Inequality in the Earthly Paradise

By publicsquare
November 29, 2015 //
0

Sermon for the First Sunday in Advent, 29th November 2015 at St Mary the Virgin, Stoke D’Abernon
Luke 21:25-36 There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations …

It’s Advent. We’re about to embark on that happy progress up to Christmas. We will get together with our families. We will give presents. We will send cards. We will be happy, and friendly, and full of the ‘season of goodwill’.

So why such a doom-laden Bible reading? Surely it’s all fun in the run up to Christmas?

Advent is looking forward to the coming of God on earth, Emmanuel. Today we are looking forward to the revelation of God. Quite a lot of the Bible readings in Advent are about watching and waiting, looking for the coming of the Kingdom of God. When the baby Jesus appears, that is the revelation of God. God isn’t some impossible hugeness, some grand master in the sky: He is a baby.

This is a time for deep reflection, spiritually, in the light of that astonishing Revelation. There are some important challenges for Christians out there. To start you off on your Advent reflection, here are some things that I have encountered.

I went, earlier this week, to a presentation by the Walton Charity, the Walton-on-Thames charity, the very old-established (its origins are 800 years old) and influential body who are behind all sorts of good works locally. They had commissioned a report from an economic think-tank, the New Economics Foundation, under the title ‘Inequality in Elmbridge’.

Some of you may have been at the reception too: I must confess that I have given up using the Rugby skills that I once had, in order to get to the prawn sandwiches. So I’m sorry if I didn’t greet you. It was heaving with people.

It looked like everyone was there. All the local great and good. A county councillor or two. Senior people from Elmbridge Borough Council and Surrey County Council. Social workers. Foodbank people. Businessmen.

Our borough, Elmbridge, was being looked at, from an economic standpoint. How were the lowest paid fixed? What was affecting the middle class people? What about the commuters?

It comes as a surprise that there are any poor people in Elmbridge. It’s supposed to be the second richest borough, in the sense that the average income is second only to Kensington and Chelsea. But – as I know from my work as manager of the Cobham Foodbank – there are substantial pockets of deprivation and poverty.

For instance, our area has one of the highest levels of domestic violence in the country. This means that there are single parents – usually women, with children – trying to put their lives together, sometimes after years of abuse. They aren’t in a fit state to work. They lack self-esteem. There’s a wonderful charity in Cobham, Oasis Childcare, which provides all sorts of courses and support for them, even taking their clients on holiday in the summer. This year they took 70 families to Weymouth for a week.

Oasis’ clients are our clients too, at the Foodbank. We provide food for around 30 people each week: 1,500 not very exciting, but nutritionally balanced, parcels of non-perishable food a year. In Cobham, Stoke and Oxshott. Yes really. There really are a number of people who sometimes find that they haven’t got enough money even to buy some food. We were a bit quiet on Friday – we provided food for 17 adults and 4 children, the day before yesterday.

In the next chapter of the report, it looked at middle income earners. The middle income people have different needs, compared with the very poor people. They aren’t hungry – they have good jobs – but they want more. They admire their neighbours’ new kitchens and curved-screen TVs: they stretch themselves financially in order to keep up with the Joneses. They spend a bit more than they actually earn – and they worry. Will it all come to an end? Their lives aren’t secure.

And finally the report looked at some wealthy ones, who are commuters – couples, who both get the 7.56 to Waterloo, and don’t get home much before 8 most evenings. They don’t really know anyone in the village, and they don’t really participate in local life. They have lots of money – but once you’ve put that island in your kitchen, what else can you do with it? And as every German motorway – Autobahn – driver knows, however fast you are going in your beautiful bolide, there is always a Porsche, a faster car, coming up to overtake you.

Remember what our Gospel today said. ‘Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life, and that day does not catch you unexpectedly, like a trap.’ (Luke 21:34-35)

There’s a spiritual emptiness in our world. What is really worth something? What will have lasting value? The posh kitchen and the Bentley in the drive won’t do it.

The thing that struck me was that none of the great and good, who were gathered to mark the publication of the report, were saying anything much about it. What do the grandees and the local councillors feel? How much of the poverty, the poverty in the middle of riches, is down to ‘austerity’ and cuts in benefits?

How do we feel about the huge gaps between rich and poor, and between the rich and the richer? Should we – dare I say this? – pay more taxes?

Would it help if people came to church and said their prayers a bit more often?

Oh, and another thing. We’re going to be singing about peace in all those Advent and Christmas hymns. Take hymn 56, [Common Praise] for instance:

It came upon the midnight clear,
That glorious song of old,
From angels bending near the earth
To touch their harps of gold:
‘Peace on earth, good will to men,
From heaven’s all-gracious King!’ …

‘Yet with the woes of sin and strife
The world has suffered long;
Beneath the angel strain have rolled
Two thousand years of wrong;
And man, at war with man, hears not
The love-song that they bring:..’

Are we really going to be bombing Syria at Christmas? I have to say that, although of course we all sympathise completely with the poor people in Paris who suffered from the terrorist atrocity, and with the Russian families who lost relatives and friends in the plane which IS bombed, nevertheless it’s not clear to me what the objective of dropping even more bombs in Syria would be. The Americans have been dropping huge numbers of bombs already, and there is no sign that IS is going away. On the other hand, just as when they bombed a Médecins sans Frontières hospital by mistake, or when they killed an IS leader with a drone strike (and killed four others, nameless in the same car), there are always innocent bystanders who are killed and maimed as well.

Let’s use this time of prayerful anticipation in the lead up to Christmas, let’s use Advent, use it as a time to reflect and think again what Jesus’ true message for us today would be.

Back to the carol:
‘Oh hush the noise, ye men of strife,
And hear the angels sing.’

Tags , , , , , , , , , ,
Categories Uncategorized

The National Anthem of the Kingdom of Heaven

By publicsquare
November 23, 2015 //
0

Sermon for the Sunday next before Advent, Christ the King: 22nd November 2015

Daniel 5

Today in the Christian year we celebrate, we talk about, the idea of Christ the King. The expression ‘King’ comes up when he is on trial in front of Pontius Pilate, which seems to have been the most extraordinary scenario. ‘Are you a king?’ Pilate asks.

Pilate seems to me to have been a rather normal bloke, in a difficult position, having to deal with a bunch of fanatics who were zealots who caused a lot of trouble: possibly we might say they were in the line of ancestors of the people who are Zionists today, contributing to dissent and and unrest in the Holy Land. 

Well, perhaps that’s not a legitimate thing to say, but we can say that the Jews presenting Jesus for judgement by the ruler, by Pontius Pilate, were certainly not thinking about how to promote peace and harmony in the long run; they just wanted to rub out Jesus. He was asking awkward questions, which they did not find easy to answer. It was said that he was King of the Jews.

The idea of the kingdom of God in Jewish theology is a mixture of the idea of the Promised Land and the theology of God’s Holy Mountain. ‘They shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain’ (Isaiah 11:9) – the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and so on. We all know to some extent about Jesus’ rather upside-down concept of kingship. The first shall be last, washing people’s feet, giving up all that you own and giving it to the poor, when dealing with somebody described as a “rich young ruler”, a sort of prince.

But I’m afraid that I will rehearse all these stories, and then add a couple of pious sentences, saying that somehow you should follow them – and then you will forget this sermon and the ideas that it contains, probably before the end of the service, if not a few moments later.

I’d be very doubtful if a sermon, which concentrates on telling you, just in an academic way, what the meaning of kingship was in relation to Jesus Christ, would influence your life in any meaningful way, because you would find the way of life then so different, so alien from what we do now.

We have to build a bridge. What would Jesus do if he were here today? If we go back to the trial before Pontius Pilate, there’s an awful lot of irony in it. Pilate clearly is the representative of the ruling establishment, of the empire of Rome. So the idea that somebody else should come forward and present themselves as a king looks rather counter-intuitive, when it was so obvious that the ruler was a Roman.

Maybe Jesus’ kingship was a bit like all those grandly-named sort-of kings that survived in India after independence – I think largely for the purpose of owning classic vintage Rolls-Royces. The Maharajah of Jaipur, or the Nawab of Pataudi, for instance. Possibly Pontius Pilate had something similar in mind when he was tackling Jesus. ‘Are you a king?’ Meaning, ‘Are you one of those symbolic kings?’

I’m pretty sure that that’s not what the earliest Christians, what the contemporary readers of the Gospel, would have had in mind. The idea of some kind of symbolic king without any power just doesn’t chime with the whole of Jewish history. It’s more likely that they thought of a king as being like King Belshazzar the King of Babylon, the King from Ur of the Chaldees, portrayed in the wonderful fifth chapter of the Book of Daniel.

That King’s father, Nebuchadnezzar, was so confident in his own legitimacy and strength that he had invaded the kingdom of Judah, overrun the Temple, and nicked all the treasures, the gold goblets, plates and things used in the Temple rituals; he turned them over for use at parties, at his court banquet. It was pretty insulting to the Jews, but he had the power. 

Was their God so weak, so inferior to Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar’s god? The Jews didn’t believe this. What that King did, what Belshazzar did, was sacrilege to the Jews. Even today, in theological debates, now between Moslems and Christians, the heart of the matter is precisely that both sides think they have the correct understanding of the most important question ever, namely, what the nature of God is.

But then, despite all his power, Belshazzar encountered the writing on the wall. What did it mean? And Daniel, the Jew, explained. Despite all his power as a king, Belshazzar was finished.

What would happen today, if the confrontation between Jesus and Pontius Pilate was re-run in a contemporary environment? Was Jesus a king? And if so, what sort of king? Well, in St John’s Gospel, Jesus very clearly reserves his position, and points out that the kingdom that he rules as a king is not of this world. So we can’t judge him by how big a country he rules or how big an empire: or whether he has given up his power and become a constitutional monarch like the Queen; or whether he is still an absolute monarch, like the Saudi King, for example.

There’s a faint colour of artificiality about the move which I’m trying to make, between Jesus the king in the Bible and some kind of contemporary interpretation. But never mind; let’s pursue it. I’m confident that it will illustrate what needs to be said here. 

What would the kingdom of God look like? Is it like Belshazzar’s banquet, or is it ‘the year of the Lord’s favour’ as Jesus proclaimed in St Luke chapter 4 [4:19], fulfilling the prophecy of Isaiah [Is. 61:1,2]? Is it ‘They shall not hurt or destroy on God’s holy mountain’? Or is it, ‘The last shall be first, and the first shall be last’, in the Gospel story itself? [Matt. 20:16]
What does it mean to be a king? I think that the idea of kingship can be taken in more than one way. 

You can of course look historically at who has actually been a king, and identify the qualities these historic kings actually had. But equally, another way of looking at it is to see kingship as a kind of metaphor for the whole business of government, of leadership of people. What would a really Christian government look like – a government where Christ was really in charge?
Would he be democratic, for example? Surely yes. We believe that God loves every single one of us: indeed that he has called us all by name [Isaiah 43:1], and that therefore we are all worth knowing. That would imply that we should each have a vote; it would imply a need for democracy. 

But would Jesus approve of our particular version of democracy? So many people didn’t vote in the last general election. So, although the government claims a majority, in fact I believe that only 24% of the electorate as a whole actually voted for them. Many more, 36%, didn’t vote for anyone. It’s at least arguable that our current arrangements are not as democratic as one feels they might be, if we were trying to create heaven on earth. It’s something to think about.

Again, after Bishop John Robinson’s ‘Honest to God’, we now understand that the Kingdom of God isn’t in a particular place, where Jesus, the Lamb or God Himself is, up there somewhere on their thrones. In a spiritual sense, the Kingdom is with us here and now. We are God’s workers – ‘Take my hands and let them move | At the impulse of thy love’, as the hymn says [Common Praise no 581]. It’s up to us to work to bring about the year of the Lord’s favour. Jesus is our King – not in a temporal, earthly sense, as he says when Pilate questions him – but he does rule; he rules in our hearts. 

I worry a bit, when I say that. I worry because I think that it might be the same type of reasoning which IS, Daesh, uses in support of its ‘Caliphate’. They talk about their Islamic State having a king, a ‘caliph’. But the difference is that, whereas their caliph is to be a sheikh, an Arab king, who is defined as the successor to, or deputy for, Mohammed, in Islam, and is king, caliph, by virtue of that divine authority, in Christianity, as Jesus says, the king is not a secular ruler. ‘My kingdom is not from this world’, he said, in John 18:36.

And definitely, on our God’s holy mountain there will be peace: ‘They shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain’ (Isaiah 11:9). It’s so tragic that people who support Daesh believe that God supports violence. We understand that Moslems as well as Jews all worship the same God as we do – but the IS people don’t recognise that if their Islamic State were a real Caliphate, governed by God, then God ‘will dwell with them, they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them’: 

that we agree on; but we believe that 

‘he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more.’ 

That’s in our Bible, in the Book of Revelation, 21:3-4. To be fair, I think that most Moslems do not support the idea of a a militant ‘caliphate’, based on terror. They wouldn’t recognise a Daesh Caliph as a real ruler, whoever he might be.

So, even if there’s no kingly pomp, let us give our allegiance, let us indeed sing hymns and praises, sing the National Anthem of the Kingdom of Heaven, even, to our King, to Jesus.

Tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Categories Uncategorized

Liberté Égalité Securité

By publicsquare
November 15, 2015 //
0

Sermon for Mattins on the 24th Sunday after Trinity, 15th November 2015 – Security or Liberty?
Daniel 12:1-3 ‘There shall be a time of trouble, such as never was ..’
Mark 13:1-8 ‘Such things must needs be; but the end shall not be yet’

‘For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be earthquakes in divers places, and there shall be famines and troubles: these are the beginnings of sorrows. But take heed to yourselves: for they shall deliver you up to councils; and in the synagogues ye shall be beaten:…’

That’s the end of our Gospel reading this morning, and the verse after. It might be a description of what it feels like to be a Christian in Iraq, or Syria, or anywhere else where so-called Islamic State is operating. It’s not safe to be a Christian there – and many Christians have become refugees.

