Bible readings: see https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=592871225

What must it feel like to be wrongly, unjustly, accused? What must Andrew Malkinson have felt as he was condemned for a terrible crime and then, no doubt, treated in prison, for 17 years, as though he had done that terrible crime, a terrible rape? What must it have felt like to be one of the poor postmasters and postmistresses accused of stealing from the till, sometimes thousands and thousands of pounds? Being up against a computer system – you know, computers do all our sums today – because they never get things wrong, do they? So all the people who used to come into your post office start to look at you differently – especially if you are not a white person, or if you have come from another country. ‘The till is short by £20,000.’ Have you got £20,000 saved up so you can make up the shortfall? How can you be sure that it isn’t going to happen again even if you do make up the shortage now? Think of the shame. What exactly am I supposed to have done wrong? “Call and I will answer; let me speak and I will let you reply to me. How many are my iniquities and my sins? Let me know my transgressions and my sin.“ It’s what Job was saying.

Job was a good man with a happy family, prosperous. Everybody liked him and respected him, but in heaven, Satan said to God, “Even though Job is a good man, and he worships you, and does everything that you command him to do, I can make him curse you.” God said that he didn’t think that would be the case, but Job would remain faithful, and he allowed Satan to put Job to the test. Terrible things happened to Job. He suffered from a plague of boils all over his skin. He lost his wealth. He lost his family. But he still sent his prayers, and looked to the Lord to save him. His three friends, Job’s ‘comforters’, came along, and they didn’t really give him any comfort, they didn’t show themselves to be real friends, because they justified all the terrible things that had happened to Job, on the grounds that he had sinned, he had brought his misfortune on himself. But still, he knew he was innocent and he clung on to his trust in God.

Job’s prayer, that we had as our first lesson, must be the sort of thing that you would expect that someone in Andrew Malkinson or any of the postmasters’, positions would be likely to say, if they were praying for relief from their terrible suffering, relief from the wrongful accusations.

How could a good, kindly, God allow such things to happen? That’s what the book of Job is all about. Ultimately, God is there for Job and Job is rescued from all his trials and troubles, his prayers are answered. But you must know that the book of Job is not a history book. It isn’t a story of something that actually happened, like the story of Andrew Malkinson or the postmasters. It’s a roman à clef, a story with a purpose.

The letter to the Hebrews, too, isn’t a news report, or a bulletin ‘From Our Own Correspondent’. It’s supposed to have been written by St Paul, but scholars think that it probably wasn’t, although it was written by someone who wrote just as well as St Paul, perhaps someone who had learned from him. The letter to the Hebrews is really an extended sermon. The idea is that it goes through a lot of biblical references, relating them to current life and the life of Jesus, and then exhorting the people that have been written to, to live according to the teachings which had been illustrated. It does that in 13 chapters. We are looking at the second chapter, and you might well think that this is another take on the issues which the book of Job addresses. It’s not about the suffering of one man as a result of the devil and how or whether God allows that suffering to take place, but the Letter to the Hebrews is about Jesus, who was divine, but who was at the same time fully human. We have this slightly mysterious reference to angels, a quote from Psalm 8,

What are human beings that you are mindful of them, or mortals that you care for them?

You have made them for a little while lower than the angels,

And then the letter goes on to say that Jesus, who also for a little while was made lower than the angels, so he was fully human, is now crowned with glory and honour, because he died: ‘so that by the grace of God, he might taste death for everyone.’

What an extraordinary thing to say: ‘…so, that by the grace of God, he might taste death for everyone’! You could probably settle in for at least an hour’s worth of theological explanation about that one sentence – but I hasten to reassure you that I’m not going to inflict it on you, even if I were capable of it!

But immediately, you’ll think that some of those words just don’t fit. How can God’s grace, which presumably is something nice, something welcome, something good and pleasant, involve ‘tasting death’ as though it was some kind of delicacy instead of actually being strung up in agony on the cross for three hours and dying? That doesn’t seem to me to be a tasting experience. What on earth is that all meant to signify? It’s bringing home the point that Jesus was a man just as much as he was divine. He was fully man, and as a man he was subject to mortality. As God, he was immortal, not bounded by space and time at all. He was there before the world began, if we can understand that: even with Stephen Hawking’s eleven different dimensions, I think it is really difficult. But at the end of his life, as a man, Jesus died, so in that sense, he tasted death. He had the same experience as a man. He was a man. But he was also divine. ‘This is my Son, the beloved’. So I suppose we can say that the grace of God there, in Jesus’ death, is the permission of God, God allowing it to happen.

