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.

Sermon for Mattins on the Fourth Sunday after Trinity, 16th July 2017
Romans 8:1-11, Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23

Last Sunday we had a wonderful time with Bishop Jo when she came to lead our celebration Eucharist and officially to open St Mary’s Hall. When she first saw this pulpit – this splendid Jacobean pulpit – she said, ‘Wow! What a pulpit! If I’d known how splendid it is – not six feet, but at least twelve feet above contradiction – I would have added a lot more to my sermon!’

Well, what Bishop Jo actually did preach seemed pretty good to me, and I’m sure if you were there, you’ll agree. She based her message on the Collect for last Sunday, and its distinction between things that were ‘temporal’, like buildings, and things that are ‘spiritual’. One was a vertical plane, looking up to heaven, and the other, even if it was pretty splendid, like our St Mary’s Hall, was earth-bound.

Now today we are invited by St Paul to go into this spiritual/temporal thing more deeply. This great chapter 8 of his Letter to the Romans is the chapter, we often read from at funerals: it goes –

35Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?

……..

37Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us.

38For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come,

39Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Before this passage, in chapter 7 is the bit of St Paul’s teaching which I find rather reassuring, about how, although he knows what the right thing to do is, he gets led astray and doesn’t do it: in other words, he may be a good man, trying to do the right thing, but he is only human. Being human means, at least partly, being open to temptation, being sinful. It reflects the story of the Fall, of Adam and Eve.

But then Paul contrasts that imperfect, earth-bound state with the spiritual plane, with being ‘in the spirit’, as he calls it. 

5For they that are after the flesh do mind the things of the flesh; but they that are after the Spirit the things of the Spirit.

Or, as the New English Bible translates it, 

Those who live on the level of our lower nature have their outlook formed by it, and that spells death; but those who live on the level of the spirit have the spiritual outlook, and that is life and peace.

This is similar to that other great Pauline funeral passage, from 1 Corinthians 15:

42So also is the resurrection of the dead. It is sown in corruption; it is raised in incorruption:

43It is sown in dishonour; it is raised in glory: it is sown in weakness; it is raised in power:

44It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body.

A spiritual body. St Paul was familiar with Greek philosophy, with Plato and Aristotle. Four hundred years before him, they had made a distinction between souls and bodies – the body was ‘temporal’, earth-bound, mortal: the soul was the essence of the person, it is what makes you, you: and there was a lot of discussion whether the essence of a person, (what it is that makes you, you), whether this essence, their soul, was immortal, could survive death just by itself.

Paul in effect rejected the idea of disembodied souls, at the end of that great passage in 1 Corinthians 15, that we know also from Handel’s ‘Messiah’:

51Behold, I shew you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed,

52In 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.

So the spiritual life is not disembodied, not some ethereal idea in the mind of an abstruse philosopher. We know from Paul’s Letter to the Galatians, chapter 5, what the ‘fruit of the spirit’ is, in contrast with the ‘works of the flesh’:

‘… the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance …’

When you look at that list, most of it is what you would expect from a list of ‘spiritual’ virtues: joy, peace, meekness, for example. However a couple of the items seem to me to be more practical things, things that involve actually doing things with other human beings: in particular ‘love’ and ‘long-suffering’ spring to mind. 

And that seems to me to link St Paul’s teaching with that of our Lord Jesus Christ. I don’t think that Jesus actually thought in the same terms as St Paul. He didn’t think in terms of a flesh and spirit dichotomy: instead he tended to talk about the devil, on the one side, and the kingdom of God on the other. Jesus was more of a doer than a thinker, at least as the gospel writers describe him. He healed the sick; he turned water into wine; he taught in the synagogue, he turned the money-changers out of the Temple, he fed the 5,000.

But most noticeably, Jesus was a servant. He upended his divine status, he humbled himself, he washed the disciples’ feet. In all that benevolent, dynamic activity, Jesus never lorded it above people, even though he was higher than anyone, 

‘He humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross. Wherefore God also hath highly exalted him, and given him a name which is above every name: that the name of Jesus every knee should bow..’

That’s in St Paul’s Letter to the Philippians [2:9-10]. So he wasn’t Plato’s ‘philosopher king’. On the one hand he was ‘gentle Jesus, meek and mild’, the words of Mrs C. F. Alexander, that we sang in Sunday School: but on the other, he was a really brave man, a hero, willing to face any challenge, even death.

Does that take us anywhere nearer to finding out what it is to be ‘in the spirit’, to be spiritual?

Let’s assume that St Paul’s antithesis, of the flesh as against being of the spirit, and Jesus’, as the kingdom of God against the wiles of the devil, are two perspectives on something similar.

The lists of ‘works of the flesh’ and ‘works of the spirit’ in Galatians look very like what in other places in the Bible would be called sins, on the one hand, and good works on the other.

So being spiritual looks more and more like a prescription for action, for good works. You might say that we don’t earn salvation, by doing good works: instead God has saved us through his free gift of grace. All we have to do is believe. You don’t actually have to do anything.

But that’s not right either. Think what the Epistle of St James says. 

14What doth it profit, my brethren, though a man say he hath faith, and have not works? can faith save him?

15If a brother or sister be naked, and destitute of daily food,

16And one of you say unto them, Depart in peace, be ye warmed and filled; notwithstanding ye give them not those things which are needful to the body; what doth it profit?

17Even so faith, if it hath not works, is dead.. [James 2:14-17]

So what would Bishop Jo have said, if she’d realised what a splendid pulpit we have at St Mary’s – what would she add to her careful balancing of the spiritual with the temporal? Granted that the new Hall is not spiritual, but it’s a temporal, earthly benefit: what must we do to ensure that the spiritual side is upheld too in our church?

I would suggest that this spirituality would, or rather should, manifest itself not just in contemplation, but in action: not in meekness or peace, (or rather not only in meekness or peace), but also in action, in love of our neighbour, active love, Good Samaritan love.

In our Parish Profile, published on the Diocesan website the other day, we describe our Christian tradition, here at St Mary’s, as ‘liberal catholic’. What that means is that we are Anglicans who are in the catholic tradition, tracing our church back to the Apostles, catholic, a word meaning ‘universal’, a church for all, inclusive and traditional. It is a type of Anglicanism which was started in the 1830s in the Senior Common Room of Oriel College, Oxford, and was preached from the pulpit of the University Church, St Mary the Virgin, just opposite Oriel on the High Street. It was called Tractarianism or the Oxford Movement, and it started with a sermon, the ‘Assize Sermon’, preached 184 years ago last Friday, on 14th July 1833, by John Keble, which he titled ‘On National Apostasy’.

John Keble preached: ‘What are the symptoms by which one may judge most fairly, whether or not a nation is becoming alienated from God and Christ? … How may a man best reconcile his allegiance to God and his Church with his duty to his country, that country which now by the supposition is fast becoming hostile to the Church, and cannot therefore long be the friend of God?’ 

John Keble was followed by John Henry Newman, Pusey, Froude and other notable theologians. Newman would eventually convert to Roman Catholicism. But the Anglo-Catholic, Tractarian, movement within the Church of England became a major spiritual revival. And you must note that at its heart, this revival, although it was chiefly spiritual, could also be political. Where the state was perceived not to be operating in a Christian way, the Tractarians were prepared to challenge the politicians, as Keble had done in his Assize Sermon. The established Church and the State can’t avoid each other. They mustn’t. I believe that is still true today.

A real hallmark of the new Anglo-Catholic churches was their social concern. Just as I have tried to show how being ‘in the spirit’ really involves action, loving care, and service: being a servant like the Servant King, not just passive piety, so the Anglo-Catholics became great social workers. They founded missions among the poor in the East End of London, where they did not just look after the spiritual needs of the people, but also their temporal hunger. They started schools and libraries: they started the forerunners of our food banks.

So if we seek to be in the tradition of the Anglo-Catholics – and I believe that, for example, Revd John Waterson, the legendary Rector here for over 30 years till the 1970s, would have said that he was one – I think that as we follow Bishop Jo in her quest for spiritual gifts as well as temporal blessings, like the Hall, we need to start on the action items which our Vision Day identified, and in particular we need to start to look seriously at our care for our neighbours, our love for our neighbours. 

We already support the Foodbank. Putting on my Foodbank manager’s hat for a moment, I can thank St Mary’s for all sorts of valuable support. As well as generous food and money donations, three of the four Foodbank trustees, and several more of our volunteer staff, come from this church. 

But what else ought we to get involved in? What about welcoming refugees? Should we support Elmbridge CAN, our local refugee support group? There will soon be three Syrian refugee families living in the borough. They will need support in all sorts of practical ways.

Or should we take a leaf out of the Anglo-Catholic history book, and find a parish in a deprived area with whom we could make a partnership, so some of our wealth and abundance could be shared?

These are some of the ideas which I think we must start looking seriously at, if we are to take on the vision which we developed with Revd Steve Cox when he visited us. I think that we’ll be trying to assemble a new committee – of course, you can’t do anything in church without a committee – to become a kind of ‘delivery group’ for the ideas for community involvement from the Vision Day. If you’d be interested in getting involved, please do let me know. 

