Sermon for Evensong on the Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity, 4th 2016
Isaiah 43:14-44:5, John 5:30-47 

On Wednesday night I went to rather a good party. It took place in a car showroom in Guildford. It was in honour of the new registration plate which came in on 1st September. The idea was that you could pick up your new car at midnight and drive it away. I was one of the fortunate ones who were doing exactly that. Some of you may have noticed that my little Smart car has changed colour! Well, apart from nourishing my petrolhead tendencies, the party at the Smart showroom, still open late on Wednesday night, was interesting for another reason.

I had a long conversation with the managing director of the garage, who was a courteous and friendly South African, who told me that he had been living in Guildford for the last five years. Somehow or other we got on to talking about our Christian faith. You might think that it was rather surreal to be in a garage having a party at midnight: but I think that the fact that we were having a serious discussion about Christianity in a car showroom in Guildford at midnight probably tops even that! 

I asked my new friend which church in Guildford he went to. He told me that it was a relatively new church which had been ‘planted’ by Holy Trinity Brompton, the London church where the Alpha course started. He had been in London, worshipping at Holy Trinity, originally – indeed I think he was part of the team exported by HTB, as it is known, to start the new congregation in Guildford.

I was a little bit surprised to think that Guildford needs another church, as there are a lot of thriving churches there already. Think of Holy Trinity, Saint Saviour’s, Emmanuel, Stoughton or St John’s, Stoke, to name just a few. All big, well-supported churches, within a mile of the centre.

But of course that doesn’t matter. So far as spreading the gospel is concerned, the more the merrier. ‘Go therefore and make disciples of all the world’ (Matt. 28:19), was Jesus’ great commission. I was intrigued, and I looked up the new church on the Internet, as you do. 

What was interesting to me was that, when my new friend introduced it to me, the thing he said was, ‘There is a new church plant in Guildford, which meets in a theatre.’ And then he went on, ‘You know, Guildford has the highest rate of marriage breakdown in the country.’
Now I may be doing him a disservice, because he didn’t say  this, but I wondered whether the statistic about the divorces in Guildford was some kind of mission statement. Actually I’m not sure that mission statements are necessarily a very good thing.

Nevertheless, it got me thinking about why we are Christians: almost, what’s it for? It seemed like my friend in Guildford felt that the very high divorce rate was, in itself, an important reason for having more Christians. It may be a gross oversimplification, but I got the feeling that perhaps the idea was, that if you were better disciples, if you loved Jesus more dearly and followed him more nearly, then there would be fewer divorces. That seems, of course, perfectly laudable. It is, though, rather a surprising objective, if you put it at the top of the headlines, as the most notable reason for going to church.

The sanctity of family life has always been at the heart of Christianity, and indeed it has been since the time of the ten commandments – ‘Thou shall shalt not commit adultery’ (although of course that’s not the only reason why marriages fail). But it seemed almost that that was the new church’s ‘strap line’.

But what is the appeal of a particular church? What is its unique selling proposition? Are there different USPs for different churches, or is there one central USP, which is what Jesus brings? Why do you go at all, and why do you go to one church rather than another? Incidentally, when I looked up the new church’s website, the divorce rate in Guildford was right up there again, prominently mentioned. They didn’t mention other social concerns, such as perhaps a mission to refugees or to relieve poverty, perhaps by supporting their local food bank, although I’m sure they do that too.

So go back to the question, “What is Christianity for?” Is it to make us better people, so we don’t get divorced so much, for example? The difficulty is that good Christians still do bad things. Indeed, right at the very beginning, St Paul, in his letter to the Romans, chapter 7, confesses that although he wants to do the right thing, he still does what he does not want to do, he falls for temptation, the bad option, every time. Although he knows what God’s law lays down, he does not always follow it. (See Romans 7:14-19).

Are Christians better, morally, than other thoughtful human beings? They are subject to the same temptations and the same weaknesses. If you follow what St Paul said in Romans 7, you’d conclude that Christians are, morally, nothing special. That may be overly harsh: because, as St Paul says, in his letter to the Galatians, the fruits of the Holy Spirit are a number of moral virtues. They are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, fidelity, gentleness, and self-control. (Galatians 5:22). If you are a Christian, if you have been saved by God’s grace in Jesus Christ, then there will be signs of your having been saved in the good that you do as a result.

This certainly got me thinking about us here at St Mary’s. I’m not aware if we do have a spectacularly high divorce rate. But if we were to go off and plant another church in order to spread the good news of Jesus far and wide, what would we home in on? What would be our unique selling proposition? Of course, some of you will immediately say, ‘Hang on, that’s exactly what St Mary’s actually did, at the turn of the last century: when we, we at St Mary’s, set up St Andrew’s, Oxshott.’ St Andrew’s, Oxshott was a church plant, a church plant from St Mary’s.

I’m sorry that I am not a good enough historian to be able to tell you what it was that they took from St Mary’s to the good people of Oxshott by way of a gospel message. Whatever it was, it was obviously a good message, because St Andrew’s, Oxshott has thrived ever since. We must all pray for them to find a new vicar soon, to step into Jeremy Cresswell’s shoes, as he is now enjoying retirement, having been their much-loved vicar for 25 years.

I wonder what the church planters 100 years ago identified as the particular spiritual need of the new community growing up in Oxshott. Perhaps that can be a group discussion topic! You know, I am inclined to think that, rather than identifying a particular social ill and suggesting that more discipleship would fix it, the dynamic for a church like ours – and, dare I say, I think it might have been the same 100 years ago – might have been – might be today – what is in our lessons today. 
In the prophet Isaiah:
‘I am the Lord, your Holy One, the creator of Israel, your King.