And now, in Paris, that violence, that terrorism, has come out of the Middle East and is on our doorstep. Hundreds of people have been killed and maimed by suicide bombers with Kalashnikovs in that lovely city, where we all have treasured memories, of happy days, beautiful sights and wonderful meals in fine company.

We are horrified. We feel for the poor people of Paris. How frightened they must feel. If these terrorists could do it once, can they, will they, do it again? It could be London next time. How can we deal with this terrorism?

I was already thinking about this earlier in this week, before the terrible news from Paris arrived. Mohammed Emwazi, ‘Jihadi John’, the IS terrorist with a British accent, who appeared on several of their awful propaganda videos and appears to have murdered several innocent people, was killed in Syria earlier this week by a missile fired from an unmanned aircraft, a drone. Or rather, the Americans, whose missile it was, say they are ‘99% certain’ they killed Emwazi. And several other people were in the same car and were killed when it was hit by the missile.

You may remember the case of Derek Bentley, condemned to death – and executed – in 1953 – for the murder of a policeman. He was a 19-year-old with learning difficulties. During an attempted burglary, his partner in crime, Christopher Craig, who was under 18, shot a policeman after Bentley had called out ‘Let him have it’, ‘it’ being the gun. The prosecution alleged that ‘Let him have it’ meant ‘Shoot him’, and the judge directed the jury to find that interpretation. Bentley was hanged. He has since been posthumously pardoned, and his conviction quashed.

Bentley’s case was one of those miscarriages of justice which persuaded our parliament to abolish the death penalty. At least, to abolish it when we bring an alleged murderer before the courts.

But what if the alleged murderer is a terrorist? Do you remember ‘Death on the Rock’, the ITV documentary broadcast in 1988, about three IRA man who were shot by the SAS in Gibraltar?

Or Jean Charles de Menezes, the innocent man shot nine times by policemen on a Victoria Line tube train?

Or even Osama bin Laden, shot by the US special forces in Pakistan at his home? None of them was tried. But they were all killed, killed by the forces of law and order. Was that right?

There is a difference in legal interpretation between us and the USA in this context. They characterise these operations as being part of a ‘War against Terror’, an actual war, in which the terrorists are combatants, soldiers. We, on the other hand, see terrorists as criminals, to be brought to justice in the courts.

In general, in war, subject to the Geneva Conventions, it is lawful to kill enemy soldiers. Therefore if Mr Emwazi was a soldier and there was a war, in principle it would have been lawful to kill him.

But if there wasn’t a war, at least a war in the sense that Mr Emwazi was a soldier in an army belonging to a country which was at war with the United States, then he was simply a criminal who should have been brought to trial. Incidentally, murder is one of the few crimes which the British courts will try, irrespectively where in the world the offence was committed.

So was it right, or lawful, to kill him with a missile? Nobody is sure even that it was indeed him who was killed – let alone whether his fellow-passengers were in any way sufficiently culpable in order to deserve the death penalty.

Compare Jihadi John’s case with Derek Bentley’s. Bentley was tried. He had the benefit of counsel. There was a jury. The judge was experienced. But they still got it wrong.

Here, we don’t even know for sure whether it was Jihadi John that the missile hit. We don’t know who the other people who were killed were. The missile was fired by the US Army at a car in a town in Syria, Raqqa. The United States is not at war with Syria. Dare one ask, on what legal basis could the strike be justified?

Now I know that you will have listened to me saying that, and you’re probably thinking, ‘That must be wrong’. Wrong, in the sense that ‘of course it was the right thing’ to get rid of Emwazi. He was a ‘dangerous terrorist’. The Prime Minister, I believe, has said that killing him was a question of self-defence.

A former law professor at the LSE, a very old friend of mine, said that the special circumstances, in effect, justified the killing. ‘Imagine you have him in your sights, knife poised over neck of a captive… Do you shoot, or ring 999 and hope for the best?’ It is the same sort of reasoning which is sometimes used to justify torture.

Well, some lawyers at least certainly disagree with those suggestions. The former Master of the Rolls, Lord Bingham, Sir Tom Bingham, in his very fine book ‘The Rule of Law’, quoted Cicero, De Legibus (‘On Laws’),’ Salus populi suprema lex esto’, (‘let the safety of the people be the highest law’), but said that he preferred Benjamin Franklin’s view that ‘he who would put security before liberty deserves neither’.

The early Christians had a hard time. As we read in St Mark’s Gospel, Jesus was preparing the apostles for persecution. What he warned them about indeed sounds like what is happening to the Christians in the Middle East today. But remember what St Paul said, in his Letter to the Romans, chapter 8.

35 Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?
36 As it is written, For thy sake we are killed all the day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.
37 Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us.

And let us remember what Jesus himself said in the Sermon on the Mount.

‘I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.’

Jesus had no use for military intervention, let alone a ‘war on terror’. In the Beatitudes, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God’. Love your enemies. Love your enemies! This is revolutionary stuff. How can we handle it?

Surely we cannot just stand aside and let IS run amok all over the world? Can we? Last week I preached about how ‘Thou shalt not kill’ had evolved into the doctrine of the Just War, and how in modern times the rules sometimes allowing for warlike acts had been agreed in the United Nations Charter. The war must be in self-defence, or to give effect to a mutual protection treaty, or if the United Nations to has sanctioned it.

This is presumably why the Prime Minister has made reference to self defence, in seeking to justify the drone strike which probably killed Jihadi John. But it is at least arguable that there is no war; there was only terrorism, which in this country is a criminal matter, not an act of war.

In that case, whether or not the action was in self-defence is not relevant, in the sense that the Battle of Britain was fought in self-defence by the RAF. Even if it were, it is highly unlikely that Jihadi John was in any meaningful way a threat to the existence of this country.

We need to pray for guidance, and for our leaders to have wisdom and discernment where terrorism is concerned. It is no use our getting involved in ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’. We should remember that ‘He who would put security before liberty deserves neither’.

Truth and reconciliation are far more likely to lead to long term peace. Let us pray that they are forthcoming.

Tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Categories Uncategorized

Deterrence, Leopards and God’s Mountain 

By publicsquare
November 8, 2015 //
2

Sermon for Evensong on Remembrance Sunday 2015

Isaiah 10:33-11:9; John 14:1-29
‘We will remember them.’ This has been a time of remembrance today, looking back in remembrance on all those brave people who have given their lives in the service of their country in war. Now in the evening of the day, ‘at the going down of the sun,’ it is time perhaps for us to look forwards, and reflect on the question of peace.
‘The wolf also shall dwell 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 nor destroy in all my holy mountain.’ This beautiful and mystical scene is the prophecy of Isaiah. And then in St John’s Gospel, ‘In my father’s house are many mansions …. Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.’
When I started to study Latin and Greek, the Latin was Julius Caesar, De Bello Gallico (‘about the war in Europe’), and the Greek was Xenophon’s Anabasis, another history of war. Julius Caesar, as you know, invaded Britain in 55 and 54BC – less than a century before the time of Christ. It was definitely a warlike time throughout the Roman Empire.
Jesus grew up surrounded by wars. Before then the world of the Old Testament was permeated with lots of violence and wars. The story of the exodus from Egypt was very violent and the entry into the promised land equally involved a number of battles.
In the passage we have read from St John’s Gospel, Jesus says, ‘If you love me, you will keep my commandments.’ Presumably, that includes ‘Thou shalt not kill’. But even so, Jesus himself also said, ‘I came not to bring peace but a sword’ (Matt. 10:34). So would Jesus have belonged to the Peace Pledge Union, and worn not a red poppy, but a white one, today? Just as today most people see war as something to be avoided if possible, but never to be ruled out as a last resort, in Jesus’ time, war was an unavoidable fact of life.
Following St Thomas Aquinas, the church developed a doctrine of the ‘Just War’. (See Summa Theologiae 40.1). This is what Aquinas says. ‘If a war is to be just, three things are needed. It must be waged by the due authorities, for those who may lawfully use the sword to defend a commonwealth against criminals disturbing it from within may also use the sword of war to protect it from enemies without. … the cause must be just, …. And those waging war must intend to promote good and avoid evil.’
It might be instructive to compare these principles with the principles laid down in the United Nations Charter allowing a modern nation lawfully to declare war – or at least to make war, even without a declaration – on another. These days the requirements for a war to be just are: that it should be in self defence; or because a treaty obliges us to wage war to protect another nation – as we were obliged by treaty to protect Poland at the beginning of WW2 – or because the approval of the United Nations has been obtained.
But the original ‘just war’ principles are still influential. War can only be waged lawfully by a sovereign nation: you cannot have private wars, vendettas, as they have in Sicily between Mafiosi. The cause must be just. A nation can’t wage war simply in order to benefit itself. So Hitler’s quest for Lebensraum, literally, ‘living space’, territorial aggrandisement, was not a legitimate occasion for making war.
And the means employed must be proportionate. Proportionality is an old legal principle dating back at least to the lex talionis, an eye for an eye, (Deut .19:21): the point is that it is just an eye for an eye, not more. There were similar provisions even earlier, in Babylonian law and the laws of Hammurabi.
There must also be a reasonable expectation that the war will be successful. This does still come, perhaps, from Aquinas. He says, “The Lord’s words, ‘I say to you, offer the wicked man no resistance’, [Matt. 5:39 ] must always be borne in mind, and we must be ready to abandon resistance and self defence if the situation calls for that.” (Summa Theologiae 40.1) Pyrrhic victory might not be lawful. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus certainly went much further than the Lex Talionis.

Are we content that there is, or there can be, such a thing as a just war? Does it matter that some of the wars which have been waged, at least arguably, as just wars, have not achieved their objectives? See for example the situation in Iraq today, or even more tragically, in Afghanistan.
Is it reasonable to ask, what would Jesus do? Would he have something to say, for instance, about the doctrine of mutually assured destruction, (the rationale behind the holding of nuclear weapons), or of ‘shock and awe’ as used in Iraq. Would these doctrines square with the doctrines of just cause and proportionality in the case of MAD, or proportionality, in the case of ‘shock and awe’?
The theory of nuclear deterrence does not depend on the rightness of one’s cause. The opponent is deterred not because we are right, but because we can kill him. Perhaps it is proportional to respond to a threat of global annihilation – with what? With a threat of global annihilation. But perhaps that simply illustrates that the principle of proportionality is inadequate in the context of nuclear weapons. And again, what about a nuclear suicide bomber? MAD will not affect them.
I for one was very encouraged when Parliament refused to back military action in Syria. It seemed to me that the criteria for a just war were indeed not properly met. There was no threat against this country, so as to raise a question of self-defence. There was no treaty obligation to help some of the Syrians against the Syrian government – how could there be? And what was the likelihood of success – if indeed one could agree on what would constitute success? Of course, the question may come up again soon.
So much of our Remembrance Day liturgy and poetry was inspired by WW1. That was supposed to be ‘the war to end all wars’ – which must be a perfect example of Aquinas’ second test for a just war, that the cause must be just. There can surely be no more righteous cause than the eradication of war for the future.
But even in this most worthy objective, war was not a solution. Indeed the seeds of the Second World War were sown in the aftermath of the First one. Can we honestly point to many wars and say they have really achieved anything?
Perhaps universal pessimism is not justified: it was vital that Nazism had to be defeated: war was the only way to do it; the war succeeded. The war on Nazism succeeded at least in that the military threat to this country was removed – it was justified according to the principle of self defence.
But one cannot change people’s minds by war against them. Just as there are still people who are Nazis, even in this country, and there certainly are still Nazis in mainland Europe, it is certainly arguable that people have been inspired to take up terrorism by their believing that the West has waged war unjustly in the Middle East.
This is a terribly difficult area. Clearly we can be, and we are, really thankful for the bravery and sacrifice of our soldiers, sailors and airmen. That is the main purpose of Remembrance Sunday. But it is much more difficult to know where our duty lies as Christians in the face of the threats to peace which the world now faces.
We must say our prayers, we must pray for world peace. But also we must be alert, we must scrutinise everything that is done in our name, especially if warlike acts are being prepared. ‘At the going down of the sun’ we will remember. We must remember – and because of what we remember, we must be careful. And we must be just.

Tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Categories Uncategorized

Saints

By publicsquare
November 1, 2015 //
0

Sermon for All Saints, Sunday 1st November 2015
Rev. 21:1-6, John 11:32-44

Why do you come to church? I’m sorry; I’ll put it a bit less abruptly. Why does one come? I used to know a lovely old lady, Mrs Ryder, who said, ‘I go to church to think about dead people.’ To some extent, I think that’s how I came in, too. What does happen when we die? What is heaven like? ‘Behold, I make all things new. … A new heaven – and a new earth’. Is that where Mrs Ryder’s people have gone?

And then there’s Lazarus. Too much detail: his corpse was beginning to go off, to get smelly. He hadn’t gone anywhere, apparently. Then out he came, blinking, into the light. Not smelly.

In a way, those two pieces encapsulate where I came in; where I started to think about things outside the realm of what I could see and feel and touch. How I started the the process in which I eventually came into being a Christian.

‘Am I going to die?’ I asked my mother one day when I was a boy. ‘No’, she said. Well, not imminently, anyway, she might have added. But even so, I had started to think about it.

Actually, it’s tomorrow that we really think about dead people – All Souls, the Commemoration of the Faithful Departed, will be our service at 10.30 tomorrow morning. Today we are doing what Christians have done at least from the third century, and that is to celebrate the special people who have been, from the earliest time, witnesses to Jesus’ mission, the saints. I Sancti, the holy ones, set apart from ordinary people. St Paul mentions ‘saints’ thirty times in his letters. We may think of them as being somehow almost superhuman, but St Paul simply used that name for the ordinary members of the church.

But clearly in many instances the term ‘saint’ does describe someone very special. In the Roman Catholic Church saints are priests, in the sense that they pray for us, they intercede for us with God. ‘Sancta Maria – ora pro nobis’: holy Mary, saintly Mary – pray for us. So in Catholicism the idea grew up that you pray to God through a saint, you ‘invoked’ that saint.

This was all part of the system of purgatory and indulgences which Martin Luther opposed. Thomas Cranmer, following Luther, wrote in our 39 Articles of Religion, Article XXII, ‘The Romish Doctrine concerning Purgatory, Pardons, Worshipping, and Adoration, as well of Images as of Reliques, and also invocation of Saints, is it fond thing vainly invented, and grounded upon no warranty of Scripture, but rather repugnant to the Word of God.’According to the Reformers, invocation of saints, praying through the saints, has no scriptural basis – you can come to God direct: you don’t need a priest to intercede for you. There is a ‘priesthood of all believers.’

Just like a lot of the controversies from the Reformation, the antithesis between the Catholic idea of the saints as being people whom we can call upon to intercede for us with God, and the Reformation idea of the Priesthood of all Believers, is a question which we don’t now look at in such a black-and-white way. We do say prayers by ourselves; we do dare to speak directly to God, wherever we might be: but we also come to church and have the minister say prayers for us.

In the Apostles’ Creed in the Prayer Book (the one we say at Mattins or Evensong), we say,
‘I believe in the Holy Ghost, the holy Catholic Church, the Communion of Saints, the Forgiveness of sins, the Resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.’ The Communion of Saints is right up there with all the other really important parts of our faith.

Today we pray in the Collect, “O Almighty God, who hast knit together thine elect in one communion and fellowship, in the mystical body of thy son Christ our Lord…” Being in ‘Communion with the Saints’ means being in the same body with them, in the church down the ages. There is something very powerful about that. All those wonderful men and women, beginning with the apostles and the earliest Christians – Peter and James and John, the Twelve, then Paul, then Dorcas and Phoebe; then the early martyrs, St Stephen and all those who were eaten by lions in the arena: and then all the great figures in the church down the ages.

Martin Luther, certainly: Thomas Cranmer: but also St Francis Xavier, and Pope John XXIII. John Wesley and John Henry Newman. Dietrich Bonhöffer. This is the ‘great cloud of witnesses’ that we read about in the Letter to the Hebrews.

These saints were willing to sacrifice everything for their faith. Read the list of faith heroes in Hebrews 11. It might be rather daunting. How could we match up to some of the things they did? But at least we don’t have to face being thrown to the lions.

Whom would you think of as a saint today? This is where we can recognise the force of St Paul’s idea that everyone in the churches was, is, a saint. I’m sure it’s still true. Just look around you, and think how nice we are – think how we have cared for each other and for those in need. In a real sense everyone in the congregation is a saint.

It doesn’t mean that we have to be perfect in order to qualify to be saints. St Paul, when he wrote to the ‘saints’ at Corinth, or in Ephesus, or in Colossae, or even in Rome, wasn’t writing to eulogise their virtues: instead the purpose of his letters was often to correct their errors and put them back on the track of the true faith. Saints are normal people with normal faults and weaknesses. People like us can be saints.

So what is it that calls us, still calls us, to be people apart, holy people – (because that is what Άγιος , Sanctus, sacred, saintly, means)? This is where poor old Lazarus comes in. We are ‘members of one another in Christ, members of a company of saints, whose mutual belonging transcends death’. Jesus conquered death. He raised Lazarus from the dead, and He himself rose resurrected in glory. This is our faith.

This faith is the mark of a saint. A saint – a saint like us – has the sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life.

‘Behold, I make all things new’. That includes us. Us saints.

Tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Categories Uncategorized

Vanity of vanities?

By publicsquare
October 25, 2015 //
0

Sermon for Evensong on the 21st Sunday after Trinity 2015

Ecclesiastes 11 and 12; 2 Timothy 2:1–7
Cast your bread upon the waters; don’t have all your eggs in one basket. This is a strange lesson. “‘Vanity of vanities,….’ saith the Preacher”. All is vanity, emptiness, worthlessness. Whatever we do, whatever we enjoy, whatever the books we read, all are pointless. But nevertheless, ‘fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man’. God will judge everybody at the end of the world.
This is in that part of the Old Testament called the Wisdom literature, written relatively late in the Old Testament history of the Jewish people, when they were ruled by Alexander the Great, around 300 BC. Ecclesiastes, the name of the book, is sometimes translated as ‘the preacher’ or the ‘teacher’ or the ‘speaker’. Or it might be, “commentator”. Somebody at the back of the church listening to the preacher, perhaps – and making rather cynical comments. [I got this idea from Charpentier, E., 1981, How to read the Old Testament, London, SCM Press, p87]
God, according to the man actually in the pulpit, is good and just. The world goes on in accordance with his plan. Ecclesiastes, at the back, mutters, “No, it doesn’t”. Whatever you do will all come to nothing. When you’re young, you can exult in the joys of youth. “The light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is to behold the sun.” But, there will be darkness. “All that cometh is vanity.” There is no attempt to explain this rather uncompromising and gloomy message. Why would the creator, the good God, allow everything to come to nothing? Ecclesiastes simply says, you have to accept it, worship God and hope for the best.
When the second letter to Timothy was written, maybe 450 years later, Timothy was told to teach the early Christians that he visited. Although he may have to endure hardship, “share in suffering like a good soldier of Christ Jesus”, and it will come out all right. No one is crowned, no one wins the race, without completing according to the rules. The farmer who does the work is allowed to enjoy the first fruits of his work. He should have the first pick of the crop. There is no talk of vanity, “everything is vanity”. God is good, because God sent Jesus to demonstrate his love, and that is the gospel message which Timothy has to pass on.
I went to a learned seminar in Oxford on Monday night concerned with this problem of evil. If God is good and loving, why do bad things happen? Why would it be that the ‘preacher sitting at the back of the church’, Ecclesiastes, would say that, however good it may look at first, everything is empty and pointless? ‘Vanity of vanities, everything is vanity’. Some people have argued that, because clearly there are bad things, there are natural disasters and there is man’s inhumanity to man, this must call into question either the very existence of God at all, or certainly the goodness of God. How could a good God allow all these bad things to happen?
The paper that I was listening to dealt with the answer which has been given by theologians all down the ages, from Saint Augustine onwards, to this problem of evil, which is that it is explained by the existence of free will. God created us with free will, in other words, the freedom of ourselves to choose to do good or bad things.
If free will consists in having a free choice whether to do a good thing or whether to pursue a bad course of action, equally, in order for us to be able to understand what the good is at all, there must be some bad things for us to contrast with it. The idea is that it is not God treating us as robots, so that we always do the right thing. We are made free. We can certainly choose to do the right thing, but we may not do so. It’s our own free choice.
The speaker on Monday night was examining the relative worth of free will as against the damage that it causes. If God gave us free will so as to demonstrate that he wasn’t creating all the bad things alongside the good things, is that a good bargain? Would we not perhaps be better off being predetermined just to do good things? Well, that was a rather deep theoretical discussion, and I think that you might complain that it is a little too recondite for Evensong!
But it does remind us of the sort of thing that Ecclesiastes, the teacher or the preacher, was bringing up. You can do the best things in the world: they may all come to nothing. If so, where is God in all that? The second letter to Timothy gives you the answer. In the light of the fact that Jesus has come, and in the light of who Jesus is, we can now be confident that it is not the case that everything is pointless, not true that everything is vanity.
That’s all rather dry stuff. I think I can bring it to life, can illustrate what I mean, by mentioning some things which have happened in the last week: which you can contrast them with what things looked like to Ecclesiastes, under the reign of Alexander the Great in 300 BC, or to Timothy, perhaps about 120AD.
I want to mention two happy things that happened this week. They are not intended to be the be-all and end-all, but simply to demonstrate that there are cases where prayers are answered, and that, although there may be evil in the world, there is also a lot of good. Things are not absolutely pointless.
The first story is all about a little black and white cat called Dottie. All round our road and quite a long way up Sandy Lane, for the last couple of weeks notices have been stuck to fences and gates – there have even been notices through everyone’s letterboxes – telling us that Dottie had gone missing and asking us to look in our garages and sheds in case she was locked in.
I know what that feels like, because I lost one of my Bengal cats, Poppadum, a few years ago. She went missing for two whole weeks. I looked everywhere; advertised on the Internet and on posters, and I went to see all my neighbours to ask whether she was stuck in their garages or in their sheds.
All to no avail. I said my prayers; I am sure that Dottie’s owner also said her prayers. Well, happiness of happiness, not vanity of vanities. Both cats reappeared safe and sound.
Prayers answered, surely. But I suppose you might be a bit sceptical if I based all my theology on stories of lost cats. Let me try another story. What do you think about footballers? Do you think of them as rather overpaid oafs rushing about in Ferraris? Or plonking their Range Rovers in disabled parking spaces outside pizzerias in Esher? You tend not to think of them as doing anything morally uplifting, however skilful they may be.
Now I swear that this is not intended to be a eulogy of Manchester United at the expense of our local teams, but you may have read in the newspaper this last week about the two great former Manchester United players, Gary Neville and Ryan Giggs, who bought the former Manchester Stock Exchange in the centre of Manchester with the intention of turning it into a boutique hotel with smart restaurant and spa facilities; all very chi-chi and no doubt, very expensive.
But before they had a chance to start work, squatters moved in and took it over. What do you think the two Manchester United players did when they found that the building was occupied by squatters? Do you think they called the police or went to court for an injunction? Did they hire bailiffs to remove the squatters?
They didn’t do any of those things. Instead, they welcomed the squatters, and told them they could stay till the spring. They realised that these were homeless people who faced spending the winter on the streets. The squatters say they are now able to have a roof over their heads, hot food, health checkups, benefit advice, signposting to other services and help with securing permanent long-term accommodation. They have renamed the former stock exchange building the ‘Sock Exchange’ as they will be distributing clothing as well.
The squatters have agreed to keep the building scrupulously clean and some of them are even working for the builders converting the building. Gary Neville said, ‘From my point of view, I’m quite relaxed about this.’ For the last 10 years he has been offering support to homeless people whom he has encountered on the streets of Manchester as he has walked about.
It could be something out of Saint Matthew chapter 25. You remember the story of the sheep and the goats at the time of the final judgement. ‘The king will say, when I was hungry, you gave me food; when I was thirsty, you gave me something to drink. When I was a stranger, you took me into your home. And they will say, ‘When was it that we saw you hungry and fed you, and so on?’ And the king will answer, ‘I tell you this. Anything you did for one of the least of these my brothers here, you did for me.’ Anything you did for one of those down-and-outs. Like Gary Neville and Ryan Giggs did for them.
Not vanity, not emptiness. Even today, not in the hands of saints, but even among some premiership footballers, Jesus’s words have come true. Hallelujah!

Tags , ,
Categories Uncategorized

The Beloved Physician

By publicsquare
October 19, 2015 //
0

Updated – another picture!

publicsquare's avatarhughdbryant

Sermon for Mattins on the Festival of St Luke the Evangelist, 18th October 2015
2 Timothy 4:5-15, Luke 10:1-9

What is it to be a doctor? St Luke the Evangelist, whom we are commemorating today, was a doctor: ‘the beloved physician’, ιατρός αγαπητός, according to St Paul in his Letter to the Colossians, [4:14].

He was the author of the Gospel that bears his name, and it looks as though he was the author of the Acts of the Apostles too. Both books are addressed to somebody called Theophilus. It’s quite clear from the beginning of the first chapter of Acts that it is a continuation of the story which was told in Luke’s Gospel. If you look at Acts chapter 16, you’ll see that, all of a sudden, the narrative changes from third-person, ‘they’ did this, that and the other, to ‘we’ did this, that and the other; so…

View original post 1,492 more words

Categories Uncategorized

The Beloved Physician

By publicsquare
October 18, 2015 //
1

Sermon for Mattins on the Festival of St Luke the Evangelist, 18th October 2015
2 Timothy 4:5-15, Luke 10:1-9

What is it to be a doctor? St Luke the Evangelist, whom we are commemorating today, was a doctor: ‘the beloved physician’, ιατρός αγαπητός, according to St Paul in his Letter to the Colossians, [4:14].

He was the author of the Gospel that bears his name, and it looks as though he was the author of the Acts of the Apostles too. Both books are addressed to somebody called Theophilus. It’s quite clear from the beginning of the first chapter of Acts that it is a continuation of the story which was told in Luke’s Gospel. If you look at Acts chapter 16, you’ll see that, all of a sudden, the narrative changes from third-person, ‘they’ did this, that and the other, to ‘we’ did this, that and the other; so it’s pretty clear that Luke was one of the people who actually went around with St Paul.

My daughters, Emma and Alice, are both doctors. They’re probably not evangelists as well, like Luke was, but I think they would both say they had their hands pretty full, just being doctors.

This weekend doctors are in the news. My daughter Alice travelled up from Exeter in order to join yesterday’s demonstration in Parliament Square by thousands of so-called ‘junior’ doctors – because that is what she is. It’s a misleading description. ‘Junior’ doctor, in this context, means any doctor who is not a consultant or GP.

But even a really junior ‘junior doctor’ – and I think that Alice, as an F1 hospital doctor (what used to be called a Junior Houseman) would accept that she is one of those – is somebody who has had at least five years of academic study and whose career then goes forward through more or less constant further training until they either become a general practitioner, or a Senior House Officer, Registrar or Consultant in hospital.

Alice’s elder sister, my elder daughter Emma, is a junior surgeon, a Senior House Officer in the Royal Glamorgan Hospital working for her MRCS qualification (she’s half-way there) which will enable her to apply for a Registrar’s post. She has two degrees, has published academic papers, and she is just entering her tenth year of study and training since she started at Bristol University.

Emma will be very happy to take your, or your children’s, tonsils and adenoids out, or to fit grommets in their ears – all of which she does very well, every day of the week, including weekends. She’s at work now, right now, on Sunday morning. She often is.

image

Dr Emma Hallett, surgeon

I’m not sure whether St Luke was a physician or a surgeon: whether he worked with drugs or other non-invasive therapies, or whether he wielded a scalpel. It’s interesting that, in the Gospel reading, (from St Luke), Jesus sends out his 70 or 72 missionaries in pairs, travelling very light; and after they have wished peace upon those whom they visit, they are told to heal the sick – which is something that St Luke, the doctor, reports without comment.

I would be really interested to know what he thought about this healing. We have, even today, almost a parallel set of disciplines here: on the one hand you have the medical profession, that my daughters belong to, who practise medicine as a scientific discipline with drugs, with other non-invasive therapies, and with surgery. On the other hand you have healing ministries. In many churches – including St Andrew’s, our sister church – there is a healing ministry, where during the service, people are available to lay on hands and pray for people who feel they need God’s healing touch.

Of course Jesus himself healed many people, even including raising people from the dead – Jairus’ daughter and Lazarus, who’d both definitely died. That must be the ultimate form of healing. There were also many other healing miracles: the blind man, that Jesus had to have two goes at healing; the man who had been lame from birth: ‘Take up thy bed, and walk’; the woman who had had a haemorrhage for 12 years – she touched his clothing, and it was enough for her to be healed; people who had ‘devils’ – what we perhaps would now characterise as a kind of psychiatric illness: in all these cases, Jesus didn’t use any drugs or psychiatric techniques or behavioural therapies – or surgery.

Jesus did seem to approve of surgery. He said, If thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell. (Matt. 5:30).

There are people who sincerely believe that one or other branch of healing, scientific, medical on the one hand, and faith-based on the other, should oust the other one entirely. A very important ministry in the church is our ministry as chaplains in hospital. On the whole our chaplains are not medically qualified – although some are. I know a very experienced hospital chaplain who started as a nurse.

On the whole, everybody in the NHS believes that having hospital chaplains is a very good thing, simply from the point of view that it helps people to get better; it helps people to cope with the stresses and strains of being in hospital. You could almost say that hospital chaplaincy offers a kind of complementary therapy.

What about today’s ‘beloved physician?’ What do we, as Christians, have to say about a situation where our beloved physicians feel that things are so wrong for them that they have to actually have a demonstration, in public outside Parliament?

Jesus was pretty clear that someone who needs medical assistance should receive it. The Good Samaritan found the man who had been hurt and helped him. He didn’t ask to see his credit cards or the details of his insurance. He helped him because he was hurt. That is the principle of our National Health Service. The Health Service should be available to all, free at the point of need.

I believe that Margaret Thatcher said that we should note that the Good Samaritan had the means to look after the poor man that he found injured on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho. He took him to an hotel, had them swipe his credit card, and undertook that he would be responsible for the cost of the injured man’s accommodation until he was better. That wouldn’t have been possible if the Good Samaritan had not had the wherewithal to do it.

Actually I’m rather uneasy about the conclusion that Margaret Thatcher drew from that. When I go collecting for charities, particularly Christian Aid, it’s always easier to get money from the poorer roads. People who have less, tend to give disproportionately more of what they have, in charity.

The National Health Service is, effectively, a collective charitable operation by all of us, paying through our taxes, so that everyone can receive medical treatment if they need it, irrespective of the cost of that treatment and the ability of the patient to pay for it.

But it is very wrong, I think, for us who enjoy the benefits, at the same time to ask the professionals who actually deliver that medical care, the doctors and the nurses and the ancillary workers, to give their time and energy, and not have decent living conditions or proper salaries, because we, through our politicians, are not prepared to pay enough for what they do. I think that we should be brought up short – and I hope that our leaders are brought up short – by the sight of thousands of the cleverest, most dedicated and most highly qualified people in our society gathered outside Parliament and demonstrating against the conditions which the government is threatening to impose upon them: demonstrating not only that they are not being paid enough or given enough rest time, but that they are being forced by those conditions to deliver substandard or possibly dangerous care.

If a doctor in this country wants to practise abroad, in Australia, Canada, South Africa, mainland Europe or the USA, or anywhere in the world, they usually require a certificate of competency which the Health Service has to provide on request. Applications for these certificates are now running at the highest level they have ever done since the Health Service began.

We are losing doctors in significant numbers because they believe they can no longer practise in a way which is consistent with their Hippocratic oath and with the ability to have a decent life. Remember, the Good Samaritan had enough money, and so he was able, to help the injured man.

The whole business of healing was obviously central to Jesus’s ministry. The son of God – God in man – didn’t want people to be ill. He healed people, and when he sent out the 70 or 72 as missionaries, they were medical missionaries. They were there to bring healing to sick people.

I’m very proud of my two daughters – Dr Emma and Dr Alice. But I am deeply troubled that Dr Alice had to be in a demo yesterday and Dr Emma would have been there but for the fact, as she tweeted earlier in the week, that #IAmInWorkJeremy.

I do pray that the politicians will start to realise that however expensive the mission of healing is, it is a cost that society, in the sixth richest country in the world, should meet gladly and in full. As we remember Saint Luke, the beloved physician, let us also remember, and give proper support for, our beloved physicians as well.

image

Dr Alice Bryant, right

Tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Categories Uncategorized

Eulogy for Jim, who, facing degenerative illness, killed himself

By publicsquare
October 16, 2015 //
0

Why? Why, has Jim left us? It’s an impossible question. We’re all perplexed and sad. And dare I say so, we’re at least a little bit cross with him sometimes.

There are no perfectly convincing explanations. We can’t know everything that was in Jim’s mind. But what I want to try to do, is to explain that we can be confident that Jim himself is not suffering – and that he may even be in a better place.

But then I want to try to turn our thoughts away from our sadness, from all the worry and despair of the last few days, and to do what I’m sure Jim would have wanted, which is to start to remember, to savour, happier memories, of Jim at his best.

Nearly 2500 years ago, Socrates, the great Greek philosopher, was condemned to death. He had to drink hemlock, a poison which took some time to work. He was surrounded by his pupils and his friends, who were terribly distressed at what he was going through.

Socrates said this, which I think could well apply to Jim as well.

‘There is great reason to hope that death is a good, for …. either death is a state of nothingness and utter unconsciousness, or, as men say, there is a change and migration of the soul from this world to another. Now if you suppose that there is no consciousness, but a sleep like the sleep of him who is undisturbed even by the sight of dreams, death will be an unspeakable gain. . . . Now if death is like this, I say that to die is gain; for eternity is then only a single night. But if death is a journey to another place, and there, as men say, all the dead are, what good, …. can be greater than this? . . . What would not a man give if he might converse with Orpheus and Musaeus and Hesiod and Homer? Nay, if this be true, let me die again and again. . . . The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways – I to die, and you to live. Which is better God only knows.’

So said Socrates. [Plato, Apologia Socratis, 40c5f: see https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Apology_(Plato) for translation]

Those of us who are Christians believe that, as St Paul wrote, there is life after death. We are all made of body and spirit: although the body dies, the spirit, our soul, lives on. [See 1 Corinthians 15, especially from v.35].

Other religious beliefs are similar. Buddhists believe in a ‘transmigration of souls’, so we come back again in this earthly life, but perhaps in a different body. There’s that old song: ‘Be kind to your web-footed friends; as a duck may be somebody’s brother ..’

Jim didn’t have a religious faith, so following what Socrates said, he has either just settled down for one last gentle sleep – or he has woken up to a nice surprise, in a blessed place. But there is another, less philosophical, place where Jim certainly lives on, and that’s in our hearts, in the happy memories we have of him.

Categories Uncategorized

Comfortable Words

By publicsquare
October 11, 2015 //
2

Sermon for Evensong on the Nineteenth Sunday after Trinity, 11th October 2015

Joshua 5:13-6:20; Matt. 11:20-30
In our second lesson tonight, we heard: ‘Come unto me all that travail and are heavy laden, and I will refresh you’. (Matt. 11:28). These are the first of the so-called ‘Comfortable Words’, ‘comfortable words our Saviour Christ saith unto all that truly turn to him’, in the Communion service in the Book of Common Prayer – you’ll find them in your little Prayer Books at p. 252. We use them sometimes in our 8 o’clock traditional-language communion service.
The Comfortable Words are, like a lot of passages in the Book of Common Prayer, a really neat summary of some of the most important passages in the Bible: after ‘Come unto me all that travail and are heavy laden’, there is arguably the best-known verse in the whole of the Bible, ‘So God loved the world, that he gave his only-begotten Son, to the end that all that believe in him should not perish, but have everlasting life’, John 3:16. Have a look at the other Comfortable Words on p.252 as well.
Huge amounts of meaning and theology are in every one of those passages. But let’s stay with the particular ‘comfortable words’ from our lesson tonight, ‘Come unto me all that travail and are heavy laden, and I will refresh you’. They are rather a contrast from what Jesus said just before, about being frustrated with the fact that his message had not been listened to in various places, and his ‘deeds of power’ had not been properly taken account of. ‘A prophet is not without honour, but in his own country …’ [Matt. 13].
Jesus threatens that all these places where he has not been properly received will come to a bad end in the Final Judgment. The whole idea of wiping out entire cities is a hallmark of the Old Testament idea of Holy War, an example of which we heard about in our first lesson, the story of the sack of Jericho. This story in Joshua is obviously not a piece of literal military history, but is more symbolic, showing an instance where God has been present, God has revealed himself, has given a revelation.
‘Behold there stood a man over against him with his sword drawn: and Joshua went unto him, and said unto him, Art thou for us, or for our adversaries?And he said, Nay; but as captain of the host of the Lord am I now come. And Joshua fell on his face to the earth, and did worship.’

He said, ‘Nay, (No)’; ‘No’ goes with, ‘[Are you] for our adversaries?’ The answer is, no, he’s not. He’s for us. He is, perhaps, an angel of the Lord, some kind of messenger from God.

In the story of the priests and the trumpets, the ark of the Covenant, it was seven priests, seven trumpets, going round the besieged city for seven days. The number seven was regarded as a numinous number, a magic number, in the ancient world. That idea goes back earlier than the Old Testament, for example to the Ugaritic civilisation which flourished from about 6,000 BC as well. It’s all highly symbolic.
‘When ye hear the sound of the trumpet, all the people shall shout with a great shout; and the wall of the city shall fall down flat.’ And the walls did fall down. We’re not talking about a literal historical account of the fall of Jericho – although Jericho could well have been sacked at the time when the Israelites crossed the Jordan; we just don’t know. The archaeological evidence isn’t conclusive one way or the other, apparently. The real message is that God showed his hand; there had been a revelation.
Today’s Comfortable Words point to a rather different revelation from the one involving the angel’s presence before the battle for Jericho. ‘Come unto me all that travail and are heavy laden, and I will refresh you’. ‘Comfortable’ is a word whose meaning has evolved a bit since 1549 when Cranmer originally drafted the Book of Common Prayer. It really means ‘strengthening’ or ‘encouraging’, from the Latin verb confortare, which comes from the adjective fortis, ‘strong’: so it means to make strong, to strengthen, to build up. ‘I will refresh you.’
So these are words which build you up: these are refreshing words. Strengthening your faith. I also thought about about the invitation to confession which comes a bit earlier in the Communion service. ‘Draw near with faith, and take this holy Sacrament to your comfort’.
That ‘comfort’ also brings in the idea of a sacrament, a symbol. ‘Take this holy Sacrament to your comfort’. A ‘sacrament’ is what the Catechism in the Prayer Book describes as ‘An outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.’
‘Take this holy Sacrament to your comfort.’ There is God’s grace around. Just as the captain of the hosts of the Lord, the angel, appeared to Joshua, we may encounter God in all around us.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote:
‘Earth’s crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God, But only he who sees takes off his shoes, …’
Or George Herbert’s hymn,
‘Teach me, my God and King, In all things thee to see’.

So in the Comfortable Words we are reminded of God, of what Jesus said and how he asked us to bring him into our lives.

Come unto me … Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.’
On one level, we can simply read this passage and feel good. What’s not to like about a Christianity whose ‘yoke is easy’ and whose ‘burden is light’? It’s not tough. Church is fun. ‘Jesus wants me for a sunbeam’.

But even as I say these things, and as you hear them, surely they don’t really make sense. Being a Christian may be – and is – full of joy; and in that we meet with fellow Christians and share each other’s burdens, so perhaps those burdens are lighter than they would otherwise have been, if we had not been members of the church together. But nevertheless, following Jesus can still be pretty tough.
Jesus calls upon us to make sacrifices, calling to mind his supreme sacrifice for us. As Godfrey preached this morning, about the rich young ruler, Jesus calls on us to give up our riches, to share with those who have none: to care for our neighbours – even if our neighbours are as strange and alien as Jews were to the Good Samaritan.
Even today, in many places in the world, being a Christian could be life-threatening. Just as, so often, Jesus said things which appear to be contrary – ‘The first shall be last, and the last shall be first,’ is the quintessential one – so ‘my yoke is easy and my burden is light’ might also seem to be counterintuitive.
Jesus is saying that to follow him involves total commitment and may involve sacrifice of various types. But as St Paul has pointed out in his Letter to the Romans, [chapter 8], however awfully we may suffer, none of it matters.
‘As it is written, for thy sake we are killed all the day long;

We are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.

Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors

Through him that loved us.

For I am persuaded, that neither death, not life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come,

Nor 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.
That’s why Jesus’ yoke is easy, and his burden light. Ultimately, whatever we have to suffer, He will make comfortable for us. So let us look again at what we have to do, in order to take that yoke upon us, to lift the burden and really follow Jesus. If we do, even if we don’t get the captain of the heavenly host alongside us, God will be there. We will be comforted.

Categories Uncategorized
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »