you read all through St John’s first letter, you’ll come across many of the points which the church has spent so much time on in the past. ‘What difference does it make?’ you might say.

The difference, a big fundamental truth of Christianity, is in the last line of tonight’s lesson.

‘If ye know that he is righteous, ye know that every one that doeth righteousness is born of him.’

Christianity has a practical effect. You believe, and this leads you to action, to doing. By doing good, you show that you are a child of God.

The Prayer Book again, in the ‘sentences’ in the Communion service [page 243], quotes a slightly longer version of this practical gospel, which appears in 1 John chapter 3: “Whoso hath this world’s good and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up … his compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him?”

A real Christian understands that Christ was, is, God incarnate. He was, is, both God and human.

A real Christian can’t claim to have fellowship with God, while still ‘walking in darkness’, as the 1st chapter of the letter puts it. Faith, if it’s genuine, if it’s true, leads to action. Go and read all five chapters – they’re short. It won’t take long. Then you’ll know what is the Christian thing to do – and why.

Sermon for Evensong on the 13th Sunday after Trinity, 10th September 2017
Ezekiel 12:21-13:16; Acts 19:1-19

Click on http://bible.oremus.org/?ql=372404914  for the readings

Every now and again there is a news item or an article in one of the papers pointing out that fewer people claim to belong to the Church of England. Some go on to calculate how long it will be till there won’t be any churches left.

 There was quite a friendly article in the Weekend FT colour section by Jeremy Paxman along those lines yesterday. He lit on the efforts of Holy Trinity Brompton, the evangelical church which created the Alpha Course, and who specialise in ‘planting’ congregations in churches which are fading away – and indeed HTB, as they call it, was the church where Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, started as well. Young ministers, without dog collars and robes, singing worship songs rather than hymns, and they pack them in! Perhaps Alpha and the HTB formula will be the salvation of the C of E, says Jeremy Paxman.

 But of course there are lots of more traditional places where an ageing vicar ministers to an ageing flock of parishioners, declining in numbers. In some country places the vicar has to race round several churches at once. And there are traditional places like this, that are growing, if not spectacularly.

 I have to say that I think that this question, whether the sea of faith is running out, as in Matthew Arnold’s poem on ‘Dover Beach’ – which, after all, wrote the Christian faith off as doomed as long ago as 1867 – is a bit like one of those sandwich-board men whom you used to see tramping about with ‘The End is nigh’ or something similarly apocalyptic on their sandwich boards. The End has been nigh for rather a long time, and it still hasn’t arrived. There’s a plaque commemorating Matthew Arnold in St Andrew’s in Cobham, by the way. I don’t know what his precise connexion was – he was buried in Staines.

 The prophet Ezekiel gets involved in the sandwich-board stuff too, in our Old Testament lesson.

 Ezekiel 12:26

The word of the LORD came to me: Man, he said, the Israelites say that the vision you now see is not to be fulfilled for many years: you are prophesying of a time far off. Say to them, These are the words of the Lord GOD: No word of mine shall be delayed; even as I speak it shall be done. This is the very word of the Lord GOD. (Translation: the New English Bible).

 I’m not desperately bothered about these expressions of gloom and doom about our church. The key thing isn’t to get bums on seats. It’s that church should be a place for encounters with God, with all the blessings that come with that.

 So why should we start thinking about ‘Dover Beach’ and having all these gloomy thoughts? I wonder whether some of it has to do with how we go about meeting God, encountering Him. In the Old Testament, in the books of the prophets, it’s almost unremarkable, how the prophets do meet God. Look at Ezekiel. The context is that the ancient Israelites are either about to be or have been captured by the Babylonians. Just a few years afterwards, the Babylonians did invade, and the Israelites were rounded up and captured.

Psalm 137:

‘By the waters of Babylon
We sat down and wept
When we remembered Zion’

 In that atmosphere of conquest and invasions, all the armies and navies tried to get in touch with God, to find out if they were favoured. And God was close at hand. ‘The Lord said to me, Man, prophesy to the prophets of Israel …’ It is quite different from our experience. If we said that we’d been told by God to do something, we’d be gently humoured, but regarded as eccentric or even mad.

 Does it mean that nowadays, by contrast, God has gone away? Does it mean that because we can’t quite so easily get in touch with Him, we should give up even trying to encounter Him? Are we shy about it? I think there is a lot of British reserve to be factored in. What would you say, face to face, to Jesus, or God himself?

 It begs the question, if you hear some rousing preacher, whether he is right in what he says. Just like the sons of Sceva in our lesson in Acts: were they the real thing? Were they in touch with God? Are we in touch with God and how can we tell if it’s the genuine article?

 We have grown to be more humanistic, more sceptical. Whereas in Ezekiel’s time – say about 587BC – if the prophets told people that God wanted them to do something, they would simply obey, or disobey: they would not go behind it, they wouldn’t try to reason it out.

 Then again, just after the time of Jesus, Paul is tackled by people, the sons of Sceva, who are claiming supernatural powers. It’s always been a live issue for philosophers what is really true. I have on my desk a book called ‘Truth Etc’, by the great Aristotelian philosopher Jonathan Barnes – and it’s 500-odd pages of ancient philosophy about what it true and what is false.

 But what the disciples were worried about with the sons of Sceva, and what Ezekiel was criticising in false prophets, was not that some statements were illogical, but that they weren’t authentic at all – they were, to use President Trump’s favourite expression, fakes.