Thus saith the Lord, which maketh a way in the sea, and a path in the mighty waters..’

There is our Lord, our creator. He confronts us. We ought to respect, to worship, our Creator. But the danger is that we ignore Him. In the Old Testament, nearly 3,000 years ago, Isaiah laments this: 

‘But thou hast not called upon me, O Jacob; but thou hast been weary of me, O Israel.

Thou hast not brought me the small cattle of thy burnt offerings; neither hast thou honoured me with thy sacrifices.’

Again, in St John’s Gospel, Jesus says,

‘And the Father himself, which hath sent me, hath borne witness of me. Ye have neither heard his voice at any time, nor seen his shape.

And ye have not his word abiding in you: for whom he hath sent, him ye believe not.

Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me.’ 

God is there, in front of us, around us, at the ‘ground of our being’ [Paul Tillich]. And yet we are preoccupied, we worry about ourselves, about our needs. Yes, we are concerned to improve our lives, whether there are divorces, or bankruptcies, or chronic illnesses, or jobs lost. But we forget God. 

I’m sure we agree with the new church people in Guildford that these things like divorces are signs of sin, of people being separated from the love of God. So the driving force of our mission, both here and by the new church in Guildford, is to remind people about Jesus, about the fact that He came to be God among us, to show that the Creator cares for us.

We need to remind people about God, about Jesus. We believe that if you do believe and trust in Him, you will have that sure and certain hope, the hope of eternal life. You will, while you live your human life, still be subject to the pull of sin, but the more your faith, the bigger the hole you make in your life for Jesus, the more you will show those blessed signs of love which St Paul told the Galatians about. And that works just as well in our beautiful Saxon church as it does in a theatre. We are all God’s people.

Sermon for Evensong on the 14th Sunday after Trinity, 28th August 2016
Isaiah 33:13-22, John 3:22-36 

‘He shall dwell on high’, we read in the prophet Isaiah (33:16), and John the Baptist said, ‘He that cometh from above is above all: he that is of the earth is earthly, and speaketh of the earth: he that cometh from heaven is above all.’ (John 3:31)

What is it like in heaven? We talk about heaven and earth. We make a distinction between earthly things and heavenly things. And perhaps we think that, somehow, the higher you go, the nearer you get to God. 

A week ago it was the 75th anniversary of the publication of that wonderful poem called ‘High Flight’, by the Spitfire pilot, John Gillespie Magee.

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,

And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;

Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth

Of sun-split clouds, –and done a hundred things

You have not dreamed of –Wheeled and soared and swung

High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there

I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung

My eager craft through footless halls of air…

Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue

I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace

Where never lark or even eagle flew —

And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod

The high untrespassed sanctity of space,

Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

In 1941, Magee had flown his Spitfire to 31,000 feet. He wrote the poem on the back of an envelope:

‘… I’ve trod

The high untrespassed sanctity of space,

Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.’

It is every pilot’s favourite poem. God is high, high up there. We will pray, ‘O Lord and heavenly father, high and mighty, King of kings, …’ High, high and mighty. In the liturgy, God is the king of heaven. ‘High’ is the adjective not just meaning tall, but also, metonymically, ‘important’, ‘high-ranking’, ‘leading’. 

I think we would all acknowledge that God isn’t really a kindly-looking old man with a beard, living above the clouds. When John Magee’s Spitfire was flying miles above the earth, and he ‘put out [his] hand, and touched the face of God’, we need not worry about whether God avoided a close shave – literally – with the Spitfire’s propeller. The idea of a place, away from, above, the world we live in, where God the creator, or the various gods, say, in the Hellenic tradition, goes back to the earliest forms of civilisation. But it isn’t meant to be taken literally. God is not confined, not limited to one place, however exalted.

In the metaphor, though, as well as God on high, there is a nether region, another place. Down, but not literally – not to Australia. Heaven, where the good people go, is up there. Hell, the other place, is down, down below. Think of Dives and Lazarus, Jesus’ parable of the rich man and the crippled beggar (Luke 16:19-31). Lazarus the beggar goes up to heaven, and Dives goes down to Sheol, Hades, the realm of the dead. Hell is also supposed to be a furnace. The sinners who end up there are burned. As Isaiah says: ‘Who among us shall dwell with the devouring fire? who among us shall dwell with everlasting burnings?’ (33:14) God puts people to the test, the test of refining fire.

It’s a graphic way of imagining the awesome power of God. According to Isaiah, unless you live virtuously, you will end up in the fires of Hell. Who will be able to come through the testing in the fire? The answer: ‘He that walketh righteously, and speaketh uprightly; he that despiseth the gain of oppressions, that shaketh his hands from holding of bribes, that stoppeth his ears from hearing of blood, and shutteth his eyes from seeing evil.’ (33:15)

And then Isaiah paints a picture of the place where these virtuous people end up after they have passed through the testing fire:

‘Look upon Zion, the city of our solemnities: thine eyes shall see Jerusalem a quiet habitation, a tabernacle that shall not be taken down; not one of the stakes thereof shall ever be removed, neither shall any of the cords thereof be broken.

But there the glorious Lord will be unto us a place of broad rivers and streams; wherein shall go no galley with oars, neither shall gallant ship pass thereby.’ (33:20-21)

The city of God; ‘Glorious things of thee are spoken, Zion city of our God’. These are lovely pictures, perhaps the best we can do with our limited understanding, to imagine the Kingdom of God – the Kingdom of Heaven. 

