General Synod Election 2015, Diocese of Guildford Hustings, House of Laity

Question 5: What is your view on equal marriage and the church? Specifically would you like to see gay people marry in church? And would you like to see the ordination of married gay people? ” (Kristina Ingate, Guildford Deanery Synod)

Answer by Hugh Bryant:
On the face of it, the traditional church view of marriage, as between a ‘man and a woman’, given that God ‘made them male and female’, might seem to rule out gay marriage, at least in church. I disagree. It seems to me that maleness and femaleness are degrees on a spectrum of sexuality. Few people are in reality wholly male or female: and many people’s sexuality evolves and changes over time. Therefore in a given relationship there may be maleness and femaleness, even if by basic biology the couple are both ostensibly of the same sex. They are both people, both God’s creatures, both welcome in God’s church. We should certainly marry them: and we should certainly welcome gay married ministers. An enthusiastic ‘yes’ to both questions! 
See http://www.cofeguildford.org.uk/about/governance/general-synod/general-synod-election-2015/general-synod-hustings-2015/hustings-q-a—laity for other candidates’ answers. 

Paper delivered at the Elmbridge Multi-Faith Forum, 29th September 2015
I have been asked to talk about this very interesting question, and to set out a Christian perspective on it.
I’m not going to talk in a completely unguided way, if you like, setting out all aspects of freedom of expression, because it seems to me that the context of this meeting is limited to religious belief, the various different religious beliefs, and further that we are examining this question in the light of circumstances where it could be said that freedom of expression has been taken beyond the limits where it begins to offend religious beliefs, and specifically, religious beliefs about blasphemy.
I’m not going to talk in detail about the Human Rights Act and the various legislation restricting free speech, because there’s nothing specifically religious in it. Instead I want to concentrate on what Christianity has to say about freedom of expression.
The real focus in the discussion topic is what we think about blasphemy, or rather, people of one religion saying something publicly which would be blasphemous in another religion – say, the journalists of Charlie Hebdo publishing cartoons showing the Prophet Mohammed. 
As I understand things, simply showing a picture of the prophet is a form of blasphemy in Islam. Certainly the sort of derogatory cartoons which Charlie Hebdo specialises in – to be fair, against all religions, not just Islam – must be an example of the sort of thing we have in mind here.
There’s no doubt that Moslem people are offended. There’s also no doubt that in certain Moslem countries, the sort of freedom of expression enjoyed by Charlie Hebdo would be a criminal offence. So what is the Christian perspective?
First of all, of course, it’s trite to say that the third Commandment in the Ten Commandments given to Moses, recorded in Exodus 20 or Deuteronomy 5, is ‘Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain’: in other words, a prohibition against blasphemy. In that Jesus Christ said that he had come not to abolish the Law and the Prophets (Matt. 5:17), but to fulfil them, this is as much part of Christian belief as it is in the Jewish religion.
But apart from that, I don’t think Jesus said very much about freedom of speech. Of course, He was in general in favour of upholding the secular law – ‘render unto Caesar’ (Mark 12:17) – but otherwise, neither in Judaism nor in Christianity does there appear to be anything corresponding with Article 10 of the Human Rights Act.
Whereas the Human Rights Act upholds a right of freedom of expression, subject to certain limitations, in Judaism and Christianity there is no positive right to freedom of speech, but rather only a prohibition on blasphemy.
I think there is perhaps a slightly difficult area which is relevant to mention in an inter-faith context, which arises where people to some extent ‘appropriate’ God to themselves. They talk about ‘my’ God and ‘your’ God and so on, rather than a God who is a universal creator and sustainer of life.
There is a difficult passage in St John’s gospel (John 14:6) – ‘No-one comes to the Father except through me’ – where on the face of it, Jesus is saying that Christianity is in effect the only authentic religion. From that, there could be an argument that, for example, to lampoon Mohammed is not blasphemous, because Christians might not necessarily believe that Mohammed had any special status or divinity about him.
There are a couple of interesting passages which bear on this, where Jesus is talking about whether or not Christians have to uphold Jewish rules on eating certain foods. To this day, we all know about the Jewish prohibition on eating pork, for example. But Jesus gives Christians permission not to feel obliged to uphold the Jewish customs. 
St Paul, in his letter to the Romans, deals with a refinement of this, where the question arises whether or not it is permitted to eat food which has been cooked as part of a sacrifice to a pagan god. This raises exactly the sort of issues which I expect we will debate tonight. 
In theory, if you eat meat which has been part of a sacrifice to a god that you don’t believe in, the fact that the food has come from the altar shouldn’t bother you at all. But of course, the act of your eating it might well give offence to the people who do believe in the god whose altar bore the sacrifice.
There is a glorious line in Romans 14: ‘One man will have faith enough to eat all kinds of food, while a weaker man eats only vegetables.’ (NEB). Is this St Paul making a slighting reference to vegetarians?
No. The point he is making is that Christians should not belittle, look down on, people whose beliefs lead them to behave slightly differently from themselves. So St Paul certainly teaches that Christians should have respect for people of other faiths; that Jesus’ teaching of love requires us not to offend other people if we can help it.
I suppose that the Christian position comes down ultimately to Jesus’ two main commandments, to love God and to love one’s neighbour. The greatest commandment, in Judaism and in Christianity, and I think also in Islam, is to love God: and that obviously entails not blaspheming.
But also, the second great commandment that Jesus gave, was to love our neighbour as ourself. Therefore, even if the god that somebody else believes in is not the God we believe in, our care for our neighbour, our love for our neighbour, should entail that we try to avoid doing anything which might be construed as blasphemous in that other person’s system of belief.
I am somewhat exercised that this train of reasoning has brought me to at least the beginnings of a feeling that Charlie Hebdo was perhaps going further than true Christian belief would allow us to go, and that they were going outside the scope of Jesus’ teaching.
This is some way away from what Voltaire is supposed to have said, namely, ‘I disapprove of what you say: but I will defend to the death your right to say it.’ If Voltaire did write that, I have to conclude, sadly, that he didn’t get his inspiration from the Bible.

Sermon for Mattins at Harvest Festival, 20th September 2015James 3:13-4:3,7-8
I don’t know whether a modern farmer ever has time to think at all about what I still think of as the miracle of life. Leaving aside my own, rather hopeless, gardening experiments, why is it that, if you have some good seeds and the right soil to plant them in, those seeds will germinate, will spring up and live?
St Paul said, ‘I have planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the increase.’ (1 Corinthians 3:6). It’s not the work of our eminent seed producers at Tozers down the road at Pyports, and it’s not the knowledge and experience of the farmers who use those seeds, that make a seed spring to life.
That spark of life is a creation process, which goes on every minute of every day in every place. I’m not sure that it qualifies for the description ‘creatio ex nihilo’, creation out of nothing, but it’s certainly an apparent hiatus in the process of evolution. There does seem to be a need for a life-giving force. I’m certainly happy to believe that it must be God at work.
But if we move away from plant life and think about our human world, again, there is clearly a birth process, a moment when, even in what looks ostensibly as having been an all-physical, all-material creation, an embryo suddenly springs to life and grows into a baby. It is said that a successful fertilisation has taken place. But what makes that particular sperm find that particular egg at that particular time, and what gives the spark of life to their coming together? It’s not something that modern science has been able to shed much light on. Again, I’m happy to accept the idea that it is God the creator at work.
Well, so far, so good; we are celebrating today and giving God thanks for our abundance of food. We are only indirectly connected with the farmers of the world, mainly through Waitrose and Sainsbury’s, and sometimes Lidl or Tesco. But it is right that we should give thanks to God for creating and sustaining the agricultural crops which nourish us and keep us alive.
Harvest Festival is an idea which goes back even earlier than Christianity, but that doesn’t make it any less Christian. The pagans gave thanks to their gods, that they recognised as the ultimate creators. We give thanks to our God in the same way, but as Christians we do it acknowledging that our God has been revealed to us in the person of Jesus Christ.
But what happens when it’s not a seed, not an embryo, that we’re talking about, but instead an organisation, a whole way of life, which provides fellowship and support to all its members? I’m talking about the church.
On Thursday I went to the ‘hustings’ at Guildford Cathedral at which the 14 candidates for the four places to represent Guildford Diocese in the House of Laity at General Synod answered questions from the electors, in an intense session, which lasted two hours from 7.30 to 9.30. I should be open and mention to you that, if you didn’t already know this, I am in fact one of those 14 candidates.
Obviously this is not the time or place to go into the detail of what General Synod does, or the various propositions and arguments put forward by the various candidates, including me. The electors are the members of each deanery synod – so in this church, if you are a member of Deanery Synod, then you are an elector.
What I wanted to draw out in this sermon was that the Church of England, and the General Synod as the parliament of the Church, has identified that growth, or revival or renewal, is something which the Church urgently needs. Indeed there are some pessimistic voices among the bishops who are saying that, unless the Church of England grows and revives, it will be extinct in 50 years.
Some of the questions on Thursday night focussed on the question of renewal and the need to grow. ‘How can the General Synod be an agent for change, and how would you do it?’ was the first question which we had to answer.
I had a rather uneasy feeling, partly of course because I only had a couple of minutes to prepare my answer, and partly because I’m not sure whether a relentless search for change, by itself, is what the Church needs. My reflections on harvest, on new life coming into being and growing, made me feel that the spark of life, which God gives, must be at the heart of things.
How is that spark of new life to keep on coming to our church? Does it have to embrace change all the time, or can it be simply a place of faithful worship and good works, looking to God to ‘give the increase’, to use the language of St Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians?
So it’s very apt that we should have a passage from the Letter of James as our first lesson this morning. The Letter of James is very short. It’s only got five chapters, and in my big Bible it only takes up four pages. But it is a really practical letter to the early church; it could still apply to many issues which we face in church today. Churchwardens might usefully be given it to read when they are first appointed!
The Letter of James may have been written as early as the time of the meeting of the apostles in Jerusalem which agreed that Christianity was for Gentiles as much as for Jews, which was in 48AD, so only a relatively short time after the date of the crucifixion of Jesus in, say, 33AD. In Acts chapter 15 James sums up the argument and shows how it would be in accordance with the Jewish scripture for Gentiles to become part of the Christian community.
He quotes Isaiah 43:
Behold, I will do a new thing; Now it shall spring forth; Shall ye not know it? I will even make a way in the wilderness,  And rivers in the desert. … Because I give waters in the wilderness  And rivers in the desert,  To give drink to my people, my chosen. .. This people have I formed for myself;  They shall shew forth my praise. But thou hast not called upon me, O Jacob But thou hast been weary of me, O Israel. (Isaiah 43:19-22)

James’ letter has all sorts of practical advice for the new church. Most importantly, it does seem to some extent to modify the teaching – from the same era – in St Paul’s letters, in particular St Paul’s emphasis on ‘justification by faith’. Salvation of one’s soul was given, simply by faith, rather than earned by doing good works.

James is very clear that ‘faith without works is dead.’ Look at chapter 3, beginning at verse 14.
What doth it profit, my brethren, though a man say he hath faith, and have not works? Can faith save him?

If a brother or sister be naked and destitute of daily food, and one of you say unto them, Depart in peace, be ye warmed and filled; notwithstanding he give them not those things which are needful to the body, what doth it profit? Even so faith, if it hath not works, is dead, …

This is very much practical religious instruction. There’s nothing in James’ letter about growing the church. It’s all about what the people in the early church should do in order to conform with God’s law. There are echoes of what Jesus says in our second lesson, about the last being first, and the little child being as important as God himself.

James is very tough on rich people, pointing out that their wealth may be only temporary, and certainly of little value in the context of the Final Judgement. James has always been a popular piece of Scripture in poor and developing countries. It’s probably got also a special relevance, as a challenge, for those of us who are fortunate and live in rich countries and in rich parts of those countries.

As we do. James challenges us always to look for that ‘brother or sister who is naked and destitute of daily food’, and to do something to help them. That’s what we’re trying to do today, with our Harvest Festival gifts.

My feeling is that, if our Church is a place where people have faith, where that faith inspires them to good works, then God will give the increase. Of course, for the work of the harvest to be light work, it needs many workers. But I do suggest that the harvest itself is the real priority, not just assembling a bigger workforce

Sermon for Evensong on the Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity, 13th September 2015

Exodus 18:13-26; Matthew 7:1-14 
Sometimes you open the newspaper and, as you skim the headlines, you mentally tick off what they say – but, precisely because you feel sure you know what the article is going to say, you don’t bother to read it. For the same sort of reasons, I’m not going to give you a sermon about refugees, or about Syria, or even about Jeremy Corbyn, tonight. You know what I believe about these topics. It’s not that they aren’t very important. But you know what I might say about them. Our Bible lessons tonight have signposted us into a different area.
We tend to think that being too busy is a contemporary disease. In the old days, we might think, life moved at a slower pace. People had more time to think; a better quality of life. 
And then we read this passage from the Book of Exodus – something which is getting on for 3,000 years old – and Moses’ father-in-law Jethro is tackling Moses about organising his time better. He is just too busy. The solution is for Moses to delegate: he should just concentrate on the really difficult cases and leave the mundane disputes for his assistants to decide. Because the business, ‘busyness’, say, is all in the context of being a judge.
Being a judge was a very important thing in ancient Israel. You’ll recall that there is a section of their history recounted in the Book of Judges. The famous judge Deborah, for example. The judges were also the leaders, were kings and queens. They had a double function. The secular jurisdiction, settling disputes between the people, and also, because this was Israel, God’s chosen people, the judges were there to steer the people towards obedience to the One True God, and to steer them away from worshipping the false gods, the Baals, that the Canaanites worshipped.
It might seem quite an odd idea to us, that the most important person in society should be a judge. The Book of Judges is, in almost all respects, a story of the various kings of Israel, how one succeeded another: all the various stories, Samson and Delilah, the battles with the Amalekites, Sodom and Gomorrah: all the highlights of the Israelites’ history. 
In each case the hero of the hour, the king, tackled the unbelief of the Israelites and their tendency to chase after false gods, put them straight, and back into a relationship with the One True God, and then, when you would expect, perhaps, the historical account to say, ‘He reigned – for example, like the Queen – for so many years’, or you might hear that the king had given his name to some magnificent new building, the King Jephtha Memorial Stadium, or something, no, that’s not how the story went.
In the Book of Judges, when a king was established in his new reign, what he did was he judged the people: and it’s recorded in each king’s case how many years he did this judging. It reads almost as though you could substitute the word ‘ruled’ for ‘judged’, but I think that the special significance of the judging was that the main purpose of it was to keep the people faithful to the true religion, the worship of the One True God, and not to go after following other, false, gods.
A rather different type of judging from weighing up the merits of one case against another; but as we see in the first lesson, there certainly was conventional judging involved: so much of it that Moses really needed an assistant. Growing good judges is something which has come to be one of the attributes of the Jewish people over the years. Today, four out of the eleven Supreme Court judges (in what used to be the judicial committee of the House of Lords) are Jewish. There is a terrific judicial tradition in Judaism: in Jewish history, to be a judge is as important as, and sometimes is the same thing as, being a king.
We don’t get much information in our lessons today about how the judges operated or what they were deciding; what sort of disputes, what sort of cases they were involved in. The overriding duty was to uphold the law of Moses, to maintain the most important principle, ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart,’ and so on; the Shema Israel. The judge is there to judge people’s conduct, to make sure that it complies with the standard, that they maintain their allegiance to the One True God rather than getting sidetracked and following false gods. 
We don’t really have judges that do that sort of thing today. We might say, as preachers in the pulpit, or as good faithful people in the pews, that there are apparently false gods around. People are effectively worshipping other things than God: money, and status, and celebrity, and so on.
But these days there is nobody in an authoritative position, like a judge, who is going to condemn it. Indeed, I think modern people would be pretty resistant to the idea that as a matter of law, somebody could condemn what they had chosen freely for themselves, however misguidedly, as their life-styles.

What about Jesus? What did He say about judging? What we see, in our New Testament lesson, is that on the face of it, Jesus went against the great Jewish judicial tradition. Don’t do it, He said. By whatever standards you mete out justice, you yourselves will be condemned.
One difference, between what the Old Testament judges were doing and what Jesus was talking about, was that the word ‘to judge’ can cover judging something, deciding between the relative merits of two different arguments, and assessing the worth of a person. Judging what someone is as opposed to what they do. ‘I think that so-and-so is rubbish’ is the sort of judging which Jesus is against. Choosing whether one person’s argument is to be preferred as against another argument, is what Moses was doing.
In St Luke’s gospel chapter 18 Jesus brings up the question of judging again, in his parable of the Unjust Judge. A widow keeps on badgering the judge to give her judgment in her favour, and eventually he gives in:
And there was a widow in that city; and she came unto him, saying, Avenge me of mine adversary.

And he would not for a while: but afterward he said within himself, Though I fear not God, nor regard man;

Yet because this widow troubleth me, I will avenge her, lest by her continual coming she weary me. (Luke 18:3-5)
‘Avenge’ is translated as ‘give justice to’ in modern Bible translations (such as the NRSV). You can see the wealth of possible meanings this topic of ‘justice’, and the exercise of judging, can have. ‘I demand justice’ often means, ‘I want a judgement in my favour’. It’s difficult to see why this judge is said to be ‘unjust’: literally, κριτής της αδικίας, judge of injustice. 
He is said to be a judge who had no fear of man or God. ‘No fear of man’ implies impartiality, a good thing in a judge. ‘No fear of God’ might imply a lack of principle, in a Jewish context where a judge had to assess the merits of a case against the Law of Moses, that is, the Law of God given to Moses. Today we would say, with Lord Denning, ‘Be ye ever so high, the law is above you’: we speak of, we revere, the rule of law. And that law is man-made: although it may well coincide with the law of Moses. Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets.
Jesus draws the same lesson from the parable of the Unjust Judge as he does in our lesson from St Matthew. Ask, and it shall be given to you – just as the widow found out, by being persistent. But there’s no suggestion that she received a judgement which she didn’t deserve – or to put it another way, there is no reason to think that she received a judgement which was not justified on the merits of the case.
Perhaps the use of the word ‘avenge’ in the King James Version in Luke 18 gives a clue. Remember what St Paul wrote in his letter to the Romans, quoting Deuteronomy: 
Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord. (Romans 12:19)
One of the earliest functions of a system of justice was to replace private vendettas. If you had suffered injury or loss, instead of seeking revenge, you sought a remedy in court.
But who is qualified to be a judge? Are you condemning one of parties because they have a slight fault, that you yourself have in spades? I think we are meant to draw the conclusion that, at least where questions of human worth are concerned, only the ‘Judge Eternal, throned in splendour’ can take the case. 
But what about those current concerns? What about refugees, or whether to bomb in Syria, or even whether Jeremy Corbyn is a Good Thing? Who is qualified to judge? And what would the cases for and against say? And if you have managed to get that all in order, would these questions be ones for Moses himself, or for the Judge Eternal, or could you safely leave them to a magistrate?
Let us pray for God’s wisdom, and for the Holy Spirit to inspire and guide us, in all these matters which call for judgement, and for the best judges.

Sermon for the 12th Sunday after Trinity, 23rd August 2015
Hebrews 13:16 To do good and to distribute forget not; for with such sacrifices God is pleased.

‘To do good and to distribute’: surely that’s not what the second lesson said. The words from Hebrews in the NRSV were ‘To do good and to communicate…’ It’s not an exhortation to open Facebook or Twitter accounts. What does it mean to ‘communicate?’

The King James Version and NRSV both say, don’t forget to ‘communicate’; which is a puzzling word. In fact, the writer to the Hebrews wasn’t just talking about passing messages – he meant sharing, sharing in the wherewithal of daily life. The Greek is κοινωνία, ‘having in common, sharing’ – literally translated and understandable in Miles Coverdale’s Bible translation of 1533, from which all the Bible pieces quoted in the Book of Common Prayer come. So, ‘don’t forget the sharing’, literally, or ‘don’t blot out the sharing’.

The ‘sharing’ that I want to speak about tonight is food and money for the Foodbank. As some of you will have heard, I am just about to resume being the general manager of Cobham Area Foodbank. I hope you won’t groan inwardly if I suggest that now would be a good time to tell you how the Foodbank is doing, and to share with you some of the challenges which we face as we go into this autumn, rounding off our second year of operation.

In the first clear year, we provided approximately 1500 food parcels for people here in Cobham who could not afford to buy food. Just under half the people were hungry not because of changes in state benefits or because of unemployment. The biggest category, 40%, were people who are working, who are employed, but who don’t earn enough money to pay the rent and buy food as well.

The various Government cuts have made life more difficult for people at the poorer end of our society. If you are unlucky enough to be made redundant, and you were working in a low-paid job, so you weren’t able to build up any savings, you will find that you don’t get any unemployment benefit for at least two weeks, and in fact, often longer.

If you receive housing benefit, to enable you to afford to pay the rent, (because there are very few council houses left – for practical purposes, none in Elmbridge) – you will find that the Council has to apply the so-called ‘bedroom tax’. They assess how many bedrooms you’ve got, and if your children have grown up and moved away, you will find that they will say that, according to the rules for Housing Benefit, you should be occupying a smaller house: they will only provide the benefit for a house which is ‘appropriate’ for your needs, so a one-bedroom house or flat if you’re by yourself – but even if you wanted to move, there aren’t any available.

Whereas in the old days with council houses, rents were controlled and went up very slowly, now the market dictates the rent, and landlords can raise the rent of their properties to whatever level the market will bear.

So the tenants are squeezed. They have to pay more rent, and they get less benefit to set against it. If they are in a low-paid job, perhaps on the minimum wage and perhaps on a zero-hours contract, paid by the hour worked, but without a guarantee that they will actually get any work to do, they will soon run out of money.

They have to take a hard decision about whether to pay the rent or go and buy food for themselves and their families. In the old days, again, with a council house, the council was pretty understanding about rent arrears when people were in financial difficulty. Nowadays the majority of so-called social housing is let on an ‘Assured Shorthold Tenancy’, which gives the landlord very sweeping powers to evict tenants if they miss a couple of rent payments. So people regard paying the rent as being the top priority, and then find that they haven’t got enough money left to buy any food.

The exact mix of food that they get is planned by a nutritionist. Each food parcel is supposed to last a minimum of three days. We are very blessed by having a lot of very generous people in this area. We are definitely not short of food. Some sorts of food are in surplus – if our clients could live just on pasta and baked beans, we could probably feed them until this time next century!

But although we get lots and lots of food, which is great, we are struggling to get enough money to run the Foodbank.

We had a lot of generous grants to start the thing up – the Bishop of Guildford’s Foundation gave us £5,000, the churches, prominently including you here at St Mary’s, chipped in substantial sums, Elmbridge Borough Council gave £2,000, and even the government, despite their negative remarks about food banks, gave us £2,000 through the Cinnamon Trust. Cargill have very generously met the leasing cost of our van so far, but may not do so in future because they have moved to Weybridge.

There is still rent to pay on our warehouse, there are bills for fuel, insurance and repairs to be paid for; and we do sometimes have to go out and buy food. Because we’ve got a ton of pasta and baked beans, we haven’t necessarily got enough of certain other foods which we need in order to offer a balanced diet.

In round numbers, it costs about £20,000 a year to run Cobham Area Foodbank, and we have funding at the moment which will take us just about up to October. Thereafter, we will have to see if there’s a food bank for food banks! We might, for instance, have to do without our van. It would cost £12,000 plus VAT to buy it.

As the Foodbank turns into a mature operation, its philosophy is being reviewed and refined by the trustees. I’d be interested to know what you think we should do.

One trustee wrote recently, “[You say that the guiding principle should be], ‘what would Jesus do?’. He did not lift anyone out of poverty while here on earth, provided mass catering only once, did not heal or deliver everyone, but he talked about Kingdom, eternal life, relationship with God. He had all the resources of heaven, yet said ‘the poor you will have with you always'”.

In discussion with them, they argued that being a Christian didn’t mean you always had to help people – especially if their misfortune was to some extent of their own making. They argued that we should avoid creating a ‘culture of dependency’.

I have to say that I do feel that Scripture doesn’t support those sort of views. Just take the sentences of Scripture which are set out in the Prayer Book at the Offertory in the Communion service:

‘Whoso hath this world’s good, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him?’ 1 St. John 3.

‘Give alms of thy goods, and never turn thy face from any poor man; and then the face of the Lord shall not be turned away from thee.’ Tobit 4.

‘Be merciful after thy power. If thou hast much, give plenteously; if thou hast little, do thy diligence gladly to give of that little; for so gatherest thou thyself a good reward in the day of necessity.’ Tobit 4.

‘He that hath pity upon the poor lendeth unto the Lord: and look, what he layeth out, it shall be paid him again.’ Proverbs 19.

‘Blessed be the man that provideth for the sick and needy: the Lord shall deliver him in the time of trouble.’ Psalms 41.

But what about the point that some people have brought their trouble on themselves? For instance, what if people are hungry because they have made ‘bad life choices’ as someone has inelegantly described it? What if they have taken out a Sky Sports subscription when there’s barely enough to pay the rent?

A common reason for people asking for a food voucher is that they have been ‘sanctioned’ by the Jobcentre. They have not submitted enough job applications, or they have failed to attend a meeting. If so, their benefits are docked for a period – leaving them destitute.

There was a shameful story recently about some adverts placed by the Dept for Work and Pensions which apparently described two people, ‘Sarah’ and ‘Zac’, who had suffered sanctions but who were saying that it had been beneficial to them in the long run: they had followed advice or improved in some other way and had got themselves out of dependency. The only problem was that the DWP had made the stories up. There were no real ‘happy’ claimants who lost benefits. I strongly suspect that such sanctions almost never help the poor people concerned. [See http://gu.com/p/4bjv5%5D

Of course the Foodbank would never turn people away who have been ‘sanctioned’ in this way, even if it were true that they had been sanctioned for a good cause. Indeed, I would argue that we are obliged as Christians to treat generously even a situation where someone almost wilfully refuses to do the right thing.

We do know of cases where someone who is getting out of debt, being counselled by Christians Against Poverty, suddenly veers off the track and takes out a Sky TV subscription. And then asks for a food voucher. Well then, what?

Again, I think that Scripture tells us to be generous. Think of the Parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11f) – sometimes called the parable of the Compassionate Father. The prodigal son is hungry because of the way he has dissipated his inheritance. It’s entirely his own fault. But Jesus clearly says that his father was right to be compassionate, to forgive him, to welcome him back. The brother who complains about this stands for those people who would not help people who have somehow caused their own misfortune, whatever it is. Jesus says they are wrong.

And finally, of course, if you were still in any doubt whether Jesus wanted us always to feed the hungry and clothe the inadequately dressed, remember the wonderful picture of the Last Judgement in Matt. 25.

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

We should be guided accordingly. I hope you agree, and that you will continue to support us in our work.

Sermon for Mattins on the 11th Sunday after Trinity, 16th August 2015
John 6:51-58

‘Whoso eatest my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day.’ (v.54)

‘He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him.’ (v. 56)

You might be a bit surprised to have this lesson at Mattins – you might think that we’ve got things mixed up and that this is more appropriate as a lesson at a communion service.

But I think that there is merit in our stepping back and looking carefully at exactly what it is we are doing when we receive Holy Communion, and in reflecting on it. That’s what I want to do now.

When he wrote the Book of Common Prayer first in 1549, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer was heavily influenced by the Reformation, by the ideas of Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, Bucer and others on the Continent, whose ideas had become known in Cambridge, where Cranmer had become a don following his MA degree in 1515.

Then Cranmer was exposed directly to the Continental reformers when he went round Europe visiting theologians in order to try to construct arguments – theological arguments – for Henry VIII’s divorce. By the time he came to draft the Book of Common Prayer a dozen years later, he was a convinced Protestant, full of the ideas of the Reformation. He wasn’t so successful with his task for Henry VIII.

One of the important battlegrounds of the Reformation concerned the Lord’s Supper, Holy Communion. What is actually happening when we receive Holy Communion? Are the Roman Catholics right in saying that somehow the Holy Spirit comes down on the bread and the wine, making them into, transforming them into, the actual body and blood of Christ?

This process is called Transubstantiation, which means, becoming a different substance. If you want to see what Cranmer thought about this, look in the back of your little blue Prayer Book and turn to page 623, to Article XXVIII of the 39 Articles of Religion:

‘The Supper of the Lord is not only a sign of the love that Christians ought to have among themselves one to another; but rather is a sacrament of our redemption by Christ’s death: insomuch that such as rightly, worthily and with faith, receive the same, the bread which we break is a partaking of the body of Christ; and likewise the Cup of Blessing is a partaking of the blood of Christ.

Transubstantiation (or the change of the substance of bread and wine) in the Supper of the Lord, cannot be proved by holy writ; but is repugnant to the plain words of scripture, overthroweth the nature of a sacrament, and hath given occasion to many superstitions.

The body of Christ is given, taken, and eaten, in the Supper only after an heavenly and spiritual manner. And the mean whereby the body of Christ is received and eaten in the Supper is faith.’

The mediaeval view, which the Roman Catholics have carried on with, followed the writings of some of the early Christian Fathers: the Lateran Council, 1215, adopted what Cyril of Jerusalem had written in 348, to the effect that the Holy Spirit made the bread Christ’s body, and the wine, Christ’s blood.

We should remember that, as well as the words of Jesus quoted in St John’s Gospel in our lesson today, there is also the story of the Last Supper in the Synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke.

‘Jesus took bread, and blessed, and brake it, and gave it to them, and said, Take, eat: this is my body. And he took the cup, and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them; …. And he said unto them, This is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many.’

And there is also the description in 1 Corinthians 11. So much for Transubstantiation being contrary to ‘the plain words of scripture’!

On the face of things, it does look as though Christianity even involves at least symbolic cannibalism – which was the accusation which the Roman emperor Nero used against the Christians, as reported by the Roman historian Tacitus.[Annals, 15:44 – see http://tinyurl.com/otsupqf%5D

In the Catholic ideas was the thought that, if indeed the bread and the wine turned into the actual body and blood of Christ, then the bread and wine were themselves very special and perhaps worthy of worship. If they were Jesus’ flesh and His blood, then they should be objects of veneration in themselves. If you visit a major Catholic church or cathedral, you’ll find ‘relics’, saints’ bones or other body parts, which are venerated: they are supposed to have the Holy Spirit in them, and therefore, they can almost be worshipped themselves.

The Reformers didn’t believe in relics. The other thing that that they, and Cranmer, were unhappy about in the traditional ideas of the Mass, was what the Mass, Holy Communion, was intended for. The practice had grown up that the Mass was itself a sort of sacrifice. So if you offered a Mass for the souls of the dead, or to obtain some cure or other benefit for someone alive, it stood for a very primitive and literal form of religion which was really only superstition.

But Cranmer and the reformers objected to this, on the basis that the only ‘sacrifice’ in Christianity was, is, Christ’s sacrifice of Himself on the cross: that He obtained salvation for everyone through His sacrifice. There is nothing that we can do, in order to be saved, except by having faith. So saying special masses for people is out; a Requiem Mass was not good theology if the worshippers believed that they were in some way giving a present to God or making a sacrifice, in return for which He would look favourably on them.

In the Prayer of Consecration in the communion service, if we use the Book of Common Prayer, we say

‘Almighty God our Heavenly Father, who of thy tender mercy didst give thine only Son Jesus Christ to suffer death upon the cross for our redemption; who made there (by his one oblation of himself, once offered) a full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction, for the sins of the whole world …’

The service goes against the idea, that you are in some sense ‘bribing’ God, giving Him something, making a sacrifice in His favour. That had turned into a rather shabby set of superstitions, and even worse, into a sort of trade, whereby the church sold masses for the dead and for the sick, sold them for a price. That was one of Martin Luther’s main targets.

Well, you can spend a lot of time going through history books of the Reformation researching this topic, whether in the Eucharist, in the Lord’s Supper, there is a ‘Real Presence’ of Jesus in the bread and wine; our tradition in the Church of England comes down from what Thomas Cranmer wrote in the sixteenth century. He wrote that ‘spiritual eating is with the heart, and not with the teeth’ [Thomas Cranmer, 1550, A Defence of the true and Catholic doctrine of the sacrament of the body and blood of our saviour Christ, quoted in MacCulloch, D., 1996,Thomas Cranmer, a Life: New Haven and London, Yale University Press, p464], so, fortunately, there is no actual or symbolic cannibalism involved.

I wonder whether today we really think about this. What does taking Holy Communion do? Are we still divided from the Roman Catholics here? This is, after all, a mystery, a sacrament, an ‘outward and visible sign’ of an inner, spiritual reality. The minister will say, as the bread and wine are distributed,

‘The body of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was given for thee, preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting life’.

Surely that is the language of Transubstantiation. The words seem to say that you are eating and drinking the actual body and blood of Christ. So a Catholic would be happy with that.

Indeed, if you use the Common Worship service, (the more modern words), as we usually do at 10 o’clock, all the minister or the server usually says is, ‘The body of Christ’, and ‘The blood of Christ’. This is it, the very thing.

But if you use the full words of administration, either in traditional or modern form (‘you’ instead of ‘thee’), the second part is,

‘Take and eat this, in remembrance that Christ died for you, and feed on him in your heart by faith with thanksgiving.’

Remember, the ‘spiritual eating is with the heart, and not with the teeth’. In receiving Holy Communion, even without being cannibals, we are receiving Jesus into us, internalising Him. As we say in the Prayer of Humble Access, ‘We do not presume to come to this thy table, ….’ and so on, ‘Grant us so to eat the flesh of thy dear Son Jesus Christ, and to drink His blood, that our sinful bodies may be made clean by His body, and our souls washed by His most precious blood, and that we may evermore dwell in Him, and he in us.’

‘That we may evermore dwell in Him, and he in us’. It’s not a literal business. We aren’t literally eating human flesh and drinking blood, but it is a spiritual consumption. It’s a metaphor, a sacrament, an ‘outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.’

I think that there is also the idea of a difference between bodies and souls, that there is a physical world and a spiritual world, that the body and blood of Christ in the communion are spiritual things, not physical ones.

That’s all good. But what if some of our fellow Christians – for instance the Roman Catholics – what if they still believe that the body and blood of Christ has come in them through the Eucharist, in a real sense? After all, St Paul often writes in his letters about being ‘in Christ’, meaning that Christ was in him.

I think that now, 500 years after the Reformation, we needn’t be quite so fierce as Cranmer was in the 39 Articles. Even as a metaphor, to celebrate the Lord’s Supper is to do something very significant and powerful. We are ‘in Christ’ as we receive the bread and the wine. What a wonderful entrance ticket that is – free admission to heaven!

When we are ‘in Christ’ we will be like the Ephesians to whom St Paul wrote. We are not to get drunk, but ‘be filled with the Spirit; speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord.'[Eph. 5:18-19]

Let us pray that, when we receive the bread and wine in the Lord’s Supper, that the body and blood of Christ will be real to us, will be present: a present help in times of trouble. A real presence.

Sermon for Mattins on the Seventh Sunday after Trinity, 19th July 2015
Ephesians 2:11-end, Mark 6:30-34, 53-end

You’ll have to excuse the Welsh flavour of my sermon today. I’ve just come back from a very happy couple of days being with my younger daughter Alice in Cardiff, as she collected her M.B/B.Ch degree and became Dr Alice.

About 200 happy young people trooped across the stage at St David’s Hall to shake the Vice Chancellor’s hand. Soon most of them will be taking up a junior doctor’s post – what used to be called a ‘junior houseman’, and is now known as an ‘F1 (Foundation Year 1) Doctor’. They all take up their new posts, and the doctors they replace move up the tree, on or about 1st August.

Someone rather unworthily has said that, if you’re going to be in a car crash, try to avoid 1st August: give the new doctors a bit of time to settle in! More seriously, I know from my older daughter Emma, who is also a hospital doctor, that when they look at their new work schedules, these new doctors will all be working quite often over the weekends, as will their supervising consultants, never mind what the Health Secretary says.

So this was the class of 2015 at Cardiff University Medical School, and we were in the Welsh capital to join in the jollifications. I have always liked going to Wales. When we were little, we had holidays in North Wales, in Rhyl and the Lleyn Peninsula, in Abersoch. Wales had the Festiniog Railway, the Talyllyn – heaven, for boys, of all ages – and sheep. Sheep are very Welsh.

I remember that we sometimes drove over the Horseshoe Pass near Llangollen in Snowdonia. Dad’s Morris Minor bumped over a cattle grid at the beginning and end of the pass: in between, the animals could roam about freely, and there were no walls or fences to keep them off the road. And it was mainly sheep. You had to drive carefully, as they wandered about all over the place.

If you stopped in one of the lay-bys to admire the view, the sheep came up to inspect you – and if you seemed to be friendly, they would climb into the car! I’ve never been so close to a sheep, before or since. When you look at them close up, I think they look very weird – almost prehistoric. A sheep’s face hasn’t changed much since the time of the dinosaurs, and indeed, if you use a bit of imagination, a sheep’s head does look rather dinosaur-like.

And I remember my folks weren’t that keen on sheep coming into Dad’s car. Perfectly all right to have our friends’ dog in the car, or our own cat, if we needed to take her to the PDSA for her vaccinations. But not a strange – a very strange – sheep. The sheep were too strange, too alien. They had to be gently steered away.

This Sunday has a rather sheepy flavour to it. The people milling around and following after Jesus, in St Mark’s gospel story today, were like sheep without a shepherd. ‘Jesus … was moved with compassion toward them, because they were as sheep not having a shepherd’ (Mark 6:34).

Our hymns have sheep and shepherds in them: echoes of Psalm 23,

The Lord my pasture shall prepare,
and feed me with a shepherd’s care;

and

The King of love my shepherd is.

The lesson from St Paul’s letter to the Ephesians has the idea of bringing the sheep into the fold: ”But now in Christ Jesus ye who sometimes were far off are made nigh …’

Do you remember the lovely prayer after Communion which we sometimes use?

Father of all,
we give you thanks and praise,
that when we were still far off
you met us in your Son and brought us home.
[Common Worship, Services and Prayers for the Church of England, (2000), London, Church House Publishing, p265]

There’s an echo in that of the parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11f) too. ‘But now in Christ Jesus ye who sometimes were far off are made nigh …’

There’s a sense of being ‘far off’ in the strangeness of the sheep when you get close to them. St Paul – or his follower who wrote in the same style – the author of the Letter to the Ephesians – points to the way that the Gentiles – those people who were not Jewish, like the original Christians, and indeed like Christ himself – those Gentiles who were attracted to Jesus and to his followers – were used to being excluded by the Jews, kept out. They were those rather weird-looking sheep which you had to keep out of Dad’s car.

But Jesus had broken down the boundaries: He ‘hath broken down the middle wall of partition between us.’ St Paul’s mission was not to the Jews, but to the Gentiles, to people like us. In Biblical terms, we are Gentiles. If Jesus hadn’t preached reconciliation and love, and if Paul hadn’t reinforced that message in his preaching, we wouldn’t have been able to become Christians.

The point is, that it doesn’t matter how strange you might look, or how alien. Jesus is just as much for the strange ones, for those prehistoric-looking sheep, as He is for us smart, sleek ones. So the prayer goes on:

‘May we who share Christ’s body live his risen life;
we who drink his cup bring life to others;
we whom the Spirit lights give light to the world.’

So next time we’re tempted to put someone down or ignore them, because they’re too alien, too different – too much like the sheep which I thought of as weird and prehistoric-looking – let us remember how Jesus welcomed them, even though He and his disciples were tired from their missionary work. ‘He had compassion on them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd.’

We can learn a useful lesson about the love of God from thinking about sheep, and the good shepherd. Let us pray:

‘Keep us firm in the hope you have set before us,
so we and all your children shall be free,
and the whole earth live to praise your name.’