That grace is also the grace, the gift, referred to in St John’s Gospel chapter 3, verse 16, for ‘God, so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.’ The ultimate gift: the ultimate grace.

You might think that God didn’t care for the world, that he didn’t care for us, if you look at all these terrible injustices: Andrew Malkinson, the postmasters, Windrush, all the natural disasters – how can we say that God is good and how can we say that God cares for us? As the letter to the Hebrew says, it is the fact of Jesus, what he represented, what he represents in our lives today. That is our assurance of faith. It is because God gave us his only son, and because Jesus rose again from the dead, that we can have the sure and certain hope of eternal life, of the resurrection to eternal life and the time to come.

I am very conscious of the fact that I’ve left a lot of loose ends. The idea of God ‘incarnate’, in the form of a man, is a huge topic, literally beyond our understanding. Some of the easy stuff, like angels, I think I can safely leave you to work out.

The name, ‘angel’, means a messenger; and we do pray sometimes for God’s holy angels to watch over us, keep an eye on us and look after us, perhaps when we are asleep.

In the letter to the Hebrews, it looks as though angels have some kind of status between human and divine. I’m pretty sure, though, that I’ve never actually met one and I’m not really sure what an angel would look like.

But on the other hand, just as we often pray as the people of God to be God’s eyes and ears and hands in his work on earth, so maybe in certain circumstances, we can be his angels too.

But then, back to this question why God allows there to be suffering, and if so, how we can square that with our understanding of him as a loving God. There’s this idea that somehow suffering is a good thing. St Paul said, in his letter to the Romans, chapter 5, ‘We glory in our suffering because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.’ Even so, Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane prayed not to be tested to destruction – ‘Take this cup away from me.’ Indeed in Jesus’s own prayer, the Lord’s Prayer, we say, ‘lead us not into temptation’, which is sometimes translated as the ‘time of trial’. Why would a loving God inflict something like that on us? Maybe we can understand suffering as being like the processes of evolution, the survival of the fittest, and not something actively willed upon us.

The other thing I haven’t really talked about is at the end of the passage in chapter 2 of Hebrews, where Jesus’s role as a priest is dealt with. A priest in ancient Israel was someone who stood between the people and God, who uniquely had the ability to be in the presence of God, without being destroyed in the process, and who made sacrifices to God as part of the worship. In the letter to the Hebrews the idea is that Jesus, as a priest of the order of Melchizedek, isn’t somehow separate from his congregation, but rather he is part of it. It is a priesthood of all believers. He is one of us.

The sacrifice mentioned, the atonement, is the Jewish idea of making a sacrifice to placate God, to make up for sins, and failures to follow God’s commandments. We need to think very hard what the letter to the Hebrews means when it says that Jesus was a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God ‘to make a sacrifice of atonement for the sins of the people’. Perhaps the answer is the next sentence. “Because he himself was tested by what he suffered, He is able to help those who are being tested.” So if we suffer, God suffers too, his shares our sufferings. ‘Tears and smiles like us he knew’.

Sermon for Evensong at All Saints Church, Penarth, on 18th August 2024

Hebrews 13.1-15 – see https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=592869244

‘Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers’. I love the idea of entertaining an angel ‘unawares’. ‘Be not forgetful to entertain strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares’. The letter to the Hebrews has some wonderful ideas in it. At Evensong last week we had heard about the ‘great cloud of witnesses’ – ‘since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses’. Hebrews is full of really encouraging teaching like that.

Let’s go back to showing hospitality to strangers. There’s a bit of alliteration in the Greek original. ‘Let mutual love continue’ is how it goes in our translation, and the word that they translate as ‘mutual love’ is ‘φιλαδέλφεια’, which isn’t really ‘mutual’ love but rather is brotherly love. Anyway it’s ‘φιλαδέλφεια,’ and hospitality to strangers is φιλοξενία: philadelphia and philoxenia go together,brotherly love and love of strangers. You must not just love your family, but also you should warm to strangers. In the King James Bible, it says that you should ‘entertain’ strangers, and in the Bible we are using here, [NRSV], to ‘show hospitality’ to them.