But there is a problem. The problem is that this beautiful vision is so far removed from our daily life, that no-one these days really takes any notice of it. As John the Baptist says about Jesus, ‘And what he hath seen and heard, that he testifieth; and no man receiveth his testimony.’ (John 3:32)

A prophet is without honour, indeed. There was Jesus, who was God, there in front of them, not a metaphorical figure: someone who’d been there, in that heaven, and was telling everyone who listened to him about it – but his testimony was not believed – at least not according to John the Baptist.

That’s strange. Surely Jesus was surrounded by big crowds, most of whom presumably would have described themselves as followers. Maybe this is like what people say about Jeremy Corbyn. He certainly attracts great crowds – but people say that, when the general election comes, he won’t get the votes from the electorate as a whole, as opposed to just his followers.

I couldn’t speculate on whether that’s a correct view, in Mr Corbyn’s case, but I wonder whether it was what John the Baptist thought about Jesus. ‘No man receiveth his testimony’: did John think that the craze for following Jesus was just a local thing, just that, a craze?

‘No man receiveth his testimony’. Testimony is what a witness gives in court, evidence. Why would people be reluctant to believe Jesus’ evidence? I suspect that there could be different answers, depending whether you’re talking about people then, contemporaries of Jesus, 2,000 years ago, and people today. 2,000 years ago the people who refused to believe Jesus were other Jews, the Pharisees and the Sadducees. For them Jesus’ teaching wasn’t convenient. He challenged them in all sorts of ways, accusing them of hypocrisy, challenging the trappings of their piety – having the best places in the synagogue, for instance. But He told them that the first would be last in his kingdom. Not what they wanted to hear.

The problem today is that people don’t so much positively resist Jesus’ teaching, as ignore it altogether. John the Baptist taught his followers that, if anyone did accept what Jesus said as being true, that it was real evidence, then they had taken to heart the very words of God himself. God had given Jesus the words, his words. ‘He whom God sent utters the words of God, so measureless is God’s gift of the Spirit.’

It takes God away from the world of picturesque metaphors, from the heights of heaven. In Jesus, God is right there in front of us. Well, I ought to have said, God was right there in front of them. Them, not us. Jesus recognised the struggle we would have, when he appeared to Doubting Thomas. He said to Thomas, ‘Because you have seen me you have found faith. Happy are they who never saw me and yet have found faith’. (John 20:29)

So for many people, it’s just a distant, academic thing. ‘Jesus gave evidence about heaven. He was talking about what he had witnessed with his own eyes’. Really? Come on, they say: it’s too far-fetched.

John the Baptist, like Isaiah, thought that there would be a Last Judgement, that there were big penalties awaiting anyone who did ignore Jesus’, or the prophet’s, words of God. For the believer, ‘He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life: and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him.’ 

We tend to downplay the hell-fire and damnation aspect these days. But what do you think? It’s not so long, in evolutionary terms, since John Magee made his High Flight, and ‘touched the face of God’. God is still there – maybe not just up there. I think the hymn has it right.

For the beauty of the earth, 

for the glory of the skies, 

for the love which from our birth 

over and around us lies, … (Folliot S. Pierpoint, Common Praise No 253)

God is still with us; in the beauties of creation: in love, which you can find over and around us. Over, indeed; but also all around us. Let’s not be blind to Him.

Sermon for Evensong on the Thirteenth Sunday after Trinity, 21st August 2016 –

Isaiah 30:8-21, 2 Corinthians 9: Supermarket Stories (2) – God loves a cheerful giver.

My sermons today will have been tales of two supermarkets. This morning I was gently pointing out that perhaps Jesus’ saying, that it was all right to heal sick people on the Sabbath, wasn’t a total let-off from the Ten Commandments – and especially the one about observing the Sabbath day and keeping it holy. Although we all go to Waitrose after service on Sunday, is it the right thing to do, really?

Tonight I’m bringing to you my thoughts, about helping with the Foodbank collection at the big Sainsbury’s in Cobham yesterday. It put me in mind of part of our lesson from St Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians: ‘God loves a cheerful giver’. 

You can heave a sigh of relief, that I don’t plan to give you a hard sell to increase your banker’s order to St Mary’s – although of course if someone new came along and wanted to know how the work of the church is sustained, then pretty early in the discussion I would expect the practicalities of a banker’s order and Gift Aid declaration would come up. 
No, I wanted to share with you a little about an expression I heard plenty of times yesterday. It was, ‘I’m all right, thank you.’ Yes, ‘I’m all right, thank you.’ That was probably the first thing I heard, when I offered someone a small shopping list with a list of those items we haven’t got enough of in our warehouse in order to provide a nutritionally-balanced package of food for all our clients. ‘Would you like a shopping list? You know, for the Foodbank – things to buy for us?’ And they said, ‘I’m all right, thank you.’ 

Under my breath I muttered, ‘It’s not whether you are all right that I’m concerned about. It’s your Mum in a nursing home. The family who live next door to you. Are they all right?’ But I sensed that what was being said wasn’t actually what he really meant. 
We were wanting people to take one of our ‘shopping lists’ and buy one or two of the items listed in it, in addition to their own shopping. They would then be able to drop off the food in our collection crates, and add to our food collection, making up the shortages in our warehouse and enabling clients to pick up good food to tide them over their thin time.

This person wasn’t expressing a view about how he was, yesterday. He wasn’t all right. But he said he was; because he was embarrassed, or shy. He wasn’t, I’m afraid, a cheerful giver.

You encounter the same effect sometimes, when you collect for Christian Aid. Some people refuse to give, in a variety of ingenious ways. ‘The dog must have eaten the envelope’. The best one I have heard is, ‘We don’t give to that kind of thing.’ What kind of thing? What ‘kind of thing’ is Christian Aid – or Cobham Area Foodbank? They are both registered charities, after all. They have to follow prescribed, approved, charitable purposes.