I do hope Bishop Jo, and the spirit of John Keble, would both approve!

Sermon for Evensong on the Second Sunday after Trinity, 25th June 2017
1 Samuel 24:1-17, Luke 14:12-24

When I was a graduate trainee (last year …), one day I was sitting at my desk, at lunchtime, having a sandwich and trying to complete a task which I had been set by one of the partners in the august marine insurance firm I was working in.

One of the senior partners, whom I normally never saw from day to day, appeared. Why had he left the corridor of power? I wondered. I never found out – but nevertheless, I soon had to deal with him.

‘Bryant, what are you doing?’ He asked. I said that I was trying to catch up with such-and-such a piece of work. ‘No, but what are you really doing?’ He pressed. I was at a loss. What was he on about?

‘What’s that in your hand?’ 

‘A sandwich, sir.’

‘You’re wasting the firm’s time! Get off your backside and go out: go and find a shipowner, and buy them some lunch!’

So I did. And I fear that my slightly less than streamlined shape is the result of my finding those shipowners and buying them some lunch rather regularly over the last 40 years.

Lunch – or dinner – is a powerful tool. And a nice stylish invitation just adds to how good it is. If you have a few of those nice cards on your mantelpiece, you feel all right. Well, everyone here has at least one of those, for Bishop Jo’s opening of St Mary’s Hall, followed by a hog roast, on 9th July. (If you haven’t got an invitation, please do see me after the service!)

Meals are powerful. The Alpha Course, the way in which more people have been introduced to Christianity in this country than by any other way in the last 40 years, involves sitting down together and sharing a meal. Somehow, eating and drinking together deepens the sense of fellowship and draws people in.

The Ancient Greeks, and the Romans after them, placed great store by banquets and feasts. You may remember Fellini’s wonderfully over-the-top film ‘Satyricon’, which was a dramatisation of that part of the Roman author Petronius’ satirical book which was called ‘Cena Trimalchionis’, Trimalchio’s Banquet. Trimalchio, the host, is a freed slave, and therefore almost by definition a nouveau-riche – and he has made up for lost time by making a lot of money, which he’s keen to show off to as many people as possible. It is pretty vulgar stuff – girls leaping, scantily clad, from giant pies, and so on. Not but what it’s great fun – although possibly not quite suitable for ‘Spiritual Cinema’.

We still remember – and celebrate – those ancient meals. Plato and several other Classical authors wrote descriptions of ‘Symposiums’, gatherings of men to discuss important topics over serious drinks, reclining on couches, what the Romans called ‘triclinia’. Plato’s book, called his ‘Symposium’, contains a big panel discussion about love – love between the sexes, that is. Food was taken separately: a ‘symposium’ was strictly a drinks do, whereas a ‘δειπνον’ was a meal where the discussion could continue.

But Jesus was concerned to add his distinctive twist to banquets and party invites. His banquet was not for the in-crowd, not for the glitterati. He told a parable about a posh dinner, where the intending host had sent out those nice invitation cards, but his friends were turning him down. They had various practical things to attend to: a new piece of land: ‘five yoke of oxen’, which must have had the same function in those days as one of those massive John Deere tractors that we see pulling trailers through the village today. Serious kit. And another one had just got married.

Difficult to see what the problem of being a newly-wed was, unless the banquet was a men-only do. After all, even the Reform Club only admitted women in 1980. But the other excuses were feeble. It sounded to the host as though they just didn’t want to come to his party, at any price.

So Jesus turned the whole thing on its head. He’d already indicated that he didn’t think you should invite posh people round to dinner and things, just so as you could get invited back. He had said earlier to the disciples, ‘But when thou makest a feast, call the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind.’

Bear in mind that in those days, if people were ‘poor, maimed, lame, or ‘blind’, it was looked upon as showing that they had done something wrong – they had sinned, and that had brought divine punishment upon them, which was why they were halt, and lame and blind. So Jesus was recommending that you send your party invites not just to rather unglamorous people, but also that you send them to people who were actually bad, bad, at least in the eyes of Jewish society in those days. It was another instance of Jesus being willing to make friends with anyone. Remember when he got taken to task for having a meal with ‘publicans’ (tax gatherers) and sinners.

You might just notice in passing that it’s a bit like what certain sections of the press and the media say about people who are on benefits or who have to get food from the Foodbank. They call them scroungers and imply that most of them are cheats. They’re in a bad way because they’re feckless. Perhaps some people’s attitudes haven’t changed much in 2,000 years.