 How can we tell? There aren’t any prophets any more. Even though Jesus said he hadn’t come to abolish the law or the prophets, in effect he did finish off the prophets. He was the voice of God in a way that no prophet has ever been since. He fulfilled the prophecies.

 But just as when Ezekiel prophesied, not everyone took notice – and we don’t have any percentages to go on – so today not everyone bothers to take any notice of God. People don’t believe that God takes an interest in human affairs as they may have believed he did in Old Testament times.

 We do the stuff, we wreck the environment – or not, depending who you believe – and if Houston is flooded and the British Virgin Islands devastated by hurricanes, no-one, or almost no-one, would think of blasphemy or disobedience to the law of Moses as being possible causes.

 Perhaps these days we make a distinction between religious beliefs and practices on one hand, and practical behaviour on the other: what you do as against what you believe in. God is in the spiritual bit, but not the practical, we might think.

 But I wonder whether that will really do. I would suggest that, if you take that distinction, between acts and beliefs, to its logical conclusion, then religion can never – or never ought to – affect our behaviour, for better or worse.

 Jesus clearly didn’t see it that way. The Sermon on the Mount, loving your enemies, turning the other cheek, not even looking at someone in a lustful or a covetous way, for instance, are all about doing things, about action.

 Because you believe, because you believe in a God of love, as a Christian, you are supposed to act in certain ways, not just to keep it as a mental or spiritual exercise.

 But we don’t. We don’t always follow what Jesus taught, in a practical way. Indeed, sometimes people criticise what Jesus taught, the Sermon on the Mount, for example, as being impractical, impossible to achieve in real life.

 If someone is pointing a gun at you, you don’t turn towards him to offer him a bigger target – which might be how you would ‘turn the other cheek’; and our society works economically on the principles of ambition and greed, not ‘blessed are the meek’.

 Or what about our recent encounters with Gypsies, with Travellers, in Cobham? Apparently they were washing horses, using washing-up liquid, in the River Mole at the picnic spot just up from the mill. They were holding trotting races on Portsmouth Road. There was drunkenness, fighting and betting. Wherever they went, people felt intimidated and there was a lot of litter.

 It’s sort-of assumed that the only thing to do with gypsies is to get them to move on: in other words, to drive them out of our community. Not in any sense to treat them as our neighbours, not in any sense to love them, let alone to love them as ourselves.

 Well, let’s think about it. I would suggest that Jesus didn’t want us just to love, to be kind to, only nice people. Who is my neighbour? was the question. And the story of the Good Samaritan isn’t just a story about two blokes, any two blokes. The hero is someone whom the Jews thought of a beyond the pale, a Samaritan. And Jesus had supper with, hung out with, friends who weren’t all ‘nice people’. Some were ‘publicans and thieves’.

 I think it’s a serious challenge for us. What should our attitude towards the Gypsies, who come into our villages, be? Even if, indeed, they behave in an awful way? What should we think about ‘immigrants’? What happens, or what should happen, when we meet someone who isn’t very nice?

 What about we feel about people in jail, or people who’ve committed the crimes and are sentenced to do community service? The community service bods did a great job tidying up round the church hall. Should we say ‘thank you’ to them?

 ‘Justice is mine’, says the Lord. So why do we lock up so many people? I’m just asking. There isn’t an easy answer, an easy answer to any of these challenges. But I do think that Jesus wanted us not to go for easy answers. It isn’t a simple distinction between religious stuff, spiritual matters, and actions, deeds. It isn’t the case that nice deeds only happen to nice people.

 What would you do? What if you had a knock at your door, and a couple of bedraggled-looking black men asked you for a drink of water? Somebody who goes to one of the local church house groups, when that topic came up, immediately thought that they would be refugees who’d smuggled themselves into this country by hiding in the back of a lorry – so the right thing would be to call the police and get them arrested.

 Again, what do you think Jesus would have to say? And if, as I suspect, Jesus wouldn’t be quite so quick to dial 999, then how should we be influenced? What should we do? Or is our belief, our Christianity, just as the Roman proconsul Gallio said about the Jews when St Paul was on trial before him, just a ‘question of words and names’?

I think we should really reflect – and pray – about that. It’s more important than bums on seats.

Sermon for Evensong on the 11th Sunday after Trinity, 27th August 2017

Acts 17:15-34 – The Unknown God – see http://bible.oremus.org/?ql=370781966

[Parts of this have already appeared in ‘My God is your God’, delivered at St Andrew’s, Cobham on 25th August. This sermon was delivered at St Mary’s, Stoke D’Abernon, the other church in the United Benefice of Cobham and Stoke D’Abernon, last Sunday]

I’ve always loved this passage, this story of St Paul tackling the Athenian philosophers. As you may know, I was a classicist by education. I loved the thought that, 2,500 years ago, there was real civilisation and very sophisticated thought. The Greek philosophers, especially Plato and Aristotle, of course, raised issues which are still debated today.

I had a sneaking suspicion then that the encounters in the New Testament between the Romans, whose civilisation was very much based on Greek concepts, and the Israelites and early Christians, showed the Jewish side as being rather lacking in intellectual firepower when compared with the greats of classical antiquity.

Now I’m more open to the idea that actually Jewish culture was similarly sophisticated. Granted the ancients were lacking in the means of transport – no planes, trains or automobiles – and they hadn’t harnessed electricity, with all it now does for us. But they were all, Jews and Greeks (to use St Paul’s terms) just as capable as we are of articulating arguments about what it is for something or someone to be good, or to do right.