How awful! you will say. What is the world coming to? People never used to be that mean. Well, actually, nothing much has changed – for over 2,000 years. Look at this fascinating passage from St Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians. He’s fund-raising for something. One of the difficulties with Paul’s letters is that you rarely find out what a letter, which he’s replying to, said. But it’s clear that he’s been in Macedonia, and got concrete support for a charitable venture of some kind from the Christian congregation there. 

Members of a church were called ‘saints’, sancti, in Latin, άγιοι, holy ones, in Greek, by St Paul. It’s the sanctity of being separate, being fenced off, from ordinary society. Perhaps we’re ‘saints’ in that cut-off sense too. Look – there are about 20 of us meeting here for worship tonight. We’re rather a tiny minority of the population as a whole. Saints. 

But even so – and this is what I find fascinating here – mundane considerations of raising money to support the mission have to be dealt with. Paul has asked the Corinthians to raise some money for the relief of poverty in some of the other churches. He tells them how generous the Macedonians have been in giving to the same cause. He’s sending on ahead of him two of his team, to ensure that there’s no backsliding, so that the Corinthians’ contribution is ready when they arrive. Quite mundane stuff. No high-faluting theology or philosophy here. Just make sure that your Parish Share is ready!

And again, Paul appeals to quite basic instincts in his readers. The more you put in, the more you’ll get out. [2 Cor.9:6]. God can add to what you yourself give – and God can give you the necessary abundance so that you can afford to be generous. It’s a sort of ‘matched giving’. A big donor – if you are a Methodist, the Rank Trust – will add a pound for every pound that you yourselves raise. God is the ultimate matched giver. Pretty down-to-earth stuff.

Being a generous donor to charity is a good thing. People will speak well of you. ‘As it is written, He hath dispersed abroad; he hath given to the poor: his righteousness remaineth for ever.’ ‘Dispersing abroad’ isn’t offshore investment, by the way. It’s just a way of spreading generosity around. ‘As it is written’, says Paul. It’s a quotation from Psalm 112. Being a generous giver, says Paul, isn’t just a way of helping other Christians. It is in itself a way of praising God. 

But Paul is also keen to point out that giving to charity is not compulsory. ‘Each person should give as he has decided for himself; there should be no … sense of compulsion’ (2 Cor 9:7). But if you are willing, but perhaps worried whether you have enough to give some away, St Paul reassures you. ‘He who provides seed for sowing and bread for food will provide the seed for you to sow; he will multiply it and swell the harvest of your benevolence, and you will always be rich enough to be generous.’ (vv 9-10). 

But it isn’t easy. It isn’t easy to fund-raise for church or for charity. There will always be these people who tell you they’re ‘all right’, and pass on by. They’re not all right.

Sermon for Mattins on the 13th Sunday after Trinity, 21st August 2016
Hebrews 12:18-end, Luke 13:1—17 

Shall I see you in Waitrose in a few minutes? Quite possibly. Sometimes it makes me smile a bit that whereas, if you were not one of the faithful, here in church – you might go and play rugby, or at least take your children to play rugby, or you might go to the garden centre and pick up a few pot plants, and then go back home, open the hefty packet containing your Sunday paper, and with a nice croissant and cup of cappuccino from your Nespresso machine, you might while away a happy hour – and then realise that there are a couple of things which you need to pick up for lunch. So off you would go to the supermarket, to Waitrose or Sainsbury’s; and about midday you’d start to bump into the people from this congregation, and perhaps also from St Andrew’s. Or you could have got up at a more civilised hour and joined us here for Mattins – but we all still tend to end up in the supermarket.

And there we all will be, picking up those last few things which we need for our Sunday lunch. It is a good gathering place: we’ll see our friends, and stop to have a little chat. How did the children get on in A Levels? Have they got the grades that they need for their university places? How is so-and-so’s baby? It’s a real community, there in the supermarket on a Sunday morning. 

We don’t seem to worry too much about the fact that it is Sunday, or that the shops are open on Sunday. The idea of the Sabbath, and Sabbath Rest, doesn’t have much traction in today’s society. Even though, a long while ago, we were brought up on what the Bible said. The Creation story. The Ten Commandments. 

Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou nor thy son nor thy daughter nor thy manservant nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates: for in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day and hallowed it.

That’s what the leader of the synagogue was objecting to, when Jesus healed the poor lady who had been crippled and unable to stand straight for 18 years, in this story from St Luke’s gospel. Jesus rebuked the leader of the synagogue, and the other members of the congregation, calling them hypocrites; pointing out that, if it was OK to do something, to undertake some activity, even if only to make sure some animals were adequately watered as well as fed, surely it must be all right to relieve the suffering of a person who is ill, if you can do it.

The Health Service has certainly always followed Jesus’ teaching about healing on the Sabbath. No wonder that the doctors were rather indignant when the Health Secretary suggested that there needed to be ‘seven-day health service’ so called. He apparently didn’t know that all doctors working in hospitals work on a rota, which covers all seven days of the week. (I think he’s found out now that they do.) 

We’ve perhaps found that this passage, and other passages where Jesus pointed out the difference between people who were ‘whited sepulchres’ [Matt. 23:27], people who made a show of conforming with religious commandments, rather than, perhaps, going to the real meaning of those commandments, that this teaching of Jesus is a sort of excuse, a sort of release from any obligations literally to carry out the Ten Commandments. 