So when his friends came up with excuses why they couldn’t make the party, Jesus’ bloke sent out ‘into the streets and lanes of the city, and brought in the halt and the lame, the poor and the blind – and got his man to make sure that the banquet was filled up with all these second-class citizens, and none of the proper lot who were first invited.

This is right in line with Jesus’ commandment of love, with his contrary way of doing the opposite of whatever conventional wisdom would have recommended. There were precedents for this kind of selfless generosity in Jewish history – our first lesson, the story of David sparing the life of King Saul, is a good one. But the point is that Jesus wanted to raise up the poor, the halt, the lame and the blind. Think of what we sing in the Magnificat:

‘He hath put down the mighty from their seat: and hath exalted the humble and meek.

He hath filled the hungry with good things: and the rich he hath sent empty away’.

When we think of the people burned alive in Grenfell Tower, where they spent nearly £10m making the building look nice to the posh neighbours, but didn’t spend anything on sprinklers or proper fire alarms: when we learn that the council didn’t listen to the residents’ association when they tried to warn about the fire risk – perhaps because they were only poor people, maybe immigrants or black people – not worth listening to; somehow less important, less influential, than the rich people whose mansion flats looked out on the grotty council block in their midst: when we learn of that, we should think carefully about what Jesus was saying.

Jesus didn’t tolerate a huge gap between rich and poor. ‘He hath put down the mighty from their seat: and hath exalted the humble and meek’. He didn’t tolerate those who wanted to do the right thing, but allowed mundane practicalities to get in the way. Is it right that a nurse shouldn’t have a pay rise since 2009? Is it an answer to say that ‘there isn’t a magic money tree’? Jesus didn’t care. He wasn’t at all impressed that one of his guests had just bought a parcel of land, and another one had bought a stonking great tractor for his farm.

Jesus would have looked at our country today, and seen the rich getting tax cuts while the poor had to go to food banks and the Health Service teetered on the brink of financial collapse, and poor people being incinerated in a lethal tower block with no sprinkler system, which had been prettified at great expense – but just chiselling off the cost of fireproof cladding – and I am sure he would have been like the dinner host when his pampered guests turned him down for their own selfish reasons: ‘He hath filled the hungry with good things: and the rich he hath sent empty away’. 

And by the way, as you’ll see from the hand-outs which we’re giving out today, that even here in the second richest borough in the country, second to the home of Grenfell Tower, Kensington and Chelsea, even here in Elmbridge, in the Cobham area, demand for our Foodbank has gone up so much that we’ve run out of many vital food items. We are giving out over half a metric ton of food per week now, here in Cobham, to local, Cobham people. 

You may say that this is political. I would say that it doesn’t matter which party you are in, you need to lobby your party to adopt policies, or change its policies, so that the halt (that could mean those who have long-term disabilities), the lame (that could mean those who have been hurt, or who are ill), or the poor (they could be people working, but on a zero-hours contract) – and of course the blind – so that all those second-class citizens are no longer shut out of the banquet which most of us enjoy.

Shall we start with two things? Let’s take one of the shopping lists at the back of the church and do an extra trip to the supermarket this week, and buy some of the things that the Foodbank is short of; and let’s invite the Foodbank’s customers who live in Stoke D’Abernon to join us at our hog roast with Bishop Jo on 9th July. I think Jesus would approve.

Sermon for Evensong on Trinity Sunday, 11th June 2017
Isaiah 6:1-8, John 6:5-15 
I’ve always thought that the picture of the seraphim in heaven was a bit like one of those pictures of Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘ornithopter’ – one of the earliest flying machines – or rather, the earliest not-flying machines. Six wings. Two covering his face: two his feet, and two doing what wings normally do, giving aerodynamic lift: ‘with twain he did fly’. Perhaps Leonardo got the idea from the sixth chapter of Isaiah.

Do you know what a seraph is? 

‘Thus spake the seraph, 

and forthwith

appeared a shining throng

of angels praising God’

A seraph is a super-angel, a six-winged angel, supposed to be the highest in heaven under God. 

This is a truly splendid vision. I don’t know what you feel about angels. Surprisingly sane people tell me that they believe in them. ‘Do you have a guardian angel?’ they ask.

Well, no, I say hastily. Wait a minute – is that rather too hasty? What is an angel? It may be a question what a particular type of angel is, or does, such as the seraphim; but what is an angel anyway, any type of angel? An angel is, in Greek, a messenger. This story, about the calling of the prophet Isaiah, indeed does involve an angel as a messenger, of sorts. He brings a message to Isaiah. God is calling him.