It’s still very topical as a message for today. These awful riots that have been going on are at least partly caused by people’s unwillingness to ‘entertain strangers’.

There is an expression, ‘people who look like me’, or ‘people who look like us’– and that does not mean overweight retired lawyers or ladies in their best hats for Ascot. People who ‘look like us’ are white people – or sometimes, Black people. That’s the hidden meaning. It is an expression which often goes with racism. There is a tendency not to welcome people who do not look like us.

It’s clear that, as Christians, we should entertain strangers. Jesus’s commandment to love your neighbour as yourself is clearly a commandment to love the stranger in your midst. It’s at the heart of the message of the parable of the Good Samaritan. Your neighbour is not necessarily somebody you know or somebody who looks like you.

But then there is this wonderful line in the letter to the Hebrews by way of explanation; you should show hospitality to strangers, because by doing that you may have entertained angels without knowing it.

Have you met an angel? When somebody does something really kind, we sometimes say, you are an angel. Theologians look at the Greek word in the New Testament, αγγελος, which is the same word as ‘angel’, and see that it means a messenger: a messenger from God. When the angel Gabriel came to see Mary to announce to her that she was to be the mother of God in Luke chapter 1, Mary spoke the words which we heard sung by the choir, Magnificat. ‘Tell out, my soul, the greatness of the Lord’, that lovely hymn, is a version of it. Bishop Timothy Dudley-Smith, who wrote it, has just passed away, at the age of 97.

The angel, the messenger, is in the Psalms, at Psalm 8. In that one we see how angels fit into the hierarchy of heaven.

‘What is man that you are mindful of him?

The son of man, that you should seek him out?

You have made him little lower than the angels.’

So angels are somewhere between us and God in the hierarchy of heaven. It might be difficult to work out what that means, but I don’t think we need to worry about taking it too literally.

There is another angel story in our first lesson, with Moses and the burning bush, where are the angel of the Lord appeared to Moses in a flame of fire, out of a bush.

When Moses turned aside to look to see why the bush was on fire without being burned up, God himself called to him out of the bush. It seems that both the angel and God were in the bush. Perhaps the explanation is that in Hebrew, the word used for ‘angel’ can also mean God himself.

This is what is called a theophany, an appearance of God, a revelation. The Israelites had cried for help, as they were suffering under their slavery to the Egyptians, and God heard their groaning. God remembered his covenant with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. A covenant is a contract. It is a solemn agreement. God took notice of the Israelites, and that’s when he appointed Moses to lead them out of slavery. Maybe in the context of the letter to the Hebrews, if you entertain an angel without knowing it, it might be more than an angel you look after.

Think of Jesus’ teaching about the final judgement at the end of Saint Matthew’s Gospel. When the son of man comes in his glory and all the angels with him, he will sit in state on his throne… He will separate mankind into two groups, as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats; and he will say to those on his right hand, you have my father’s blessing. Come, enter and possess the kingdom; for when I was hungry you gave me food; when thirsty, you gave me a drink; when I was a stranger you took me into your home. And the righteous people queried it. When did we do these things? And Jesus the king will answer, ‘Anything you did for one of my brothers here, however humble, you did for me.’ So maybe entertaining angels might just be entertaining the Lord himself. What a wonderful reason to do the right thing.

As some of you know, although I don’t think I had any angels in mind when I was doing it, I got into having refugees to stay in my spare room when I lived in Surrey; and I continued to do that when I came here to Penarth. There’s a charity called Refugees at Home who will match you up with a refugee or two, usually for a very short stay, maybe two or three weeks only.

My Jordanian Palestinian friend, who is still seeking asylum five years after he first requested it, was originally introduced to me by Refugees at Home – but in his case the two weeks originally planned stretched out nearly to 2 years!

He has become a firm friend. Although I am sure that he would be properly modest about thinking of himself as an angel, I did feel blessed by his company and by the things that I was able to learn from him – and indeed I continue to do so. He has become our friend here at All Saints too.

I do hope that in the aftermath of the riots our leaders will realise that it is important to say positively that we should always show hospitality to strangers. Immigrants are good for us, in all sorts of ways.

The NHS would probably grind to a complete halt were it not for the doctors and nurses who have come from abroad. Most of the curries that we enjoy are cooked by people who come from a small area of Bangladesh around the city of Sylhet, and only they really know how to make a chicken tikka masala, which is of course the British national dish these days. They don’t look like us; but once you’ve had the curry or the nurse has brought you your pills in the Heath [University Hospital Wales, Cardiff], you will know that you have been entertaining angels.

We need to do more of it. There is a great city in the United States which is the city of brotherly love, Philadelphia. Wouldn’t it be great if Penarth became the new Philadelphia and we entertained more strangers, more angels? We should pray the Compline prayer:

Visit this place, Lord we pray;

Drive far from it all the snares of the enemy;

May your holy angels dwell with us and guard us in peace.

See https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=591880348 for all the Lectionary readings for the ‘Third Service’, i.e. Mattins, or Morning Prayer, and the ‘Second Service’, Evensong, or Evening Prayer.

First Sermon: for Mattins at St Dochdwy’s Church, Llandough on 8th September 2024

Genocide and Vengeance on Earth: Smells and Bells in Heaven

Ecclesiasticus 27:30 – 28:9, Revelation 8:1-5.

Anger and wrath, these also are abominations,
   yet a sinner holds on to them.

‘Forgive your neighbour the wrong he has done, …

‘Does anyone harbour anger against another,
   and expect healing from the Lord?’

These sentences from our first lesson, which somewhat unusually we have taken from the Apocrypha today, the book called Ecclesiasticus, or the wisdom of Jesus son of Sirach, which is one of the books in the so-called ‘wisdom literature’ in the Bible, like Proverbs and the book which is actually called Wisdom.

The logic of the passage seems to be that you should not retaliate, or exact vengeance against, people who harm you, because if you do, when you meet your maker in heaven, you will be treated the same way. If you won’t forgive people, you won’t be forgiven by the Lord on the day of judgement.

‘Remember the end of your life, and set enmity aside; remember corruption and death, and be true to the commandments.’

And then if you’re wondering what would happen once you’re through the pearly gates, we have some lines from the book of Revelation as a New Testament lesson.

‘Another angel with a golden censer came and stood at the altar; he was given a great quantity of incense to offer with the prayers of all the saints on the golden altar that is before the throne. And the smoke of the incense, with the prayers of the saints, rose before God from the hand of the angel.’ You will see that in St John the Divine’s Revelation, the style of worship is definitely one of smells and bells!

But look – let’s just take half a pace back from this. I can elegantly expound on these two readings from the Bible and make some clever links and inferences from them, and give you a thoroughly inspiring message, I would hope. And you would go away thinking, yes, that’s fine. I’ve been inspired, perhaps, to forgive my enemies and I’ve had a glimpse of heaven.

There are people in Anglican and Roman Catholic churches all over the world, certainly wherever they use the Revised Common Lectionary – all getting something like the message that I have just given to you now. Don’t bear grudges, don’t try to retaliate all the time, forgive your neighbour.

And everybody will come out of church feeling good about that. What a great message: straight out of the Sermon on the Mount. Turn the other cheek. Not an eye for an eye. So it turns out that Jesus taught ideas about forgiveness and generosity, and the futility of going for anger and vengeance, which go back much earlier than Jesus himself. They were already in the wisdom literature, and Jesus preached his greatest sermon about them: but – why doesn’t anybody take any notice?

Just think of what’s happening in the Middle East today. The terrible genocide that is happening in Gaza. And it is genocide, if you respect the judgement of the International Court of Justice; although, the Israeli government refuses to accept its findings, despite having made a full case to the Court, presented by experienced top barristers. That is the view of the Court. Genocide is what is going on in Gaza. Genocide, albeit as a result of a terrible crime by Hamas against Israel.

And it’s noticeable that in all the actions that have gone on in and around the Holy Land, the devastation in Gaza, the attacks in the Lebanon on the northern border of Israel, and the killing of a Hamas leader in Iran, in all these cases, it is assumed that there will be retaliation. It is assumed that it will be an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. The argument about it is not about whether it’s okay to retaliate, but about how cataclysmically, how overwhelmingly, you can retaliate.

Maybe, just maybe, we in the church ought to be bolder in pointing out that what we stand for is Jesus’s message of love; and it isn’t a question of an eye for an eye or a tooth for a tooth. Why on earth have we not done this so far?

In the conflict in Gaza I suspect that, if you said to an Israeli, after the terrorist attack on 7th October, that they shouldn’t try to exact vengeance, I think you might have been met with an argument not about vengeance, but about self-defence.

The Israelis might say, ‘We are not retaliating against Hamas for any other reason than that, if we do not defend ourselves, they want to destroy us’. Although there is a history of pacifism in the history of Christianity, perhaps most notably in recent years among the Quakers, if we look at the last 2000 years, it does look as though the Sermon on the Mount has been modified, pretty thoroughly by the concept of the ‘just war’; which was originally a Roman concept, but then it was taken over by St Augustine of Hippo in the fourth and fifth centuries and then by Thomas Aquinas. The theory of the ‘just war’ has two strains to it, what can justify making war at all, and what is the just way actually to wage war.

According to the theory of the Just War, the use of force should be:

– a last resort, and should be

– proportionate to the evil remedied; it should

– expect to succeed; and it should contribute to

– a new state of peace.

If those conditions are not met, you should not go to war; and then the most important thing while you are conducting a war, is to protect the immunity of non-combatants.

Let’s apply that to the situation in Gaza.

– Is force a last resort?

– Is it proportionate to kill 40,000 Palestinians, and is it

– likely to lead to a new state of peace?

We can talk about this for a long time, but perhaps most strikingly, in the actual conduct of the war, if we take it as read that it was just to go to war, in these circumstances, what about the protection of non-combatants? It seems generally agreed that perhaps up to 80% of those killed in Gaza are non-combatants. Of the 40,000, I understand at least 10,000 were children. 10,000 innocent children. By definition, non-combatants. So should we just sit there and nod sagely when we listen to Bible lessons like we had this morning? What do you think?

‘Anger and wrath, these … are abominations; yet a sinner holds on to them.’ Is that a message for today? If so, what are we going to do about it?

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Second Sermon, for Evensong at St Peter’s, Old Cogan, 8th Sept 2024 – Annihilation and Ostentation

Exodus 14:5-31, Matthew 6:1-18

I really struggled writing this sermon, I want you to know. The rules are that unless there is some very special excuse, you will expect your preacher to be speaking about the Bible lessons earlier on in the service. Perhaps explaining them or drawing lessons from them for our life today: as you know, our lessons are chosen by an ecumenical body called the Consultation on Common Texts, who I think are based in Montréal, who published the Revised Common Lectionary in 1992, which at least in theory all the Anglican churches in the world follow.

All the churches in the Anglican connection are reading the same lessons each Sunday. Exceptionally, a church may decide to develop a theme, departing from the lectionary in order to give a sermon series. We did this at All Saints recently with a sermon series on the Lord’s Prayer. Don’t worry, I am not going to quiz you on what you have learned from the sermons about the Lord’s Prayer!

But I’m finding that the Lectionary is no help for me today – although it is interesting to see that the New Testament lesson actually includes one version of the Lord’s Prayer. I suppose that means that I really ought not to try to deal with that in this sermon!

But do I want to say anything about the Israelites escaping from Egypt through the Red Sea, the parting of the Red Sea and the drowning of the Egyptian army? And what can I say about Jesus talking about being modest in charitable giving? In both cases I’ve got a feeling that there is a real danger that I will just go off into some academic rabbit hole and leave you without much to relate to in your normal life.

The story of the escape from Egypt through the Red Sea is generally reckoned not to be a literal piece of history but more part of the legend of the foundation of the nation of Israel. It’s a demonstration of the power of the Lord, the one true God, the God of the Israelites. They get away from slavery in Egypt not really through anything they have done themselves but because God ordered it, either directly or through his prophet Moses.

So far, so good! But should we risk trying to draw parallels with contemporary life? The Israelites escaped from Egypt and went to settle outside. Although we don’t hear about it in the passage that we are reading today, they displaced people who were already living in those places.

You will remember that Saul was ordered by God actually to destroy the people of Amalek, the Amalekites, the people that the Israelites encountered first after the crossing of the Red Sea. ‘Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.’ That’s from the first book of Samuel, chapter 15, and as you will remember, Saul didn’t actually wipe them all out, and God was very angry as a result.

What is this theology? Surely we don’t believe in a God who would do what God is supposed to have done to the Egyptians, or who would have ordered Saul so cruelly to wipe out the Amalekites. This is dangerous stuff. Mr Netanyahu, the current Israeli prime minister, when he was talking about the war on Hamas, likened it to Amalek.

The real tragedy is that the Israeli army does not seem to distinguish between the normal inhabitants of Gaza, the normal Palestinian civilians, and the freedom fighters or terrorists, depending on your point of view, belonging to Hamas. Perhaps it is better to regard it as a picturesque story and to go back to the scholarly discussion about where the story actually came from, tracing the evidence of the different authors in Exodus and their different takes on the main narrative.

In the crossing of the Red Sea, you can see, if you look closely, that there are two different threads, expressing the story differently which shows that it has been written down from several sources. If you read our lesson again slowly, you’ll see that at one point ‘the Lord drove the sea back by a strong east wind all night, and made the sea dry land’, and the Egyptians’ chariots got bogged down, and the sea returned when the morning came: or, in the same passage, Moses stretched out his hand, and parted the waters; the Egyptians followed the Israelites, and when they were half-way over, the Lord told Moses to stretch out his hand again, and the waters returned and drowned the Egyptians. Two different stories.

But they’re not meant to be history. They simply illustrate the power of God. But is God really like that? Surely not. So I am forced to tell you that I don’t recommend anything much in the Old Testament lesson today, as a precept for a good life, except perhaps the conclusion, that God of Israel is all-powerful, and to be respected. I caution you against taking it too literally to support aggressive Zionism, which I think you will agree with me, is not a good thing.

Perhaps we are better off concentrating on the tail end of the Sermon on the Mount in Saint Matthew, and not making a fuss about charitable giving. I’m not quite sure how one is supposed to reconcile what Jesus says with charity auctions and fundraising dinners, where almost by definition people are parading their generosity – and does that really matter?

I would’ve thought that the most important thing was to be generous and not get too hung up on what the optics are, what it looks like. Oh well – maybe it’s time for another sermon series!

A Sermon preached at a Service of the Word on 4th August 2024 at All Saints Church, Penarth

Exodus 16:2-4, 9-15; John 6:24-35

https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=590361917

Manna from heaven; Bread of Heaven. Actually we’re not singing that hymn today. But apart from that, what are we to make of these lovely stories? 

When the people of Israel have escaped from Egypt, they are languishing in the wilderness, and moaning about it to Moses and Aaron; God sends manna from heaven, heavenly bread, and quails, bizarrely. The Lord seems to have gone for a Michelin-star menu – I mean, have you ever had quail at McDonald’s? – and indeed, we are not quite sure what the manna was. it’s been pointed out that ‘man hu’, the (transliterated) word in the original Hebrew, is almost a translation of “what is it?”, or it could be the fruit of the tamarind tree. Anyway, it was something that they could eat and it kept them going. 

In the New Testament, in the lead-up to the story which we have just heard from St John’s Gospel, the crowd, who had just had a massive meal, courtesy of the five loaves and two fishes, followed him round to the other side of the lake, and Jesus challenged them about why they had been following him around. 

Actually, that’s roughly the same question that’s behind the story about the manna and the quails in the Old Testament. The question is why? What is it all about? In the Old Testament, the Lord said that he had given the Israelites the food: ‘at twilight you shall eat meat and in the morning, you shall have your fill of bread’, because ‘then you should know that I am the Lord your God.’ In other words, the good things that had happened to the Israelites, escaping from Egypt, and getting fed when they were stuck in the desert, weren’t down to anything they had done, or because of the leadership of Moses and Aaron, but they were as a result of God’s care for them. God had given it to them. And they should recognise that. ‘All good gifts around us, are sent from heaven above’ as the hymn puts it.

It’s essentially the same message that Jesus gives to the people who followed him round to the other side of the lake. He says, you are looking for me, not because you saw signs, miracles, of some kind, but because you had a big meal: you ‘ate your fill of the loaves’(and the fishes, actually, as well.) He says, don’t work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life. If you put yourself in their position, I think you might be a bit stuck at that point. What is this miraculous stuff that you can eat, and it will give you eternal life? Jesus was going to tell them, but first they said, how can we know that what you are telling us is true? Can you give us some kind of proof, some miraculous sign? And they referred back to the story in the book of Exodus. ‘Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness.  As it is written,  ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’ 

They were on the same page at this stage. Jesus was saying that this was the right bread, it was what comes from heaven, and they said, yes, we want some of that. But Jesus was correcting them a little bit about how it had come about. It wasn’t down to Moses, but it was direct from God. And they said, give us this bread always, that is the stuff we want. 

At which point, the miracles and the Michelin star come together, because Jesus says that he is the bread of life. ‘Whoever comes to me will never be hungry. Whoever believes in me will never be thirsty’. In other words, you should eat up Jesus, have a meal of Jesus. That’s what we are doing symbolically in the holy communion. ‘Feed on him in your heart by faith.’ When you eat the bread and drink the wine, you are symbolically eating Jesus. 

Some of the historians at the time of Jesus who weren’t Christians, for example Tacitus, in his account of the burning down of Rome, mentioned that the emperor Nero had made up a story that the fire had been started by Christians, who, according to Tacitus, were extremely depraved.

It seems that one of the elements of that depravity was that people mistook the idea of Holy Communion for a kind of cannibalism. As you know, if you are a Roman Catholic, or an Anglican of the catholic persuasion, you believe that at the time you have the bread and the wine in holy communion, it changes from being bread and wine actually to become, in a miraculous way, the body and blood of Jesus. It’s called transubstantiation. Whether transubstantiation literally happens is a discussion which has been going on since the Reformation, since the time of Martin Luther in the 1500s, so I don’t expect that you will want me to go into it that deeply this morning.

You can see, however, that it could be that people might misunderstand things and worry that we Christians are, in fact, some kind of cannibals. But especially, if you follow Flanders and Swann,[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjAHw2DEBgw] you will know that ‘eating people is wrong’, and therefore, when Jesus talks about being the bread of life, ‘I am the bread of life’, he is not talking literally. What does it mean? 

Maybe there is another idea which can help to shed light on this in Saint Paul’s letters. He talks about people being ‘in Christ’. It’s an expression which occurs in St Paul’s letters over 150 times. Being ‘in Christ’, ‘in the Lord’, or ‘in him’. What does it mean? It means to be involved with Christ, to have Christ in you, to be a Christian. It’s a spiritual thing as much as a practical thing. We understand God in three ways, as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We are talking about Jesus the Son here, but in a sense also talking about the other side to God, the Holy Spirit, because God’s power, our involvement with God, comes through the Holy Spirit. it is the Spirit in us that makes us Christians. When we believe in, when we trust in the Lord, his spirit is in us. 

The Lord is here: his spirit is with us. I’m not sure about the quails.

Sermon for Evensong on the first Sunday after Trinity at St Peter’s Church, Old Cogan, 2nd June 2024

Jeremiah 5:1-19, Romans 7:7-25 https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=584275767

Two different ways of looking at morality, what is right and good and how people understand God in relation to that morality. On the one hand you have Jeremiah, writing about the world before the sack of Jerusalem in 587BC, a long time before Jesus, and then on the other hand you’ve got St Paul, writing to the Romans in the light of Jesus, just after the time of Jesus, so within the first century AD. 

In Jeremiah’s world God is very definitely directly involved in life on earth. The Israelites have made a covenant, an agreement, with the Lord that they will respect him as the one true God, but they have been forgetting the covenant and worshipping another gods, behaving in a very immoral way, (albeit described very picturesquely, which you have to know about horses to understand).

Jeremiah the prophet is God’s mouthpiece, or at least he knows the mind of God. He says that God will act like a kind of super-parent, punishing bad behaviour in his children directly; if they carried on like that they would come to a sticky end. Indeed the Babylonians conquered the Israelites, destroyed the Temple, and took the Israelites off into captivity. ‘By the waters of Babylon, we sat down and wept’. ‘God will punish you,’ is Jeremiah’s message.

Father Etienne Charpentier, in his commentary on Jeremiah, says that this ‘God will punish you’, these prophetic sayings, ‘…may well shock us. They often present us with a God who threatens his people with punishment because they have sinned.’ He asks, ‘So are natural catastrophes, wars, human injustice, all punishment from God? We find such a picture of a vengeful God intolerable’. He suggests that it is not a question of God doing harm, but the prophets making sense out of the ups and downs of life – ‘… these events are less divine punishments than occasions for discovering the love of God which invites them to a new life’.

I’m not sure. It seems to me that Jeremiah’s idea of God belongs to that school who refer to ‘their God’, as opposed to their opponents’ god. That God will empower people to do certain things, often at the expense of or involving harm to, someone else. It underlines the problem, that God might seem to be doing bad things as well as good ones. But how can this be, if God is love?

Contrast that with St Paul’s letter to the Romans, where he suggests that the question whether or not people are doing evil or good depends on whether or not they are breaking the moral law, the Jewish law, the 10 Commandments and the law derived from it. 

Before the law, before Moses was given the tablets of stone, the people did not know what the law was and went on in blissful ignorance, but once they had the law then they knew the difference between good and evil, between right and wrong. St Paul seems to be arguing that there is no natural sense of right and wrong, no natural conscience in the way imagined by Thomas Aquinas, who himself based his philosophy on Aristotle. They thought that we have a sort of innate natural conscience and that people do not need to be taught in order to be able to tell right from wrong. 

St Paul understands right and wrong as being questions of the Jewish law, of sin. We tend to distinguish moral right and wrong from whether something is sinful or not. Atheists can and often do act perfectly morally, they do good, and they recognise good and evil, even though the concept of sin may not be something they recognise. 

St Paul sees sin as ‘the flesh’ as opposed to ‘the spirit’; bodily appetites versus the soul; versus heavenly, spiritual matters. ‘Spirit’, in Hebrew ‘ruach’, or Greek πνευμα, is the same word as ‘wind’. This is part of where the idea of God as Holy Spirit comes in. So if in general we think of ‘sin’ as being cut off from God, living away from God, St Paul links this with his concept of body and soul, of the flesh as opposed to the spirit.  He wrestles with a conflict inside himself. [Romans 7:14–15 (REB)]: ‘We know that the law is spiritual; but I am not: I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin.  I do not even acknowledge my own actions as mine, for what I do is not what I want to do, but what I detest.’

I really like this passage, in the same way as I like the story of Doubting Thomas. Paul knows what he ought to do, what is right and good: but he doesn’t do it. He explains this as being down to his ‘fleshly desires’. Earlier on he has used the example of the Commandment ‘Thou shalt not covet’. You can see how breaking that commandment will involve the opposite of spiritual things. You feel the need for that Hermès handbag or that Lamborghini, when really your mind should be on higher things.

But to me that just helps to make St Paul more credible. He isn’t just an impossibly virtuous person; instead he, and Doubting Thomas, are people like me. That for me is the takeaway from this part of his letter to the Romans, and not really the rather convoluted argument about the relationship between sin and the Jewish Law, the ten Commandments. 

I just don’t think that we see sin or moral good in terms of whether we are aware of the Ten Commandments or not. I suppose the argument is a bit reminiscent of the Garden of Eden, that before Adam and Eve knew the difference between good and evil, what they were doing was morally neutral.

But you could note, however, that perhaps the Fall, eating the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge, gave Adam and Eve a conscience. It wasn’t a question whether they knew the Jewish Law or not – the Ten Commandments hadn’t arrived at that stage, so they weren’t there to be broken. But that doesn’t mean that good and evil didn’t exist. It’s just that they didn’t know about it.

Another parallel between Paul’s ideas and the Garden of Eden is where he says that, before sin intruded, he was ‘fully alive’, but after sin came into the equation, ‘sin sprang to life and I died’. Adam and Eve were immortal before Fall, but subject to death as part of God’s punishment for their disobeying Him. ‘Dust you are, to dust you shall return.’[Genesis 3:19 (NEB)]

And the other big difference in the Christian understanding when compared  the Old Testament, Jeremiah’s, view is the clear promise that by God’s grace, through the operation of the Spirit, there is forgiveness for a repentant sinner. St Paul asks, ‘Miserable creature that I am, who is there to rescue me out of this body doomed to death?’ [Romans 7:24 (NEB)] At the beginning of chapter 8 of the letter, Paul answers his own question like this: ‘The conclusion of the matter is this: there is no condemnation for those who are united with Christ Jesus, because in Christ Jesus the life-giving law of the Spirit has set you free from the law of sin and death.’[Romans 8:1–2 (NEB)]

St Paul is like Jeremiah in that he feels close to God; he might even have said something about ‘Our God’, but I feel he sees things much more generously. ‘If God is on our side, who is against us? He did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all; and with this gift how can he fail to lavish upon us all he has to give?’ [Romans 8:31–32 (NEB)] When you are feeling down, just read Romans chapter 8. God will not punish you: He will bless you.