We might think that all that literal stuff, God having spoken to Moses and given him tablets on which were written the Ten Commandments [Exodus 24:12 etc], is just too picturesque and, frankly, too mythical to really be taken seriously. Either God didn’t speak to Moses in that way or we have changed our understanding of what it is for God to speak to anybody. Jesus was right: the Jewish Law, the Ten Commandments, tended to lead to a sort of box-ticking approach, a literal adherence to each and every Commandment.

But Jesus pointed out that sticking rigidly to the ‘letter of the law’ could produce highly unjust consequences. Starting with the poorly lady, who was supposed to come and be healed only on weekdays. So he gave them ‘a new commandment’, ‘A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love on another.’ That looks as though it trumps any other commandment. You can treat Sunday just like any other day, if that is more practical for you. 

But – perhaps it’s not quite so simple. Remember, Jesus said he did not come to abolish the law, but to fulfil it. And also, that the first of those two commandments, which between them contain ‘all the Law and the prophets’, was to love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. ‘On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.’

And the commandment to keep holy the Sabbath day can be understood as being really all about showing respect to God, the Creator and Sustainer of the world. And if that effectively makes the Shema Israel, ‘You shall love the Lord your God’, and so on, the most important prayer, then the next prayer – to love your neighbour as yourself – is subsidiary to it. So perhaps we were jumping the gun by following literally what Jesus said, that it was more important to heal a sick person than any consideration whether it was done on the Sabbath.

Can you feel the dilemma? On the one hand, all your Christian upbringing tells you that God spoke to Moses. God spoke; we must listen. But other teachers will pop up, and lead you astray. It’s so old-fashioned to worry about the shops being open on Sunday.

I think we should look at it again. I’m not suggesting that we should become like the Scottish Presbyterian ‘Wee Frees’ or the Welsh chapel men, who made Sunday rather joyless. But I think that we should try to insist on one day or another being a holiday, a sabbath, each week for each group of people. I worry about what a Christian should say to an employer who makes them work regularly on Sunday. You’re entitled not to be discriminated against on account of religion, under the Human Rights Act. But what about subtle pressures – will you get on as well, if you don’t abandon your upbringing? Will they choose you for the promotion next time? 

Perhaps there is no tension between the first and the second commandments. Perhaps loving God always leads you to love your neighbour. And yet … I wonder whether we should all rush to the supermarkets on Sunday just as we do on any other day: I nearly said, ‘Sunday, just like any other day.’ That’s wrong, surely. We need to recognise Sunday as being holy, being special. If that stops people from using the shops …. What do we say? 

One thing that I think we shouldn’t say, is that this story, this parable, is only a big let-out. Let’s keep thinking about it.

Leonard Cohen, the singer, was in the news this week because he had written a letter to the woman who was his muse in the 1960s, Marianne, the ‘Bird on a Wire’ in his song, who died a couple of weeks ago. Before she died, he wrote this to her: 

“Well Marianne; it’s come to this time 

when we are really so old that our bodies are falling apart

And I think I will follow you very soon.

Know that I am so close behind you  

That if you stretch out your hand

I think you can reach mine. 

…

Goodbye, old friend. Endless love

See you down the road.”

I’m sure that this lovely poem will be read at funerals a lot in future. What I want to point out is that Leonard Cohen shared something which is at the heart of our Christian belief: that is, the ‘sure and certain hope’ of the resurrection to eternal life: that there is a life after death, and that we will, in some way, be reunited with those whom we love. 

St Paul recognised that this is all beyond human understanding. He wrote, ‘For now, we see through a glass, darkly; but then, face to face.’ But because we know about Jesus, we have seen a glimpse of that resurrection to eternal life. Jesus was himself, somehow, raised from the dead. He was, clearly, not ghostly: remember the story of Doubting Thomas. ‘Touch me; feel me’, Jesus said. And Thomas did. He recognised that he was in the presence of God. 

It was a sign for us. I hope you will remember that, and that when you think about Marjorie, believe that like Leonard Cohen, if you stretch out your hand, you can reach hers.

Sermon for Evensong on the Eleventh Sunday after Trinity, 7th August 2016 

Isaiah 11:[1-9]10-12:6, 2 Corinthians 1:1-22

Retired rescue greyhounds. Yes, retired rescue greyhounds. Keep those words carefully in mind. On Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, Godfrey and I and some others of the faithful meet for morning prayers here and at St Andrew’s. At morning prayers we say a Psalm and read two lessons from the Bible, chosen according to the lectionary; we also read out a daily reflection from a book called ‘Reflections for Daily Prayer’, published by Church House Publishing. It has reflections by a particular writer for several days at a time. This week we have been reading reflections on certain psalms by a writer who has come up with very interesting illustrations – ‘interesting’ is perhaps the wrong word: ‘off the wall’ might be more like it.  

For example, on Thursday, they commented on the first half of Psalm 78, which is one of the mega-psalms, which actually gives you a complete potted history of the Israelites: the covenant with Jacob, the giving of the law, the turning away from God to worship false gods, being exiled in Egypt, then rescued by dividing the Red Sea, manna from heaven, then the wrath of God again – Psalm 78 is a serious psalm.

In commenting on this, the writer started like this: – “In the fairy tale Sleeping Beauty the princess’ fairy godmothers give her beauty, wit, grace, dance, and song, thereby equipping her to have to become a sure-fire winner of the X Factor. In a long-running British drama, a local chef and sharp practitioner promises to teach his new godson how to cook spaghetti carbonara and how to cheat the tax man.” 

Yes, really: the X Factor and spaghetti carbonara. It was really supposed to be about Psalm 78. Now obviously, in the face of such a mysterious message, some of us surreptitiously turned to the index of authors and the potted biographies contained in it. It is sometimes quite a good idea to see who is writing the stuff which we are supposed to read. 

And this is what it said. The writer is the rector of a particular church and, before ordination, served as a prison governor. And here is the key: she is a keen walker, quilter, and ‘devoted adopter of retired rescue greyhounds’. Well of course, for ever afterwards, we have looked to see whether our reflection for the day has come from the writer whom we have come to know and love as the “greyhound lady”.

In passing I would just query what a ‘rescue’ greyhound is. That is, as opposed to a normal retired greyhound. Perhaps they have been experimenting in Switzerland with greyhounds instead of Saint Bernards, in order to get to avalanche victims even faster. Those dogs would indeed be ‘rescue’ greyhounds. Who knows?

Tonight we sang the beautiful Psalm 108, paratum cor meum, My Heart is Ready, which contains the immortal words, ‘Moab is my wash-pot’, which I am sure we will all remember smiling at ever since we were at school. 
‘God has spoken in his holiness. I will rejoice therefore and divide Sichem and mete out the valley of Succoth. Gilead is mine and Manasses is mine.’ God is in charge. Moab is His en suite facility.

It’s the same theme in our Old Testament lesson: the vision of the Kingdom of God, the rod out of the stem of Jesse. In the first part of Isaiah chapter 11, leading into tonight’s lesson: ‘The spirit of the LORD shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding.. The vision of the Messiah, who will put everything right. ‘… with the breath of his lips he shall slay the wicked. … The wolf shall lie with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them… They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain: for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.’

The Greyhound Lady has not had to expatiate on Psalm 108 so far, so I don’t know whether she will be able to bring the idea of Moab the Wash-pot into a reality TV reference. But seriously, how are we to make sense of the vision, on the one hand, of the rod of Jesse, the Messiah, someone coming from God to put things right, to bring people back into a right relationship with God the Father, but on the other hand, the undoubted suffering and imperfection, separation from God, which we see today?

Saint Paul’s idea, in his second letter to the Corinthians, seems to be almost a kind of homeopathic approach. God comforts us in our afflictions – ‘who comforteth us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort them which are in any trouble, by the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God. For as the sufferings of Christ abound in us, so our consolation also aboundeth by Christ.’ Saint Paul seems to be saying that there is a sense in which God’s suffering, Jesus’ suffering, in some sense stands for, or enters into, our suffering.

It’s not the same as the idea of substitutionary atonement, Jesus being punished vicariously for the things which we ought to have been punished for, as some theologians have argued. The difficulty with that is that we end up with Jesus as some kind of human sacrifice, which does not square with the idea of a loving God.

This is different. This is rather like when St Paul talks about being “in Christ” when he means, in a way, having Christ in us, having the spirit of Christ in us. When we suffer, when things go wrong for us, Saint Paul is saying in some sense that God empathises, that our suffering is in some sense God’s suffering as well. When Christ suffered, this was in a sense a kind of homeopathy, or inoculation, perhaps. In his passion and death, Jesus was separated from God in a way which was similar to, but far worse than, anything which we can suffer, but which, to some extent, showed that God suffered in Jesus, and in so doing, he entered into, he shared in, our suffering.

It’s similar to the idea that Aristotle put forward for how tragedy in the theatre is meant to work. We enter into the emotion, the pity and the fear, that the actors are showing in the drama: we feel for them. It works as a kind of clearing out of our soul: Καθαρσις [catharsis: Aristotle, Poetics,1449b21-29]. We lose our fear and terror when we come out of the theatre. We have had it cleaned out of us, by entering into actions and emotions in the play. We do this as well in church, when we take part in a sacrament. A sacrament is almost a sort of drama. It is ‘the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace’. 

Such a blessed picture. But unfortunately, in a time when, sadly, we can even imagine Donald Trump’s ungainly thumb on the nuclear trigger, the leopard has not yet lain down with the kid, or the calf and the young lion and the fatling together, let alone their being in such a peaceful world that a little child could lead them. 

There is still plenty to pray for. Even so, perhaps, on God’s holy mountain, among the menagerie, among those peaceful animals, we could hope that there might just be – a retired rescue greyhound.

I acknowledge the fact that this extract from an article by Canon Angela Tilby, and the letter commenting on it by my friend Arnie Gabbott, first appeared in the Church Times. I reproduce them here conveniently for my readers.

Angela Tilby, Church Times, 29th July 2016 – ‘Is this the moment for Marxism?’

‘…. Reading MacKinnon again has put the fight for the future of the Labour Party into a new perspective. Jeremy Corbyn’s sup­port­­ers believe in the unity of theory and practice. They see the current moment as an oppor­t­­­­unity to be grasped.

This is the time to cast off the Blairite error of seeking peace with capitalism; it is the time to seize on the disillusion­ment of the masses, especially the young. It is a moment for ruthles­sness, for overthrowing the parlia­mentary party, and being prepared (as some already are) to throw bricks through windows and take the struggle to the streets.
The issue is whether the new Left’s attempt to seize the moment by demagoguery could ever deliver a fair and just society, or whether the argu­­ment is just as flawed now as it was then.’

From Mr T. A. Gabbott [Church Times, 5th August 2016]

Sir, — The attempt to overthrow the Labour Party is being brought about not by the stone-throwers or by demagoguery but by members of the PLP who can’t work with the democratically elected leader, Jeremy Corbyn.

Although the arguments of the Left may be flawed in Canon Tilby’s vision, they are surely understood by millions now living in our deeply unequal society — a vision not given by demagoguery, but prompted by poverty wages, zero-hour contracts, benefits sanctions, and being driven to foodbanks while seeing billions lost to tax fraud.

If Canon Tilby could move to an inner-city church, she would then live alongside the poor, recognise the suffering, and ask herself whether this was a fair and just society.

Sermon for Evensong on the 9th Sunday after Trinity, 24th July 2016​

[Genesis 42:1-25]; 1 Corinthians 10:1-24 – The people sat down to eat and drink, and rose up to play. Neither let us commit fornication, as some of them committed, and fell in one day three and twenty thousand. (1 Cor. 10:8) 

As those of us who were undergraduates of a certain antiquity can remember, at university fornication is only possible before 10pm. But here, St Paul seems to be saying not only that it’s difficult, but extremely dangerous, possibly lethal. Really?

This is one of those passages in St Paul’s letters which does read rather strangely, unless you understand its background and context. St Paul is writing to the Christians at Corinth, which, then as now, was a Greek city. So when he wrote, ‘our fathers were under the cloud, and all passed through the sea; And were all baptised unto Moses in the cloud and in the sea’, it seems a bit strange, even against the time it was written – because Paul was giving a potted resumé of Jewish history, to a congregation who must have been mainly non-Jewish. It wasn’t their fathers he was talking about.

Maybe this was because Christianity started out as a Jewish sect. Indeed it was a live issue among the early Christians whether they had to be circumcised and convert to Judaism. Saints Peter, Paul, Barnabas and the early church dealt with this in the Council of Jerusalem, which you can read about in Acts 15. The answer to the question, whether on becoming a Christian, you had to be circumcised, fortunately, was ‘no’ – and St Paul emphasised it in his letter to the Galatians, chapters 2, 4 and 5. No need to become circumcised, to become Jewish, in order to be a Christian. The early Christians widened out their membership beyond Judaism to include non-Jews, Gentiles – peoples, tribes, nations, that were different from the chosen people, the Jews. 

What mattered was – what matters still – is faith. ‘A man is not justified by the works of the law, but by the faith of Jesus Christ’, as St Paul wrote in Galatians 2:16, for example. But Paul must have found that the early, non-Jewish, Christians were well enough up on Jewish history for them to understand the force of his argument when he drew on Jewish history in support of his telling the Corinthians not to behave like people who were heathens and worshipped idols instead of worshipping the One True God and Jesus his son.

It’s difficult to be sure exactly what the Corinthians were doing wrong, in order for St Paul to try to correct them. It looks as though they may have thought that, by having a holy meal together, by participating in a sacrament of holy communion, they were then assured of salvation: they had nothing to fear at the Last Judgement, whatever they did from then on. They had a free pass, a licence, to do naughty things.

This comes across to us today as one of St Paul’s rather gloomy pieces. You’re not allowed to eat, drink and be merry. You’re certainly not allowed to chase girls.

In a way, you can understand St Augustine’s prayer, ‘Lord, make me pure, but not yet.’ There used to be a birthday card, on which was a rather gloomy-looking owl. It said, ‘Owl had never had too much to drink: he had never had sex: he had never smoked exotic cheroots’. Inside, it read, ‘In fact Owl had never been to university at all!’ 

Happy birthday, poor old Owl. But is that really what Christianity is all about? Is it just rather joyless rectitude? Of course, I’m not advocating unrestrained licentiousness. And there’s no doubt that St Paul did want the Christians to stand apart from the Romans’ vices. 

There were great temptations in Roman life. You may remember a rather jolly film (which, however, we might struggle to show in our ‘Spiritual Cinema’) by Federico Fellini, called ‘Satyricon’, which was based on a book by the Roman author Petronius, which includes the ‘Cena Trimalchionis’, or Trimalchio’s Banquet, a text much loved by all boys studying Latin in the Lower Sixth: this is where those scantily-clad maidens leaping out of pies and other extraordinary pieces of decadence come from. Sin in Ancient Rome was clearly great fun.

But how did it become possibly lethal to indulge in feasting – how come ‘the people sat down to feast and stood up to play’: how come some of them committed fornication – and ‘23,000 died in one day’! Why?

St Paul was referencing the Old Testament, Numbers chapter 25, when ‘Israel abode in Shittim, and the people began to commit whoredom with the daughters of Moab’. What was wrong with the daughters of Moab and the Midianites was that they worshipped idols, the Baals. The people of Israel were not meant to mix with those heathens – and God punished them. The lesson which St Paul was drawing was that although the people of Israel were saved, although God had made a covenant with them, it didn’t absolve them from the obligation to keep their side of the bargain, to abide by God’s law.

The same went for the poor old Corinthians. I have this rather irreverent picture in my mind of St Paul as a fierce maiden aunt, rather like my old Aunt, Margaret Bryant, the historian and Girton Girl, terrorising the curates at Holy Trinity, Clapham Common: just like her, St Paul had a tendency to pull you up short and tell you to tie your shoe laces properly. So he was telling the Corinthians in no uncertain terms that it wasn’t enough simply to the church, as though it were a golf club, ‘The Christian Club’. They had to be new men, new people, reformed, born again in the faith of Christ. It didn’t give them licence to misbehave any more.

But it’s not all so serious. There is real joy in the faith of Christ. Just a couple of pages further on in St Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, we come to that wonderful hymn to love – it doesn’t matter what kind of love – in I Corinthians 13: ‘Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, …’ If I have no love, no charity – for that’s what one kind of love is. 

And in his letter to the Galatians, St Paul lists all the ‘fruits of the spirit’, the things that come to a Christian through his or her faith: ‘love, joy, peace’ are the first three on the list. Joy. Indeed. Just don’t confuse the sacrament, the holy commemoration, of Jesus’ Last Supper, with just any banquet, with any blow-out. It certainly isn’t a riotous party. But there is joy, the joy of faith. ‘Solid joys and lasting treasure’ indeed. 
Glorious things of thee are spoken

Zion, City of our God

Solid joys and lasting treasure

None but Zion’s children know. (John Newton, Olney Hymns, 1779).

Theresa May says that she would definitely press the button to launch a Trident missile and explode a nuclear bomb, if this country had suffered a nuclear attack.

Jeremy Corbin says that he definitely wouldn’t.

Some further thoughts. The main context of this discussion is the the theory of MAD, or mutually assured destruction.

In order for MAD to be effective, the opponents have to be willing – and committed – to launching their weapons if the trigger condition (as defined) is met. Put another way, there will always be a situation where one of the opponents can reasonably expect that, if A launches an attack, B will respond with a nuclear strike.

Conversely, MAD doesn’t work if various conditions occur. These include the following.

MAD will not work if one of the opponents has foresworn the use of nuclear weapons, ever. There is no mutual threat.

MAD will also not work if one or other of the opponents does not have free and unfettered use of a nuclear weapon.

In the context of the UK and its Trident weapon, MAD may well be, in view of the above, not operative, either actually under May or potentially under Corbyn.

Under May, although she is willing to wreak nuclear destruction, she may not be not a free agent in relation to the use of the Trident missile system, if she needs a ‘second key’ from the USA in order to launch a missile. Unless the USA have previously let it be known to the other side that she is authorised by them to act, her threats are empty.

There is a 2005 response by the Ministry of Defence to a Freedom of Information Act request, (see https://ukdjcdn-b4d.kxcdn.com/uploads/2014/07/UK-Nuclear-Deterrent-FOI-Response.pdf), according to which the UK does not have to obtain the USA’s prior consent to a nuclear strike. It is difficult to know what weight to place on this. Obviously, if one takes it at face value, then the condition for MAD deterrence is met: Mrs May is willing to strike back, and she is not constrained by the USA in so doing.

But it is possible that the Mandy Rice-Davies doctrine may apply here: ‘[They] would say that, wouldn’t [they].’ To some extent, nuclear deterrence may depend on cardboard policemen. If the opponent believes you have a nuke, are willing and able to use it, your threat will likely be taken seriously. You would not want to bet on it being a bluff – albeit that it might be.

It follows from this that it may not be necessary to spend much on nuclear weapons renewal. For a threat of MAD to work, all you need is a credible chance that your old nuke would get through. Can we offer such a threat, if it rests on a (necessarily unsupported) assertion by the MOD in 2005?

Under a hypothetical Corbyn government, there is no risk of a nuclear strike by the UK, as Corbyn has foresworn the use of nuclear weapons.

If a nuclear threat from the UK may not be credible, why would the not inconsiderable cost of renewing the Trident ‘deterrent’ be justified?

The other thing to observe is that Theresa May appears to be upholding the ‘no first use’ doctrine, although the UK has not made any formal treaty commitment to this effect.

She is saying that there would always be nuclear retaliation if the UK had been attacked with a nuclear weapon. No First Use (NFU) must surely rule out deterrence. The argument is that our opponents would not attack us, because they would suffer nuclear retaliation. It must be doubtful whether, in order to maintain a credible threat to retaliate, one needs to have four submarines.

There would appear to be some illogicality in the NFU argument, because if there is a first strike against us, deterrence will have failed. There will then be no point in our making a retaliatory strike. Again, Mandy Rice-Davies may come to the rescue. ‘Would you retaliate?’ ‘Yes, definitely.’ You would say that, whether or not it was true, in order to maintain the threat. Again, a well-presented bluff might be just as effective – and much cheaper.

Note that these conclusions may be reached without any consideration whether the UK’s opponents in any potential nuclear exchange are identified, or, arguably, identifiable.

Hugh Bryant
20th July 2016

Theresa May says that she would definitely press the button to launch a Trident missile and explode a nuclear bomb.

Jeremy Corbyn says that he definitely wouldn’t.

Some thoughts. The context of this discussion is the the theory of MAD, or mutually assured destruction.

In order for MAD to be effective, the opponents have to be willing – and committed – to launch their weapons if the trigger condition (as defined) is met. Put another way, there will always be a situation where one of the opponents can reasonably expect that, if A launches an attack, B will respond with a nuclear strike.

Conversely, MAD doesn’t work if various conditions occur. These include the following.

MAD will not work if one of the opponents has foresworn the use of nuclear weapons, ever. There is no mutual threat.

MAD will also not work if one or other of the opponents does not have free and unfettered use of a nuclear weapon.

In the context of the UK and its Trident weapon, MAD is, in view of the above, not operative, either actually under May or potentially under Corbyn.

Under May, although she is willing to wreak nuclear destruction, she is not a free agent in relation to the use of the Trident missile system, as she needs a ‘second key’ from the USA in order to launch a missile. Unless the USA have previously let it be known to the other side that she is authorised by them to act, her threats are empty.

Under a hypothetical Corbyn government, there is no risk of a nuclear strike by the UK either, as Corbyn has foresworn the use of nuclear weapons.

The question therefore arises that, given that, under neither the actual or the potential regime, is a nuclear threat from the UK credible, why would the not inconsiderable cost of renewing the Trident ‘deterrent’ be justified?

Note that this conclusion may be reached without any consideration whether the actors in any potential nuclear exchange are not identified, or, arguably, identifiable.

Hugh Bryant

19th July 2016