Isaiah is reluctant; he is not worthy, he says. ‘Woe is me! for I am undone’. He has seen the Lord of hosts, God. The Jews believed that only a priest was allowed to see God. Only the priests went into the innermost part of the Temple, the holy of holies. Other people, if they saw God, would be consumed, burned up, because they could not co-exist with God.

Isaiah says he has ‘unclean lips.’ Dirty. Dirty both physically and metaphorically. But the seraph brings a red-hot coal from the fire, ‘and he laid it upon my mouth’: a live coal, a coal glowing red-hot. Surely Isaiah would have been horribly burned: but no, the effect is just to cleanse him morally: 

‘Lo, this hath touched thy lips; and thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin purged’. Isaiah is cleaned up, fit to do the Lord’s work. ‘Whom shall I send?’ asks the Lord: and Isaiah says, ‘Here am I; send me.’

What to make of this today? We probably don’t think of God as ‘sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up.’ But wait – it says, ‘and his train filled the temple’. They were in the temple. Just as we are here in church. In a sense, this is where God lives. People can say, sometimes, that you don’t have to go to church in order to encounter the divine at work, in order to meet God. To which the Churchman will answer, ‘Indeed, you’re right: but it certainly makes it easier, to go to the house of prayer.’

What was the seraph doing with his red-hot coal? Cauterising the wound, the septic sore caused by all the bad things Isaiah had been doing. That seems pretty drastic. Perhaps there’s the same sort of idea that people had when they put witches in a ducking stool. If the poor woman somehow managed to avoid drowning, she was purged of her sins.

This is very old, very ancient stuff. Isaiah – first Isaiah, as the Book of Isaiah actually contains material from three prophets – first Isaiah was written about 740 BC. Eight centuries before Christ would be born. Nearly 3,000 years ago. Can we usefully talk about having ‘unclean lips’ today? Are we fit to do things for God? It doesn’t really translate in any literal sense, but I think we can nevertheless understand the drift.

Where would we look, if we wanted to find a seraph, an angel? An angel with six wings, even: maybe a sort of drone, these days. If we look at our second reading, from St John’s gospel, Jesus is casting the Comforter, the Holy Spirit, in that role after he had gone. Not so much as a way of calling people – although arguably the most effective disciple, St Paul, was overcome by a sort of seizure at the behest of the Holy Spirit, and it resulted in him being converted, and accepted by them. 

Instead these are all aspects of the divine, of God. Today is Trinity Sunday, when we remember ‘God in three persons, blessed trinity’, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Not three gods, but three aspects, three personae of one. God the Creator. God with us in human form, Jesus Christ. And then when Jesus ceased to be here as a human, in his place came the Holy Spirit, the Comforter.

And the Comforter – not a lovely ladies’ scarf, by the way, but the Holy Spirit – that is the way we think of God’s presence with us now. Not a seraphim, not an angel, but I would have thought that it does no harm for us to imagine the heavenly realm, and feel called as Isaiah was. ‘Here I am; send me.’ What a great message. Here we are. Send us!

(I’m grateful to Sue Woolley and Laide Sjumarken for the ideas for this sermon.)

Sermon for Evensong on Whit Sunday, 4th June 2017

Acts 2:14-38; Luke 24:44-53

 
‘These men are not drunk’… St Peter is answering a multiethnic crowd of Jews in Jerusalem, who have just heard the disciples – all from one district, Galilee – speaking, in such a way that each listener heard in his own language: it was like the amazing simultaneous translation service that you get if you go to watch a debate at the European Parliament. You put on some headphones, and select which language you want to listen in. The translators are very good.

But we are told by the author of the Acts of the Apostles – generally reckoned to be St Luke, who also wrote St Luke’s Gospel (both of tonight’s lessons are by St Luke) – by St Luke the doctor, that long before simultaneous translation and microphones, the disciples’ words were suddenly heard in a variety of languages, after the sound of a rushing wind and tongues of fire had come among them.

I’ve never really understood why some of the Jewish audience thought that the disciples were drunk. I know that, as a typically hopeless Englishman, that speaks French and German only to ‘O’ level, I’ve always found that my linguistic ability, such as it is, does improve with a modicum of alcohol: but it doesn’t give me miraculous powers as a sort of one-man simultaneous translation facility.

I suppose that the rude remark about their looking drunk might have been caused if the disciples were not only speaking intelligibly in several languages at once, but were showing signs of ecstatic giddiness. Perhaps they were waving their arms around or writhing on the floor.

As you know, the established Church has, since the 18th century, been suspicious of religious ‘enthusiasm’ – a word which has rather changed in meaning since 300 years ago. It meant then the sort of noisy, ecstatic worship – people ‘speaking in tongues’ and waving their arms about – that we often call ‘Pentecostal’. Be that as it may.

But for us who aren’t ‘enthusiasts’, what is Pentecost – or rather, what is this Holy Spirit, whose coming at Pentecost we celebrate today? ‘Father, Son and Holy Ghost’: the Holy Ghost? When Jesus met the woman of Samaria getting water from the well in John 4, he told her, ‘God is spirit, and those that worship him must worship in spirit and in truth.’ The Authorised Version says, ‘God is a spirit ..’

This isn’t a spooky tale of ghouls and ghosties. The history of Jesus, Jesus Christ, isn’t on the Harry Potter level. We are, when we talk about the Holy Spirit, the Holy Ghost, talking about God. As we say in the Nicene Creed, (the creed we say at Communion), ‘… I believe in the Holy Ghost, The Lord and giver of life, Who proceedeth from the Father and the Son, Who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified, Who spake by the Prophets.’

The Holy Spirit is God, one of the ‘three persons’ of God the Holy Trinity. The coming like a rushing wind, in tongues of fire, was a revelation, God declaring His presence, His concern for his creation. Jesus might not be physically present among us any more, but his Holy Spirit, the Comforter or Advocate which Jesus promised he would get the Father to send after he had gone. (See John 14-16).

A big controversy in the early church was all about whether the Spirit had come just from God the Father, (which is what the Eastern Orthodox churches believe today), or from the Father and the Son together, as our version of the Nicene Creed says. The great liberal theologian, John Macquarrie, has suggested that a better way of putting it would be that the Spirit had come from the Father ‘through the Son’, but that, either way, he said, it wasn’t fundamental to our belief, de fide, an article of faith. [Macquarrie, John, 1966, (1977), Principles of Christian Theology, London, SCM Press, p. 330]

The Pentecost story is celebrated as effectively being the Church’s beginning, the Church’s birthday. 12 apostles became 120 after the Ascension. And then, after this extraordinary miracle – simultaneous translation into many languages for an audience from many countries, coming from the mouths of a group of country bumpkins from Galilee – after Peter had told them that it was a sign, a revelation, of God at work among them, that God had come among the human race to show His love for us – after this, 3,000 people came forward to be baptised. After that, Christianity ‘went viral’ as we would say today.

Until last night, I had intended that I should link our celebration of the coming of the Holy Spirit with our need for the Advocate, the Spirit of truth, the Comforter, on Thursday in the General Election. We seem faced by so much ‘fake news’, but yet the issues facing our country are so daunting. What are the marks of the Spirit, and can they help us?

It is surely something which I must speak about, and I will. But last night there was another terrorist incident, near to us, on and around London Bridge. More people hurt and killed – and again a suggestion that this was inspired by Islam, that it was an attack on us and our Christian culture.

These are truly testing times. Just as last week I said that attack in Manchester was not a contradiction against the need for our worldwide ‘wave of prayer’, Thy Kingdom Come, so today I say that we should learn from the earliest church as they faced indifference and persecution. The signs of the Spirit are not super power, in a fierce, military sense: instead the signs of it in those earliest times began with a dove, a peaceful dove, coming down and settling on Jesus as he was being baptised.

St Paul – who was writing decades earlier than St Luke – in his letter to the Galatians, identified the signs that the Spirit was present in a believer, chief of which is not some fierce strength, or some power to retaliate, but the warmth of love. Paul wrote, ‘… the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith..’ Not fear. Not anger. Not prejudice.

When you look again at the circumstances of that first Christian Pentecost, you see that the Holy Spirit didn’t just come to an elite group, or to individuals in seclusion. The Jerusalem where it happened was full to bursting with a polyglot, multiethnic, multicultural society.

They spoke many languages. They were rich and poor – indeed the Spirit would come, according to the prophecy of Joel quoted by St Peter, to everyone, to ‘all flesh: and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams:
And on my servants and on my handmaidens I will pour out in those days of my Spirit; and they shall prophesy…’

In fact, in the original Greek, the word is δούλος, slave, in both its masculine and feminine forms. Somehow the Authorised Version’s ‘servants’ and ‘handmaidens’ are too nice, too comfortable: ‘ …on my servants and on my handmaidens I will pour out in those days of my Spirit’. On my male and female slaves, the lowest of the low. It was a tough life then.

So the church, on which the tongues of fire fell with a rushing wind, is for everyone. Again as St Paul said in his Letter to the Galatians, ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus’ (Gal. 3:28).

Look what happens if we don’t listen to what the Spirit is saying here. This is an account from one of the newspapers after the bombing in Manchester ten days ago.
‘Naveed Yasin, a trauma and orthopaedic surgeon – who had spent the previous two days in demanding surgery, was driving back to the Salford Royal Hospital to continue to help blast victims when a van driver pulled up beside him and hurled abuse, …
The surgeon was stuck in traffic when he saw a van veering towards him, horn blaring. The white, middle-aged driver then lowered his window and yelled obscenities at Yasin.
The van driver said: “You brown, Paki bastard. Go back to your country, you terrorist. We don’t want you people here. F*** off!”

The incident shocked the surgeon, who was born and brought up in Keighley, West Yorkshire and lives in Manchester with his wife and two daughters, especially after two such gruelling days at work.

He told the Sunday Times: “I can’t take away the hatred he had for me because of my skin colour … and the prejudices he had associated with this. Manchester is better than this. We Mancunians will rebuild, we will rebuild the fallen buildings, the broken lives and the social cohesion we once had.”’ (The Guardian, 28th May 2017 – accessed at http://tinyurl.com/yamxnfyo).

We must be ‘better than this’, indeed. So when the election comes on Thursday, we must vote – because otherwise we will have no stake in the result. In the EU referendum, 20% of the electorate did not vote. You might argue that, in not voting at all, they did not vote to leave the EU – which would mean that only 36% of the electorate voted to leave, which is not a majority.

But we don’t know which way these non-voters would have voted, and so it is said that ‘the people have spoken’, although the people who did vote, voted 52-48% only. The non-voters could have made a huge difference. If they had voted to leave, the majority would have been beyond question – and the same principle applies, possibly even more emphatically, if it was confirmed that the non-voters indeed had wanted to remain. So it’s vital that everyone should turn out and vote.

But the other thing which is vital to consider is what the Holy Spirit is saying to us in the churches in relation to the various parties’ policies. Is there a message of division, of individualism, devil-take-the-hindmost; of nationalism, of exclusion? How should we react to terror attacks? Should we support tightly controlled immigration and put up barriers against refugees? Or should that dove be more like it? We are all children of God.

Gracious Spirit, Holy Ghost,

taught by thee, we covet most

of thy gifts at Pentecost,

holy, heavenly love.

[Christopher Wordsworth, 1807-1885]

Sermon for Evensong on Sunday after Ascension Day, 28th May 2017
At St Mary’s Church, Stoke D’Abernon

2 Samuel 23:1-5; Ephesians 1:15-23

Thy kingdom come. The Archbishop of Canterbury has proposed, for a second year running, that in the nine days between Ascension and Pentecost, Whit Sunday, everyone in all the churches should pray that bit of the Lord’s Prayer:

Thy kingdom come,

thy will be done,

on earth as it is in heaven,

together with other short prayers, in a ‘novena’, in a nine-day cycle of prayer. You can look them up on the Church of England website – and indeed, if anyone doesn’t have a computer to download it, see me afterwards and I’ll let you have a printed copy.

In the modern-language Communion service, in one of the Eucharistic prayers, Prayer E in Common Worship, we pray this prayer:
‘Lord of all life, help us to work together for that day when your kingdom comes, and justice and mercy will be seen in all the earth’.
For ‘that day when your kingdom comes’. That’s when, but it’s a bit confusing where all this is supposed to be happening. With the Ascension, Jesus going up to heaven, and the Holy Spirit coming down upon the apostles at Pentecost.

This is something where our words are inadequate to describe the divine realm, the workings of God. As St Paul writes, ‘… what is the exceeding greatness of his power to us-ward who believe, according to the working of his mighty power,
Which he wrought in Christ, when he raised him from the dead, and set him at his own right hand in the heavenly places..’

It is, in St Paul’s words, a powerful description of a God who is beyond all measurements of power, and I think by the same token that God is beyond any location in time or space. So it is all right to talk of him being up in heaven, in the sense that that isn’t a literal description, so much as a mark of how important, and how beyond all human imagining, the power of God is.

But we are not now looking at a world in which justice and mercy are seen in all the earth: at least, not yet. There are still terrible wrongs being done, as we realised on Monday night when the suicide bomber struck in Manchester, at a pop concert mainly attended by teenage girls, some of them with their mothers.

There have been so many words already written and spoken about this terrible crime. It was a terrible thing, a horrible crime. Whatever twisted ideology stood behind it, nothing could justify killing and injuring innocent children and their parents.

And now, until tomorrow night, we have armed soldiers on the streets to give people a sense of protection, to reassure them that such an atrocity will not happen again. Nevertheless it does seem doubtful whether simply having armed soldiers on the streets would actually deter or stop a terrorist who is prepared to blow themselves up alongside their victims.

We can feel the despair. ‘Thy kingdom come – please, yes’, we might say, in a spirit of frustration and bewilderment. How can we say that God’s kingdom is coming, or will come, when such terrible things do happen?

I should say immediately that I’m not ignoring the way in which, whenever a terrible atrocity happens, it also brings out the most wonderful outpouring of love and service, from the emergency services, the doctors and nurses, the police, the firemen: and ordinary people, like taxi drivers offering people free rides home. There is a real sense of community and solidarity, which is something that we should celebrate and be profoundly grateful for.

But the doubt remains. How can we celebrate the love of God when such awful things happen? Is there any point in saying prayers?

A lot depends on how you ask those questions. I nearly said, how could a loving God allow, or even cause, such things to happen? But I don’t believe that God works that way. We are not robots. God is, we believe, all-powerful, omnipresent, and all-knowing. But it doesn’t mean that God makes us do something good or bad. We believe that we have free will: we can choose whether we do a good or a bad thing. Indeed, we can choose whatever we want to do. We have been created as autonomous beings.

So the first thing to say is that God did not somehow cause the bombing in Manchester on Monday night. It was a criminal act by one criminal, perhaps supported by others, also with criminal intent.

The second thing is that it doesn’t mean that there’s no point in our saying prayers.

The Archbishop’s ‘wave of prayer’ over the next nine days is actually a really good response to the evil which found its expression in Manchester on Monday night. I recommend to you the ‘Thy kingdom come’ website, where you can see short clips by various of the Christian leaders, and where there are prayers which we can say each day. See http://www.thykingdomcome.global.

At the beginning there is an inspiring short address by Bishop Michael Curry, the presiding Bishop and primate of the Episcopal Church in North America, where he emphasises that prayers are answered.

It’s not the case that, when we pray, it’s as though we are in some kind of divine restaurant and God is some kind of divine maître d’, whom we can summon and order about.

When we pray, it is more like being a client of a food bank: getting a food voucher. We present our voucher, and the food bank gives us what is good for us. We have little or no choice.

And it is good: the second reflection in the novena is from His Eminence Christoph, Cardinal Schönborn, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Vienna. He finishes in a very engaging way by pointing out that it is good to pray with a smile.

All around the world Christians are either involved in this wave of prayer, praying ‘Thy kingdom come,’ or in other big Christian gatherings, like the German ‘Kirchentag’, or church festival, in Berlin, which began on Thursday with a 90-minute dialogue between former President Obama and the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, about democracy and global responsibility.

Barack Obama spoke of the need for renewal of the international order, against a background of xenophobia, nationalism, intolerance and anti-democratic trends. He said we have to push back against those trends that would violate human rights, or that would suppress democracy, or would restrict individual freedom of conscience and religion. ‘We can’t isolate ourselves. We can’t hide behind a wall’, he said. He was speaking at the Brandenburg Gate, the place where Berlin was divided between east and west, by the Berlin Wall.

In our prayers in a minute I will say the special prayer which the Bishop of Manchester has written for the people of Manchester, and that will be our first prayer. It will be our contribution to the wave of prayer today.

Prayers do work. Even our little congregation here will be heard. God will answer our prayers, in ways which we cannot anticipate or forecast. God’s kingdom will come, but in God’s time. Justice and mercy will be seen in all the earth: swords will be beaten into ploughshares: they will not hurt or destroy on God’s holy mountain.

Amen.

A prayer from the Diocese of Manchester

A SPECIAL PRAYER

God of compassion,

you hear the cries of all who are in trouble or distress;

accept our prayers for those whose lives are affected by the bombing in Manchester;

We pray especially for those suddenly facing a future without a child, parent or loved one,

young ones who are in deep distress

those who are injured, traumatized or awaiting news

strengthen them in their hour of need,

grant them perseverance and courage to face the future

and be to them a firm foundation on which to build their lives;

this we ask through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen.

The Collect for Peace (from the Book of Common Prayer)

O God, who art the author of peace and lover of concord,

in knowledge of whom standeth our eternal life,

whose service is perfect freedom;

defend us thy humble servants in all assaults of our enemies;

that we, surely trusting in thy defence,

may not fear the power of any adversaries;

through the might of Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen.