Sermon for the Fourth Sunday of Easter, 17th April 2016
Acts 9:36-43, John 10:22-30
Last Sunday I was in Bristol visiting my elder daughter Emma. I went to her local church, Saint Paul’s, Clifton, where I am always made very welcome. It’s a Victorian church where the University choir sings during term time and where there are some lovely mosaics, which are said to be of national importance. They have a congregation of all ages where all sorts of backgrounds and professions are represented.
Not all the congregation is human! There is a lovely dog called Bonnie, who comes with two older ladies and sits between them in the third pew. She is a sort of mix-up terrier and she is 13 years old. She is always very well behaved. She doesn’t bark and she wags her tail as you pass on your way to receive communion. Bonnie stays in for the sermon, but the children go out. They are called the Fishes.
As well as the Rector and a couple of curates, together with my brother Reader and now friend, Derek Jay, there are also a couple of retired ministers in the congregation, and it was one of them, Father Paul Hawkins, who took the service last Sunday. He has had a distinguished career in the church. He retired to Bristol from being vicar of St Pancras, Euston Road, where he ministered among others to the students and dons of UCL. Before then he had been chaplain at Eton and at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge.
So our preacher was definitely someone who was used to addressing a congregation of reasonably learned people. The service was advertised as being a ‘creative Eucharist’. I should say to you straightway that St Paul’s is what I would call a ‘normal’ church. It’s middle of the road; fairly traditional, with 8 o’clock Communion according to the Book of Common Prayer, the Eucharist at 10:30 according to Common Worship (order one), and they regularly have Evensong and Compline. There aren’t any weird and wonderful services or worship songs, so far as I know.
So I was not quite sure what ‘creative Eucharist’ was. I debated with myself whether I could risk going, but in the end, based on all the previous times I have been to Saint Paul’s in Clifton, I came to the conclusion that it would not be too weird, and I went along. When I got the service sheet and the hymnbook and everything, I realised that it was a normal Eucharist, at least so far as the liturgy was concerned. Common Worship, order one, no problem.
Bonnie the dog was there as usual in the third row, and she seemed quite content with the idea of creative Eucharist. What was the creative bit all about? Well, of course, it was the sermon. To some extent we all had to create it.
Father Paul was preaching about the earlier part of Acts chapter 9, the end of which we had as our New Testament lesson today. Last week, just as we did, they had the story of Saint Paul being struck down on the road to Damascus, and the gospel was the story in Saint John chapter 21, the story of the disciples going fishing and not catching anything, until they were met in the morning by Jesus standing on the seashore suggesting – giving them the hottest tip – where they should cast their net.

Bonnie, the faithful dog, is ready for the sermon, at St Paul’s, Clifton.

 
The disciples suddenly recognised that it was Jesus. Peter put his clothes on and jumped into the sea. (Previously he had not been wearing anything. I’ve always thought that this was rather strange because I thought usually you take your clothes off to go swimming, rather than the other way round. Be that as it may.) The people with Saint Paul on the way to Damascus were speechless. They could hear the voice speaking to Paul but they could see no one.
The point was that in St John’s Gospel and also in the Acts of the Apostles, there are a number of instances where people do not recognise that it is the risen Jesus who is present. Think, for instance, of Mary Magdalene at the empty tomb, thinking that Jesus was the gardener.
Then came the creative bit. Father Paul asked us all to turn to our neighbours – even to people we didn’t know, which was pretty revolutionary for normal Anglicans – well, certainly creative – and to talk about whether we could remember any occasions when we had been conscious of being in the presence of the risen Jesus. He gave us five minutes.
Then Father Paul went round with a microphone asking people to share their stories. Pretty terrifying – but fortunately, he didn’t pick on me. Actually he didn’t pick on anyone – there were enough keen ones putting their hands up anyway.
What would you have said? I had the rather prosaic thought that I can’t really imagine bumping into Jesus Christ these days, for example in Waitrose. He’s been dead for 2,000 years. Yes – I know. ‘Dead’ as we would understand it in the normal way.
The congregation’s views were pretty varied. Another retired minister in the congregation put his hand up and said, ‘This is a pretty difficult question.’ Father Paul said, ‘Okay, let’s move on’. But he did let his colleague say a few more words! But for other people, it was clear that they commonly did feel the presence of the risen Jesus, even in commonplace circumstances, such, indeed, as in the supermarket.
I have to confess that my mind went a complete blank, and I was saved by Derek, my fellow Reader, who was sitting behind me. He too was thinking about Waitrose: but he had a lovely story of a customer ahead of him in the checkout queue, who was perhaps a little mentally disturbed, or who was at any rate rather muddled, and who was beginning to hold up the queue. Before anybody could say anything, or become impatient or rude, the lady manning the checkout gently took over emptying the person’s basket and totting everything up, in a kindly way, so that the slow-moving customer was not embarrassed. She made her feel that nothing was wrong and that what she had been doing was perfectly all right. You could see the face of Jesus in that checkout bod.
It seems to me that this question is such a big question it is well worth carrying on looking at it this week, in the light of today’s Bible readings as well. St Peter was perhaps a bit like one of those super Christians who put their hands up in the service last week. No doubt in his mind: no doubt in theirs.
No doubt in St Peter’s mind. Tabitha, Dorcas, was a leading Christian. She was described as a disciple. All those people, who suggest that the church should be led only by men, should remember Dorcas. She was one of the leaders of the early church, one of the innermost circle, the disciples. Her name in Greek means ‘gazelle’: you imagine her to be a gracious and graceful lady.
But she had been seriously ill and had actually died. The story is very like the story of Jairus’ daughter whom Jesus raised from the dead in rather a similar way. He said, ‘Talitha cumi’, which is Aramaic for ‘damsel, arise’ – or, if you must have it in the stumbling prose of the New Revised Standard Version, ‘Little girl, get up.’
‘Talitha’: very like ‘Tabitha’ here. And the story is rather similar. Jesus and Peter are both doing roughly the same thing. Both are doing something miraculous, raising somebody from the dead. We have no idea how it worked. But you can say that God was at the heart of it.
‘Talitha, cumi.’ ‘Tabitha, arise’. ‘Damsel, arise.’ Compare Mark chapter 5 with our reading from Acts, chapter 9. So do we meet the risen Jesus, and if so do we recognise it? Well, things happen, and you realise that God is in them. My fellow reader, Derek in Bristol, was much better at doing the creative sermon than I was. He realised that, in the kindly face of the lady at the checkout, you could see the face of Jesus.
Then again, there is this rather strange story about the Archbishop of Canterbury which came out this week, that a newspaper thought that it is terribly important that they should find out who his natural father was. They persuaded the poor old Archbishop to have a DNA test which proved that his natural father was not Mr Welby but someone else. I can imagine that it must have been very unsettling, to say the least, especially since the whole story was played out in the full glare of publicity.
But Archbishop Justin took it all in his stride. This was perhaps not because he was, or rather is, some kind of superhumanly strong individual, but simply because he quietly told us that, for him, the most important parent is his heavenly father, and the most important family for him was the family of Jesus Christ, the church. What a nice man. But is it, also, another of those moments where perhaps we can glimpse the face of Jesus himself?
I am not going to make you be creative today, because I am sure that you are all much better at it than I am. But the church moved from the experience of those early disciples, the ones who had actually encountered the risen Jesus face-to-face, including Mary Magdalene, St Paul and doubting Thomas and the disciple whom Jesus loved and St Peter, recognising Jesus on the shore; for them it was straightforward. If a preacher had come up to them and asked whether they had experienced the risen Jesus, they could say ‘Yes’ to that.
We could understand that without any kind of explanation. But then Jesus eventually left, at the Ascension, and then came Pentecost, Whit Sunday, when the Holy Spirit came among them. Now is the period when we are looking forward to those huge steps in the life of the church.
We are a bit like those early church members in Joppa – and we are a bit like the Jews that Jesus encountered in the portico of Solomon, who didn’t get who he was. ‘How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the messiah, say so plainly.’ Jesus answered, ‘I have told you, but you do not believe.’
It’s not something that everybody can see. It’s not something which is easy to understand. It needs people like Archbishop Justin and my friend Derek Jay, the Reader in Bristol, gently to point out how Jesus is really still with us. St Paul called it being ‘in Christ’. What he meant was, having Christ in him.
Remember what Christ himself said in Saint Matthew’s Gospel. ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and fed you, or thirsty and gave you a drink: A stranger, and took you home: naked, and clothed you? When did we see you ill or in prison, and come to visit you?’ And the king will answer, ‘I tell you this, anything you did for one of my brothers here, however humble, you did for me.’ Jesus is there. He is there for us to meet. You do not need to be particularly creative. You just need to keep your eyes open.

Sermon for Evening Prayer for the Prayer Book Society, Guildford Branch, on Saturday 12th March 2016 at the Founders’ Chapel, Charterhouse Jeremiah 20:7-18, John 11:17-27

Jeremiah said,
Wherefore came I forth out of the womb to see labour and sorrow, that my days should be consumed with shame? (Jer.20:18)

What happened to the covenant, the special relationship between the Lord’s chosen people and their God? They are held captive, exiles in Babylon. Psalm 137: By the waters of Babylon, we sat down and wept.

It was a time of sad reflection. Had their God abandoned them? What would look like an exile from the Promised Land today? It’s difficult to empathise with the exiles in the Old Testament, not only because there’s a gap of nearly 3,000 years, but also because we aren’t in exile: in fact, we are very much at home. In Surrey we can almost pretend that we are in the Promised Land.

But does it mean that we can’t feel something of what Jeremiah was crying out against? Is the whole world like the Promised Land today? It’s sad, but it’s not. There are even parallels with the mass exile of the chosen people, of the Jews, in the current mass migration and refugee exodus from Syria and other troubled parts of the Middle East and Africa.

The Babylon into which the Jewish exiles went was, just as we are, relatively stable and affluent. But it didn’t feel that way. The mere fact of being in exile was a bitter fate.

And then we have heard, in our second lesson, the most complete answer to such a time of despair. If the logical implication of an imperfect life, a life of suffering, is its eventual death, then victory over death is its antidote, the confirmation that the suffering was not in vain.

Lazarus has died. Both his sisters, Mary and Martha, are distressed. Jesus doesn’t arrive until Lazarus has been dead for four whole days.

Both sisters clearly believe that, if Jesus had been there in time, he would have been able to stop Lazarus dying. That in itself is a remarkable thing to believe: but Jesus had demonstrated amazing powers of healing already.

And indeed, even though Lazarus has been walled up in the tomb for four days, Jesus calls him out, and Lazarus comes back to life.

But you know all this. What has it got to do with us in Guildford Diocese today, enthusiasts for the BCP as we are?

Jeremiah is all about a people who had abandoned their covenant with God, had become separated from God, eventually literally: they were driven out of the Promised Land into exile after Nebuchadnezzar had captured Jerusalem for a second time in 587BC.

The story of the raising of Lazarus has a metaphorical significance (leaving aside the question exactly what happened), that it is one of the occasions when Jesus said ‘I am’ something. Here, ‘I am the resurrection and the life’. Death has no more power.

Jesus is God’s sign that we can come back from our spiritual exile. If we believe, we will no longer be separated from God, and we will have eternal life.

Can we know what happened? It’s striking that it’s made very clear that Lazarus had definitely died. Jesus knew that was the real position. Lazarus wasn’t just asleep. Nevertheless Jesus delayed going to him. When he finally arrived, Lazarus had been in the tomb for four days. The body would have begun to decay, and to smell. Lazarus was emphatically dead; but equally emphatically, we are told that he came alive again out of the tomb. Lazarus was among the guests at the dinner party for Jesus where Mary anointed Jesus’ feet with pure nard. Lazarus was definitely alive. We have to understand it as best we can.

You might think that such a message, or such a phenomenon, would have been a cause for universal rejoicing. But it wasn’t. The Pharisees said among themselves, ‘If we let him thus alone, men will believe on him: and the Romans shall come and take away both our place and nation’. The Romans had devolved to the Jews the day-to-day government of Palestine. If the people, the Jews, honoured Jesus rather than the Chief Priest and the Pharisees, the Romans might take away from the Pharisees the job of administration of the country.

I have to observe that this important passage in the lead up to Christ’s passion looks rather artificial, if it’s meant to be an eyewitness account. If Jesus had indeed raised a man, who had died and been in the tomb for four days, back to life, surely what the Romans might or might not do with the local government would seem to be of relatively minor importance. It does seem that what this story, of the raising of Lazarus, signifies, is much more important than just the minutiae of provincial government.

What Lazarus’ story really signifies, is that God is present with us. We are not alone, we are not separated. We’re no longer in exile.

Never mind what the Pharisees did: we can respond, we can respond to such a wonderful revelation, in several ways. The first is worship. This little congregation is gathered together because we want to uphold and support the use of the Prayer Book in worship: we think we will have better words with which to approach the Almighty, if we use the Book of Common Prayer.

And if that brings us together in fellowship, that’s good. ‘Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there I am in the midst of them’, (Matt. 18:20). We could say that the Prayer Book, for us, is a kind of conduit of God’s grace. As we meet together and worship, using Cranmer’s ancient and beautiful words, we pray for God’s grace.

Nothing we can do can earn that grace, that eternal salvation, but we have the assurance that if we believe and trust in Him, we will be saved, we will receive the grace of God.

And the way we will receive God’s grace will be through the Holy Spirit coming among us. How can we tell? How can we tell if the Holy Spirit has in fact, come among us?

Remember what St Paul wrote to the Galatians.
‘But the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance;’ (Gal. 5:22-3). Our Lent reflection today should be whether we do exhibit those qualities – and how as Christians we are dealing with the opposite of the works of the Spirit, the works of the flesh.

A person called Jack Monroe Tweeted this week:

‘Does anyone else get overwhelmed?

….

Hope too much?

Calais, welfare reform, ESA, food banks.

My heart is just broken.’

ESA stands for employment and support allowance, the benefit which has replaced incapacity benefit. ESA is a much harder benefit to claim than incapacity benefit, primarily because the medical test – the work capability assessment – is very much harsher. The government has just announced that it is going to make it even harder for disabled people to claim this benefit, and thereby to save over £1billion – that is, £1billion will be taken away from the already reduced amount given to disabled people.

Incidentally, in my work as manager of a food bank, I recently came across a statistic, that over 2,000 people have died after being declared fit for work and denied disability benefit under this new regime. 2,000 people: fit for work: dead.

Where does that all fit in? Fit in with our salvation as Christians, I mean. What are our various churches doing? Are you happy about the cuts in benefits for disabled people? What about Calais? Are you following the Diocesan links to Guildford: People to People and the other charities coordinating help for the refugees? Perhaps we should have a PBS collection for Calais. What do you think? Let’s talk about it over tea in a minute or two.

The link that I’m trying to follow is that our love of the Prayer Book is fine, and very understandable, but it ought to be seen as something which leads us to God’s grace, grace in our worship. Worship which is just ‘having a nice time’ isn’t proper worship, and isn’t worthy of the Almighty. Let’s exhibit some of the fruits of the spirit as well.

Sermon for Mattins on the Second Sunday of Lent, 21st February 2016
Phil. 3:18-19 – ‘…they are the enemies of the cross of Christ:
Whose end is destruction, whose God is their belly, and whose glory is in their shame, who mind earthly things.’

We had the first of our Lent groups this week. The one that I took part in was at the Catholic Church, Sacred Heart, in their new hall, which is almost as nice as St Mary’s Hall. This year our Lent groups are organised by Churches Together, which is the way it works every second year, and so we are joining together with members of all the other churches in Cobham and Stoke and Oxshott, which gives us an opportunity to compare notes on our various Christian beliefs and look at how we see things from our different points of view.

The course is about being a Christian in a secular world, and the first session offered us a number of instances where Christians might seem to be different, or at odds with, the secular world around them. The topics that the course material suggested we talk about included sex – whether a sex education course was right to suggest that regular sex was just like having five portions of fruit and veg a day: whether one should use condoms, for birth control or to prevent the spread of diseases – and euthanasia, or assisted dying. Issues of life and death.

The talks for the course include contributions from members of different churches. Clifford Longley, the well-known journalist, gives the Roman Catholic point of view, Rachel Lampard, who is a Methodist Local Preacher – which is the same as a Reader in the C of E – is giving the Protestant point of view; Archbishop John Sentamu starts the discussion and Bishop Graham Cray sums up at the end.

The topics were designed to elicit from everyone their various doctrinal differences, to try to get us to air our differences on these important moral questions, as between the various churches. For example, we were talking about abortion and birth control. Does the Catholic view on the point where life begins take precedence over the need, for example, to prevent AIDS or Zika by using condoms? Similar considerations might apply in relation to euthanasia. It depends on your view of the sanctity of human life; how human life works, and to what extent we might be interfering with God’s creation; you might think all these would be relevant considerations.

What was really interesting was that, in a group where there were representatives from St Andrew’s Oxshott, St Andrew’s Cobham, St Mary’s, Sacred Heart, and someone’s daughter, who confessed that she wasn’t currently going to church at all, it was actually quite difficult to get people to disagree. Everybody seemed to agree on a proposition, (which wasn’t in any of the notes), that ‘the church has too many rules’. ‘The church’, in that context, was everyone’s church. It didn’t matter what denomination it was; the suggestion was that all the churches were to some extent too bound by rules.

I thought that was very interesting. It seemed to me that it might be a reflection of something which I have noticed in other contexts, that we do seem to be shy of talking in terms of principles. Our allegiances seem to be determined as much by heredity and culture as by any kind of principled analysis and belief.

The point of this is that principles don’t seem to be that important to people; we are looking at almost tribal allegiances instead, I think. To some extent I think that that is what brings at least some of the Christians in this area together. Indeed I think it may be not just a local effect round here.

It may be that what brings us to church, or to a particular church, is a sense that it is familiar, it is what we’re used to. Our parents went to it: we were christened there, or married there. Our friends go there. Although we say, and sing, a lot of words, in the service, in the liturgy and in the hymns, we don’t necessarily take every word that seriously. 

People often talk about saying the Creed ‘with their fingers crossed’, for example. They mean that there are things we recite which they either don’t really understand, or even don’t actually believe. There are some very deep questions buried in our liturgy. What does it really mean that Jesus died ‘for our sins’? Do we still believe – if we ever did – in ‘substitutionary atonement’ – that somehow Jesus was a kind of ‘scapegoat’, punished in our place by God? How could a loving God do that?

But instead, we might say the Creed, knowing that there are bits of it which we don’t really subscribe to, precisely because it is a kind of membership subscription. We want to identify ourselves as Christians.

But then the question arises, what are the marks of a Christian? What are the basic defining characteristics of a Christian today? How do we mark ourselves off from secular society? Is it what we do or how we behave, or is it what we believe?

We sometimes hear people say that, where going to church is concerned, the process is not to ‘believe and then belong’, but the other way round: to belong and then to believe.

It might indeed be quite a challenge to start with the propositions in the Creed – Virgin Birth, sacrificial death and bodily Resurrection, for instance – if you’d never met any other Christians, and never seen the homely realities of church life. You don’t need theological sophistication in order to join the flower rota.

And indeed, unless you do engage with the theory, with the theology, it’s difficult to see how you could fall out with, or at least differ from, otherChristians in other denominations.

In our group of Anglicans and Roman Catholics, the group members didn’t split along denominational lines reflecting the supposed differences between our theological understandings, of what human life and death is, when it starts, and to what extent we can interfere with it: the members of the group didn’t fall into opposing camps over contraception or euthanasia, but rather regretted the fact that our different churches have different ‘rules’.

In one way, that’s great. There is undoubtedly more that unites us than keeps us apart. But is it clear what you need to sign up to, is there a minimum, core requirement, that defines us as Christians as opposed to humanists (who would agree with all aspects of Christian morality), or Moslems, or atheists?

And so we get back to ‘rules’ – or at least principles. ‘I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth:..’ But what about contraception, and euthanasia, and gay marriage? My Lent group were seeming to suggest that they were relatively unimportant, just inconvenient ‘rules’ which perhaps the churches would do better without.

Theologians, for example Richard Hooker in the sixteenth century, in his debates with the Puritans, used the ancient Greek Stoics’ term αδιάφορα, ‘indifferent things’, ‘things which make no difference’, to identify ideas or rules which don’t affect the essential truths.

Jesus seemed to be all in favour of keeping things simple. In St Matthew chapter 22 [37-40] he said,

Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. 

This is the first and great commandment. 

And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.

On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

Immediately he seemed to have cut down the Ten Commandments to two. But remember, at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus also said,

Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil. (Matt. 5:17)

So who is to decide what matters, what is the hallmark of a Christian, and what makes no difference? Which is where we came in. We have to be careful to try to find out what God wants us to do, and to be, and not become like the people St Paul condemned as

‘…enemies of the cross of Christ:

Whose end is destruction, whose God is their belly, and whose glory is in their shame, who mind earthly things.’
I’m looking forward to learning more in the next session of the Lent course. Do come along!