The mediaeval theologian Thomas Aquinas brought a lot of ideas from Aristotle into his great comprehensive theology guide, his Summa Theologiae. It’s at least arguable that the Jewish and the Graeco-Roman classical traditions are not mutually exclusive.

St Paul was speaking to the Athenians in the first century AD, or CE as it’s now termed, ‘Common Era’, not about philosophy – although he had been having a discussion with the Epicureans and Stoics, but about what God is like. Incidentally, for your own research later, if you look up Epicurus or Zeno and Chrysippus, the founders of Stoic philosophy, you’ll find that our words ‘epicurean’ and ‘stoical’ don’t really reflect what these Greek philosophers were teaching.

Well, so much for the history of ideas. What would St Paul say about us – or to us, today? Do we worship many idols, as the Greeks did? It shows such generosity of spirit for them to admit their ignorance by worshipping a god whom they’d missed, whom they’d overlooked, in effect. They didn’t know what characteristics this Unknown God had: but whatever his attributes were, he was worthy of worship.

St Paul filled in the blanks. It’s really interesting to equate the various characteristics of the Unknown God, as described by St Paul, with our own understanding of God, through our knowledge of Jesus Christ.

He didn’t live in a ‘temple made by hands’. He didn’t need anything, any sacrifices, from men, because he created everything anyway. He made all people ‘of one blood’. Not different nationalities. If you went looking for him, he wasn’t far away. In fact he’s omnipresent: ‘in him we live and move and have our being’. He can’t be made out of gold or silver. And there will be a last judgment. We can recognise the judge, the judge eternal, by the fact that he has been raised from the dead.

That’s all pretty well square with what we have said in the Creed. But then how come Christianity is actually a patchwork quilt of different denominations? It’s sometimes a good way of looking at ourselves, first to compare ourselves with someone else. In this case, it might be instructive to look down the road at our brothers and sisters in Christ in our United Benefice, at St Andrew’s in Cobham. What’s their church – our sister church – like?

As you may know, I started my Anglican journey at St Andrew’s, and I’m still licensed to that church as a Reader, as well as to St Mary’s. Now in the context of the search for a new Rector (who will really in effect be the vicar of Cobham), it might be interesting to look at St Andrew’s worship and witness, in the light of St Paul’s sermon which is at the heart of today’s lesson in the Acts of the Apostles, and against the description in the Parish Profile of the church’s offer as ‘middle of the road’. [http://cdn.cofeguildford.org.uk/docs/default-source/about/Work-with-us/clergy-vacancies/cobham-parish-profile.pdf?sfvrsn=0]

When I first started going to St Andrew’s just over 20 years ago, a big factor – apart from the friendly welcome, which my young family and I surely did receive – was my feeling that the church was rich, rich in ways of worshipping God and witnessing to the Gospel. It was anything but one-dimensional. The God that was worshipped there was a God approached in various ways, all under one roof.

There were people – and some of them are still around – who had followed a preacher called Gerald Coates and joined his Cobham Fellowship, which became the Pioneer People. St Andrew’s had a vicar, Sidney Barrington, who brought St Andrew’s and the Fellowship very close together, and then, very tragically, took his own life because, I believe, he had decided it was a wrong turning for the church.

But the theology behind the Fellowship is still alive. It is what is known as ‘conservative evangelical’ theology. According to it, you get to know God just through the Bible, and through prayer. The Bible is literally true. Often, people who follow those ideas are socially conservative: they believe, for instance, that homosexuality is sinful. Sometimes, people with this faith believe that illness and other misfortune come about as punishment from God for sin. But there are great positives too. There were missions to take Bibles to places where the Word of God had not reached, and where it was banned, such as China; and there was a great willingness to reach out to everyone in the village and involve them in prayer and knowledge of the Gospel, in services in a tent on the Leg O’Mutton field.

Then more recently, the vicar was Barry Preece. Barry was – Barry is – a ‘liberal’ theologian. He is very spiritual – he was for several years the Diocesan Adviser on Spirituality – but he did not believe that every word in the Bible is literally true. He was influenced by the great liberal (small ‘L’) theological movement in the 1960s following the Bishop of Woolwich, John Robinson’s, great little book ‘Honest to God’, which I bet some of you have on your shelves, as I do.

Liberal theologians are cautious about being very definite about what God is, or what He says. God is immortal, invisible, and infinitely wise. But He is beyond our understanding. We can know something about God because of Jesus. But we can use our reason to analyse the Bible, to acknowledge its contradictions and try to understand its mysteries. We can understand certain things as symbolic rather than literally true. And we can be, we must be, tolerant of people who are different from us.

Just as the former Cobham Fellowship people are still represented at St Andrew’s, there are a number of people at St Andrew’s who are – perhaps influenced by Barry Preece’s teaching – liberal theologians. I am one.

And there’s yet another strand in the rich mixture of beliefs and witnessing to faith which you will find at St Andrew’s. That is the ‘liberal catholic’ tradition, which Robert Jenkins taught, and which Godfrey espouses here at St Mary’s . ‘Catholic’ in this sense means ‘for everyone’. Robert Jenkins very much wanted the church to be involved with the community, not just a place where people go on Sunday. So Cobham Heritage had its big re-launch meeting at St Andrew’s: and the church’s outreach to Uganda, former Yugoslavia and now Nepal and South Africa, is all part of it. St Andrew’s, alongside St Mary’s, had a big part in starting Cobham Area Foodbank, too.

But ‘catholic’ also means ‘Eucharistic’ – worship is based on Holy Communion, rather than on what are called ‘services of the word’. There’s no Mattins or Evensong at St Andrew’s. Barry Preece used to encourage a Sunday evening service led by lay people, not following a set liturgy. In Robert Jenkins’s time they tried ‘Alive @ 6’, a more evangelical, modern service, in an attempt to involve people in the village who were not attracted by the more formal liturgy of Holy Communion, but it didn’t really catch on.

Now on Sunday evenings the two churches practise what they preach about having a ‘united benefice’, St Andrew’s with St Mary’s, and all are invited to join in Evensong here.

The other thing to mention about the worship and witness at St Andrew’s is their music. For 40 years at St Andrew’s David Fuge created and selected settings and hymns which successfully brought together all the various strains of belief and styles of churchmanship and theology in the church.

Three distinct types of theology and a unifying musical tradition, all trying to bring the best of the faithful at St Andrew’s to God in witness and service. The Parish Profile says they are ‘middle of the road’, but I think that doesn’t tell you half of it! As you’ll appreciate from the history, it’s much better, more positive, than that.

Now we – they – are going to find a new shepherd, a new pastor. It may take time – and whoever it is, they will have to get to know the variety and depth of love for God in these two churches.

A PS – I’m indebted to Revd Mother Kathryn Twining, Rector of the Guildford Chapter of the Society of Catholic Priests, for this additional note concerning liberal catholicism:

‘Belief in The Real Presence of Christ in the Sacraments and the sacramental life are key to catholic spirituality, in addition to a focus on social justice, beauty in worship, faith as a journey or pilgrimage.

Check out SCP website http://www.scp.org.uk/, as well as the Gospel Imprint http://gospelimprint.com/ website!’

Sermon for Evensong on the 9th Sunday after Trinity, 13th August 2017

Acts 14:8-20 – see http://bible.oremus.org/?ql=369736259

I love the adventure stories in the Acts of the Apostles. They’ve got elements of a road movie – Paul and his companions make various journeys to exotic places, dangerously, and have exciting encounters on the way. The good guys are our hero Paul and his team. Their task, their mission, is to spread the word about Jesus.

The bad guys – hmm, who are the bad guys in this? If you say, simply, ‘The Jews’, it might well lead you into antisemitism or Nazism. It’s more complicated. Paul was a Jew – a leading Jew, a Pharisee. And the first disciples were all Jews. Indeed Jesus himself was a Jew. But Paul saw his mission as being the apostle, the man sent out as a messenger, to what the Bible calls the ‘nations’, to the non-Jews. Paul remembers the prophecy in Isaiah chapter 42:6-8:

I the LORD have called thee in righteousness, and will hold thine hand, and will keep thee, and give thee for a covenant of the people, for a light of the Gentiles;…. I am the LORD: that is my name: and my glory will I not give to another, neither my praise to graven images.

At one and the same time the Jews are God’s chosen people, the ones who received the prophecies, but also the prophecy is that the Lord will make his chosen Messiah ‘a light of the Gentiles’. (There is also a wonderful message of liberation and social justice in Isaiah 42, but that’s for another day.)

In the previous chapter in Acts, before our lesson tonight, in chapter 13, Paul preaches in the synagogue at Pisidian Antioch, rehearsing the story of the Jews and linking it with the story of Jesus, his baptism by John, his death and resurrection.

Let me read you a bit of what Paul said: [13:32-39, NEB] He told them that, after Jesus had suffered, been crucified and then resurrected from the dead, appearing to the disciples over a lengthy period, ‘They [the disciples] are now his witnesses before our nation; and we are here to give you the good news that God, who made the promise to the fathers, has fulfilled it for the children by raising Jesus from the dead, as indeed it stands written, in the second Psalm: “You are my son; this day have I begotten you.” Again, that he raised him from the dead, never again to revert to corruption, he declares in these words: “I will give you the blessings promised to David, holy and sure.” This is borne out by another passage: “Thou wilt not let thy loyal servant suffer corruption.” As for David, when he had served the purpose of God in his own generation, he died, and was gathered to his fathers, and suffered corruption; but the one whom God raised up did not suffer corruption; and you must understand, my brothers, that it is through him that forgiveness of sins is now being proclaimed to you. It is through him that everyone who has faith is acquitted of everything for which there was no acquittal under the Law of Moses.’

Listening to him was a mixed congregation, of Jews and ‘Gentiles’, non-Jews; we can identify with them, because we – or most of us – are not Jews. In this context, we are Gentiles. As the passage continues, we learn that the Gentiles ‘got’ it, and ‘those who were marked out for eternal life became believers’ (13:48).

But the Jews weren’t convinced: they ‘stirred up feeling among the women of standing who were worshippers, and among the leading men of the city’. The women were not the Christian women, but worshippers in the synagogue. Interesting that they were thought important enough, in this patriarchal world, to be canvassed by the anti-Christian Jews. So the two Apostles beat a hasty retreat and moved on, to Iconium and then to Lystra (this is all in what is now modern Turkey), where, in Lystra, not only did they preach, but Paul healed a crippled man, lame from birth, who had never walked in his life beforehand.

And that brought out an extraordinary reaction from the Lycaonian people, the people of Lystra, who, we are told, spoke a local Lycaonian language. I wonder if this is an echo of the Greek historian Herodotus, who distinguished Greeks and βάρβαροι, people who spoke in languages that sounded like grunts, ‘bar-bar’ – barbarians. If so, we are meant to think of these people in Lystra as being really rustic, really uncivilised.

But I wonder if that is right: because what the Lycaonians did was to hail Paul and Barnabas as gods, Greek gods. Interestingly, they said that not Paul, but Barnabas was the father of the Greek Gods, Zeus, or Jupiter in Latin, and Paul was Hermes, Mercury, the messenger of the gods, because he was ‘the bringer of the word’.

You’ll remember that Paul falls foul of Greek gods again, in Ephesus, where there is a cult of the goddess Diana, or Artemis in Greek, the huntress. ‘Great is Diana of the Ephesians’ they shouted, against Paul and his companions.

In Lystra, when the locals hailed Paul and Barnabas as gods, and especially when the priest of the local temple of Jupiter appeared with garlands and some oxen which he was about to sacrifice, they ran into the crowd and made a big fuss. ‘We are just human, who feel the same feelings as you do. We want you to turn away from ‘these follies’ (NEB), or ‘these vanities’ (AV) to ‘the living God, which made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and all things that are therein’.

It was the same contrast as you get in the Old Testament, between gods who are just idols, just statues or other man-made objects, and the One True God, creator of heaven and earth. Psalm 135 (page 522 in your Prayer Books) has a picturesque way of putting it: it says

As for the images of the heathen, they are but silver and gold
the work of men’s hands.
They have mouths, and speak not
eyes have they, but they see not.
They have ears, and yet they hear not
neither is there any breath in their mouths.
They that make them are like unto them
and so are all they that put their trust in them.

The point is that the Greek gods, according to the Jewish understanding of them, are not real. They are just images, statues, idols. They can’t do anything. There is no reality standing behind them.

But I wonder whether we ought not to think again about the Greek gods, and perhaps not be quite so ready to dismiss them. What were the people who worshipped those gods doing, when they built temples and made sacrifices to those gods?

If it were really the case that they were just empty images which couldn’t do anything, would these sophisticated people – who were not just Bar-Bars – have built all those temples and made all those sacrifices? There were of course creation stories before Judaism – the Epic of Gilgamesh, for example. So god, or gods collectively, as a force for creation, and as being immortal, and as all-knowing – ‘immortal, invisible, God only wise’, would square with the Greeks’ understanding of their gods, just as much as it does with the Jewish ‘One true God’.

The only difference is that in the Greek heaven, the Pantheon, literally the ‘Every God Place’, on Mount Olympus, there was not one God but several gods, who all had different ‘portfolios’. We’re quite fierce on saying that the Holy Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, is one, a single God: but I think there could be a sense in which the Greek pantheistic idea, of departmental gods, if you like, is reminiscent of the Trinity.

Our worship, our services, and our idea of sacraments, the ‘outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual grace’, are surely similar to what the Greeks – and in earlier civilisations before them, in the area between the Tigris and the Euphrates, modern Iraq – modern Mosul, sadly – practised. What is the Eucharist, if not a symbolic sacrifice, in one sense?

Nowadays, would we be as definite as Paul and Barnabas? Would we, if someone got hold of Professor André Simon and his team at Harefield Hospital just after he had saved someone’s life, someone impossibly ill, as my brother was, and said, ‘You are medical gods, you are Asclepius and Hippocrates’, would we say, ‘Oh no, that doesn’t square with what we know about God.’ Those guys, André Simon and co, they’re just ordinary men.

Well, think about it. What do we know about God? It’s interesting that Paul, when he wanted to describe, and give evidence of, the One True God, said this:

The living God, … made heaven and earth and sea and everything in them. In past ages he allowed all nations to go their own way; and yet he has not left you without some clue to his nature, in the kindness he shows: he sends you rain from heaven and crops in their seasons, and gives you food and good cheer in plenty.’ (Acts 14:15-17)

He didn’t mention Jesus – except of course that Jesus was the absolute heart, the centre, of Paul’s message. But in this instance it was almost like one of those debates you might have with a New Atheist, a Richard Dawkins, say. You can still attest to the existence of a creator, an ‘unmoved mover’ such as Aristotle posited in his Metaphysics (Λ 7, 1072a21-26)[τοινυν έστι τι ό ού κινουμενον κινεί ,…]. You can point to creation, and to the apparent benevolence – at least in part – of the creator: he ‘he sends you rain from heaven and crops in their seasons, and gives you food and good cheer in plenty.’

But, as Bishop John Robinson said in his great little book ‘Honest to God’, these days we generally believe that God isn’t ‘a supreme Being, the grand Architect, who exists somewhere out beyond the world – like a rich aunt in Australia – who started it all going, periodically intervenes in its running, and generally gives evidence of his benevolent interest in it.’ [Robinson, J., 1963 (50th Anniversary edition, 2013), ‘Honest to God’, London, SCM Press, p.15].

I think we’re pretty sure that God is more than that. If we are Christians, our picture of God depends much more on our perception of Jesus. ‘He that seeth me seeth him that sent me’, John 12:45. But I daresay that if I put you all on the spot, and said, ‘OK, I’ll give you ten minutes to think about it, and then please tell me all about ‘your God’, your idea of God,’ you would understandably feel rather challenged – although of course I’m checking for theologians and philosophers in tonight’s congregation, because you never know who might have come in tonight!

But these days, in certain circumstances, not to be able precisely to describe God might be quite dangerous. What if a Moslem or a Jew challenged us, on their ‘home turf’? What if they got the idea that you had changed, changed religion, away from what they see as the ‘true faith’? Well, it might not happen to us, but what if you were a person who had become a Christian in Pakistan, or Iran?

We sometimes say that Christians, Jews and Moslems are all ‘people of the Book’, that book being the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible, which all three religions use. But sometimes that’s not accepted – for instance, when Christians are accused of blasphemy or apostasy. Do you think we should bone up on some more theology? What would you have said if you had been one of the well-meaning Lycaonians?

Sermon for Evensong on 30th July 2017, Seventh Sunday after Trinity

1 Kings 6:11-14, 23-28; Acts 12:1-17 – ‘To thee Cherubin and Seraphin: continually do cry’

See http://bible.oremus.org/?ql=368280207 for the readings

Tomorrow, whatever the Brexit people may say, the people of England will start to turn to Europe. August is not just the time when Paris, and Rome, and Bologna are deserted, and those delicious little cafés in the back streets have the shutters up and a small card in the window telling you of the ‘fermeture annuelle’, that the family will be back at the beginning of September: now something rather similar affects our own City of London and the great commercial centres of Birmingham, Manchester and Bristol, among others.

It's holiday time! There are hardy perennial indications, of course. Where have the great and good gone on holiday? Ah, there’s Theresa May and her hedge-fund husband, looking relaxed in dark glasses and what her office assures us is a Marks and Spencer knockoff of a nice designer top, striding forth into the pedestrian zone in Como in search of the perfect cappuccino.

And perhaps – especially since she’s a churchgoer, (at least at home), Mrs May might step into one of those lovely Italian churches. Perhaps she will be tracing the work of Piero Della Francesca.

And what she could be seeing, I feel sure, (from my intimate knowledge of such people on holiday, of course) is cherubs. Putti, cherubim and seraphim. ‘To thee Cherubin and Seraphin: continually do cry’. (The Book of Common Prayer, Morning Prayer, Te Deum Laudamus – We praise thee, O God)

Actually in my mind’s eye there’s a range of possibilities, where cherubs are concerned. On the one hand I do think of putti, those little stone carved babies that you find decorating churches and holding up the vaulting in cathedrals. Definitely babies, not grown-up angels – ‘cherubic’ is an adjective that you wouldn't use for a grown-up, except perhaps for a smile.

The other angels are seraphs, of course.

‘Thus spake the seraph, and forthwith
Appeared a shining throng ..’

[Nahum Tate and Nicholas Brady, carol, ‘While shepherds watched their flocks by night’, music by Georg F. Händel]

Again, what the seraphs look like is hard to say, except again that the adjective derived from their name, ‘seraphic’, is usually applied to a smile. So whatever they look like in general, seraphs are, typically, smiling.

All this angel-stuff is all very well if you are happy with a vision of heaven which is like a special palace, a paradise above the clouds, where God lives surrounded by his holy saints and angels. Of course it's what the artists and sculptors whose masterpieces fill those Italian churches – and to some extent also our own churches and cathedrals – depict. Any decent picture of the Ascension has Jesus being helped to lift off by angels, and indeed, by cherubim, by cherubs, little angels.

So understandably, when Solomon wanted to build a house on earth, a temple, for the One True God, in Jerusalem, which his father David had conquered, he built something like his idea of heaven, including cherubs. But these cherubs were statues representing rather major architectural structures, not angelic babies. The two cherubs here are ten cubits high. A cubit was the length of a forearm, 18 inches: so they were about 15 feet high. And their wings – they're definitely angels, because they've got wings – were ten cubits wingspan: ‘from the uttermost part of one wing unto the uttermost part of the other’. 15ft wingspan. Bigger than humans.

St Peter certainly had good reason to thank an angel, who rescued him when he had been put in prison by King Herod – not the Herod who condemned Jesus, but Herod Agrippa I, a grandson. This Herod is reported to have had a shaky relationship with the Jews over whom he reigned, as client king, for the Romans. This may explain his persecution of the Christians, so as to curry favour with his Jewish subjects.

There are apparent parallels between this story of Peter’s imprisonment and the actual Passion of Jesus. Both stories took place at the time of the festival of Unleavened Bread, the Passover. Also, Herod intended to ‘bring Jesus out to the people’ after the festival, much in the way that Jesus was brought out for the people to choose between him and Barabbas to be pardoned.

But this ‘angel’ is called an ‘angel of the Lord’, αγγελος κυρίου – which also, and perhaps more naturally, means a ‘messenger of the lord’; yes, a messenger. The business with wings and heading upwards to heaven is perhaps something extra which we could get, infer, from the Old Testament story: but perhaps these days we should be a bit cautious about doing that.

What we have in 1 Kings is a description of Solomon’s Temple, the first Jewish temple. In it we have a description of two statues or structures in the sanctuary: ‘within the oracle he made two cherubims of olive tree’. It wasn't whatever the cherubs were supposed to resemble or stand for which was being described, but rather the representations, the statues.

So the question arises how reliable any of the pictures of cherubs really is. Are we to think of Superman, or at least Robin to Jesus’ Batman? Or is an ‘angel’ just a messenger?

‘Just a messenger’ probably won't do, as an explanation. What sort of a messenger? The angel might say, ’I bring a message from God.’ Can you visualise that, in your mind’s eye? How would you react? Here’s St Peter’s prison escape story again.

‘All at once an angel of the Lord stood there, and the cell was ablaze with light. He tapped Peter on the shoulder and woke him. 'Quick! Get up', he said, and the chains fell away from his wrists.

 
The angel then said to him, 'Do up your belt and put your sandals on.' He did so. 'Now wrap your cloak round you and follow me.'
 
He followed him out, with no idea that the angel's intervention was real: he thought it was just a vision.’ (Acts 12:7-9, NEB)

That was the exciting bit of our New Testament lesson. On the face of things it was a bit more than a simple courier service that St Peter benefitted from.

I worry a bit about the Richard Dawkins faction here. On the face of things, if one really thinks of St Peter as being rescued by some divine Batman or Superman, I think it might lay us open to scientific scorn. The Dawkinses might say, with some justification, ‘But that’s not how things work!’ They know how flesh and blood operate, and that we can be sure that Superman & Co couldn't do some of their more spectacular stunts except in computer-generated images in the cinema – or with obvious technical assistance such as one of Yves Rossy’s jet-packs. I slightly worry that such people’s simple faith is vulnerable to a scientific challenge – that, if God is understood as everything we believe in but don't understand, as we get to learn more and more, so God becomes less and less.

But even so, there are many people, even today, who do say they have been helped by angels, who either don't worry about the luxury residence above the clouds – for them it doesn't have to be literally true – or who have an idea of God which allows for cherubic or seraphic interventions. This is how I think they do it.

Just as we may understand God’s Holy Spirit as being in us, in the way that St Paul did, as he put it in Romans 8:9, ‘You, however, are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if in fact the Spirit of God dwells in you’, so if God is in us, we could argue that God’s messengers, his angels, are likely to be round about us too, personified by our friends and fellow-Christians. You might have an angel in you, and you be that angel’s eyes and ears.

So when we say to someone like me (when I have done my annual washing-up duty,) ‘You are an angel’, there might just be a bit more to it. We can all play host to an angel. Some of us are, of course, more cherubic than others.

Sermon for Evensong on 23rd July 2017, Sixth after Trinity
1 Kings 2:10-12; 3:16-28

I'm always a bit nonplussed about the Wisdom of Solomon. Faced with two harlots and a baby, and a pretty awful story about a dead baby as well, and an allegation that a baby had been switched in the maternity ward, he has to decide whose baby is the live one.

It's why when you're in hospital they always give you a tag. But in Solomon’s day they didn't have plastic tags and bar-codes. Instead they had – swords! If in doubt, Excalibur to the rescue. If you read the chapter in 1 Kings that comes before our lesson, Solomon was busy establishing his authority after he had succeeded his father David, the great King David, as king of Israel. He had a challenge from his brother Adonijah, who wanted to marry Abishag, the most beautiful woman in Israel, who had been found and brought to King David in his old age ‘to lie with him and warm him up’, because he was getting old and felt the cold – stay with me on this – but there was no hanky-panky: as the Authorised Version puts it, so decorously:

3So they sought for a fair damsel throughout all the coasts of Israel, and found Abishag a Shunammite, and brought her to the king.
4And the damsel was very fair, and cherished the king, and ministered to him: but the king knew her not. [1 Kings 1]

You must read the story – Solomon’s elder brother Adonijah, who had previously started to act as though he was the crown prince, due to inherit the kingdom, who had been disinherited by King David just before he died, craftily asked his mother Bathsheba to ask Solomon for permission for him to marry Abishag – which Solomon took as a challenge, because Abishag was the king’s widow.

Solomon used the sword again – he had his brother killed, and indeed there is quite a trail of carnage at the beginning of the First Book of Kings. Chopping the baby in half was part of Wise Solomon’s standard procedure, which had a lot in common with George W. Bush’s ‘shock and awe’ strategy in Iraq.

You might object that I'm being rather unfair to Solomon, not giving him full credit for finding a very clever solution to a very tricky dilemma. His use of ultra-violence as a method of governing, I suppose strictly speaking, could be said to be irrelevant to the question whether he was really wise or not.

Or maybe not: imagine the Judgment of Solomon in a world without capital punishment, where ‘thou shalt not kill’ certainly means something where babies at least are concerned – a world like ours. What would Solomon have had to threaten, in order for the real mother to give herself away, to reveal her mother’s love rather than have the baby harmed? It might not have worked, today.

How should a wise leader behave? How should a judge decide? Look at the dilemma that the Sadducees, and then Annas and Caiaphas, the people that the Bible calls their ‘rulers, the elders, and scribes’, the leaders of Israel in Jesus’ time, look at the dilemma which they faced as a result of the Apostles Peter and John, who had healed a man who had been crippled from birth, preaching the gospel of Christ’s resurrection and attracting a crowd of 5,000 listeners – which must have been a huge phenomenon in those days – and generally getting the ordinary people very excited.

The Jewish leaders’ dilemma was what to do about the Apostles. On one level, they posed a threat to public order: they were challenging one of the Sadducees’ beliefs, that there cannot be a resurrection from the dead. The Apostles’ teaching was a message of hope – hope which the Sadducees and scribes didn't have. On the one hand the leaders could not deny that a miracle of healing had just taken place: but on the other hand, at the same time, the Apostles’ preaching was not like the old traditional Jewish teaching, but it was something new and radical – and they sensed that their authority as High Priests and scribes was being called into question.

Fortunately they had moved on from Solomon's favoured solution. No sword-play. They just threw the Apostles into prison overnight, to keep them off the street. And they didn't get far in trying to shut the Apostles up. Why would they, why should the Apostles, have listened? Here’s the story, from Acts 4.

18And they called them, and commanded them not to speak at all nor teach in the name of Jesus.
19But Peter and John answered and said unto them, Whether it be right in the sight of God to hearken unto you more than unto God, judge ye.
20For we cannot but speak the things which we have seen and heard.
21So when they had further threatened them, they let them go, finding nothing how they might punish them, because of the people: for all men glorified God for that which was done.

Put yourself in the position of those Sadducees. What would you have done in their shoes? They weren't bad people – they weren't, say, evil people claiming to do things for religious reasons, like Islamic State, Daesh. The Jewish Law that they upheld told them – the Ten Commandments told them – to love God and love their neighbour, just in the same way, on the face of things, that the Christians, the Apostles Peter and John, were teaching. But the problem was one of authority and authenticity. By performing miracles of healing, the Apostles were, in effect, saying that they were more in touch with God than the High Priest.

We have a similar problem today. If you are a leader, an MP or a government minister, or a local councillor, how do you decide what is good to do? If you are a judge – say, the judge hearing the terribly difficult case of little Charlie Gard, or Sir Martin Moore-Bick enquiring into the terrible fire at Grenfell Tower – what principles will you apply?

So far as the judges are concerned, obviously the simple answer is that they will apply the law, the law of the land. We have ‘the rule of law’ – ‘Be you ever so high, the law is above you,’ was Lord Denning’s version.

But as the residents of Grenfell who survived have so forcefully said, it's not so simple. And indeed so far as little Charlie Gard is concerned, there may be a fundamental difference between what the parents think should be the principle to be applied, namely that they, the parents, should have the final say, and what the law says, which is that what is judged by the court to be in the best interests of the child should be the determining principle.

Who is right? How to decide ‘who is the baby’s real mother’, to put it in Solomon’s terms, in these cases? These are not just – or maybe not even really at all – questions of law. And anyway, the law comes from somewhere. What principles are the basis, the foundation, for our laws? For instance, a lot of law is said to be derived from the principles of ‘human rights’. But where are those rights derived from?

As Christians, we have a position to take in this. Just as Peter and John refused to be silenced by the authorities, we should not shut up if we see something which is wrong, which is against God’s holy law, for fear of being accused of being ‘political’. Some of you have said to me sometimes how relieved you have been when you think that my sermon hasn't been ‘political’. I must, gently – but definitely – disagree with you about that. A Christian preacher must be political. Let me explain why.

Our leaders, our political leaders, try, I'm sure, always to do the right thing. Good leaders always try to have in mind principles which they can point to, recognised principles that the majority of people – in a democracy – can agree with. So here in England we would all agree with the principle of freedom of speech, for example. But in addition we, as Christians, base our morality on Jesus’ ‘new commandment’ of love, that we love each other as He has loved us.

So what about foreign aid? Is it better, from a moral point of view, to give £1m to a project in Africa or £1m to a similar project in England? What principles should our leaders use in order to decide? Are English people somehow more deserving than African ones? If so, why?

What if it isn't overseas aid, but refugees and migrants? Is an African or Syrian refugee more or less entitled to a roof over their head here than someone who was born here? Again, why? What principle would you use to justify your answer?

And when you've assessed that, what do you think that would Jesus say, what would He say about your conclusion and your reasons?

I think that it is a perfectly legitimate exercise – and indeed that it's an exercise that we in the church ought to do all the time – to look at the policies of our rulers and try to subject them to the light of Christ. Doing that means that we really do have something valuable to say.

As I've been saying now for a couple of Sundays, and I'll go on saying, one of this church’s vision objectives, adopted by our PCC, is for us to get out and become more involved in the community. It's not enough for us to gather together here every Sunday and offer beautiful worship – although of course we should do this – but we must love our neighbours. We need to find good causes to support: we're already behind the Foodbank, but what else should we do?

As a church, I suggest we should also consider having a fund for outward giving, a tithe (it's typically 10% of a church’s income); then we need to adopt projects to support, maybe, say, one on our doorstep and one overseas. Then we need people in the congregation to become ‘champions’ of those projects, to bring us news of how they're doing and how we are involved, what our people are doing. Ideally we need representatives of the projects to come and talk to us, perhaps by giving us a sermon or having a ‘pulpit dialogue’ as they used to have in City churches sometimes.

If any of this sparks off an idea in you, do please come and tell me, either after service now, or give me a call. Remember those wonderful but challenging lines from St Matthew chapter 25:

31When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory:
32And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats:
33And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left.
34Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world:
35For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in:
36Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.
37Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink?
38When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed
thee?
39Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee?
40And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.

I do hope we realise that that beautiful passage is, truly, ‘political’: it has a social, political message, just as much as it is at the very heart of individual morality. One thing is certain, though: these days you couldn't do it all with swords, like Solomon. Society has made some progress. Now we at St Mary's need to do our bit too.