Apocalyptic Growth Strategy

November 17, 2014 //

Sermon for Mattins on the Twenty-Second Sunday after Trinity, 16th November 2015, at St Mary the Virgin, Stoke D’Abernon
Daniel 10:19-21, Revelation 4

At the end of St Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus says to His disciples, ‘Go ye therefore and teach all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.’

People are always telling us that we’re doing rather a bad job of making disciples of all the world. Because in the UK at least, the churches are declining in numbers. According to statistics that I was reading, the Church of England is losing 1% of its members each year at present.

But Canon Giles Fraser in an article yesterday [‘Loose Canon’, The Guardian, 15th November 2014, http://gu.com/p/43bvq%5D pointed out that about a million people go to a Church of England church every week. That compares pretty well with quite a lot of other important organisations.

Compared with the total membership of the Conservative Party, which is 134,000, with the Labour Party, 190,000, and the LibDems at 44,000, as Giles Fraser says, if you add all the political parties together and even throw in UKIP, you still don’t have half the number of people who go to church. He adds, ‘More people go to church on a Sunday than go to Premier League stadiums on a Saturday.’

I bore that all in mind as I went to the St Andrew’s PCC ‘away-day’ yesterday. This was set to consider a Church of England statistical study called ‘From Anecdote to Evidence’, [The Church Commissioners for England, 2014, http://www.churchgrowthresearch.org.uk ] which had identified all the various things which made for growing churches rather than declining ones.

Incidentally, you’ll be very pleased to know that as far as I can see, St Mary’s does have ingredients identified in the study for being a successful church. There’s a emphasis on having young people and children (we’ve just had a great family service with nearly half those attending being kids or young parents); on having a clear mission and purpose; and on having strong leadership. I think that St Mary’s does meet the criteria identified.

I was intrigued because this week, now at Mattins and tonight at Evensong, there are lessons from the Book of Revelation which offer a counterpoint to the Church statistical study.

This morning there’s the vision of heaven – ‘a voice which said to me, Come up hither, and I will show thee things which must be hereafter.’ This was a vision of a throne in heaven, and a figure on the throne surrounded by 24 elders – a vision of God.

And this evening, going backwards, the lesson is from the beginning of the Book of Revelation, introducing John’s vision, John’s ‘apocalypse’, as it’s called. Αποκάλυψις, ‘Apocalyse’, is the Greek word for ‘revelation’ – lifting the veil, revealing what is hidden underneath.

I don’t think that the Book of Revelation is meant to be taken literally, but it does contain a lot of powerful metaphorical images, covering a world which is way beyond our comprehension. We can’t know what, in Revelation, is in any sense ‘true’, but I think we can agree that there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be as good a description as any other, more prosaic, description of a heavenly world there might be.

Revelation Chapters 2 and 3 – your homework before lunch today – contain the passage which I think is directly relevant to the question what makes a good, effective church. John reports that Christ appeared to him and instructed him to write letters to seven early churches. In each letter Christ, though John, identifies particular characteristics which marks out that church, and which distinguishes it in good and bad ways. It is a sort of early Ofsted report.

So the church at Ephesus is noted for its love; the church at Smyrna for being long-suffering; at Pergamum for not denying their faith; at Thyatira, there is love, faithfulness, good service and fortitude; at Philadelphia, he writes, ‘Your strength, I know, is small, yet you have observed my commands and have not disowned my name.’

He lists their faults as well. He writes to the church at Sardis, ‘though you have a name for being alive, you are dead. Wake up, and put some strength into what is left,..’; and to the church at Laodicea he writes, ‘I know all your ways; you are neither hot nor cold. How I wish that you were either hot or cold!’

Those early churches, which had been started by St Paul or by others of the Apostles, were being assessed by Jesus Christ, through the mystic seer John, for various aspects of their faith. Were they keeping fast to the true faith, or were they in error?

There’s not much about falling numbers – except perhaps the call to wake up at Sardis. There’s not much organisation theory: what the proportion of young people in the congregation is, whether they are open to new ideas and new types of worship, whether they give new people responsibility for church activities. None of those techniques seem to have worried the earliest churches.

In the church research document ‘From Anecdote to Evidence’, the work is prefaced by St Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 3:6, ‘I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God made it grow’. God made it grow. I can’t help feeling that, certainly in the early history of the church, whether the church prospered or not had nothing much to do with the management skills of the early ministers.

The biggest break that the early church had, of course, was in the fourth century, when on the eve of the battle of the Milvian Bridge, the Roman emperor Constantine had a vision of Christ telling him to paint the sign of the cross on his soldiers’ shields, and he would win the battle: and they did, and they won the victory. It doesn’t sound a very Christian story; but there it is.

As a result, Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. All of a sudden, Christianity stopped being more or less a secret sect of small cell churches subject to persecution, and became the Catholic Church, the church throughout the world.

Huge growth; but nothing to do with management skills or growth strategies. If we look at where the church is growing in the world today – and Christianity is the fastest-growing religion of them all, today – in Africa, in South America, in China, in Russia – there is still huge growth: and I wonder what it is that is bringing that growth, at the same time as the Church of England is gently and gradually declining.

I think that a clue may be in today’s lessons. You may say that the pictures of heaven and the pictures of the Almighty which are in the Book of Revelation are too far-fetched to be anything other than picturesque stories. ‘Immediately I was in the spirit, and behold a throne was set in heaven, and one sat on the throne. And he that sat was to look upon like a jasper and a sardine stone: and there was a rainbow round about the throne, in sight like unto an emerald.’

And in the first chapter of Revelation, ‘I turned to see whose voice it was that spoke to me, and on turning I saw seven golden lamp-stands, and in the midst of the lamp-stands I saw one like the Son of Man, clothed with a long robe and with a golden sash across his chest. His head and his hair were white as white wool, white as snow; ..’

‘Look, he is coming with the clouds; every eye will see him … “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the ending, says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty’.

Now we may well not believe that God is a man with a big white beard in heaven, (which is above the clouds). We may well decide that that is just a picturesque metaphor: but I think we do still find great significance in ‘I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending’.

The point about an ‘apocalypse’, a revelation, an unveiling of ultimate truth, is that we are confronted by God. Perhaps the reason that our church here at home is not growing as fast as in the other places in the world is precisely because people’s eyes are closed to God: they are not seeing the revelation; they don’t see what its immediate importance could be.

Many people, I think, would agree that there is a God, in the sense that there is somebody or something which made the world, a creator. But a lot of people, I think, today, don’t give it much more thought than that. Perhaps people no longer really worry about the story of Jesus Christ. They rule out the possibility of His resurrection from the dead.

People in England are conveniently blind to the way in which, in many other places in the world, the Good News of Jesus, the story of His life, death and resurrection, still has legs, still has huge power, because it is an indication that the God which Revelation portrays, the God, the Lamb on the throne of heaven, (however picturesque these images are) still has power, has significance, today.

These revelations are revelations that God does care for us. The fact of Jesus, the fact of His time with us, is in itself a revelation, it is an uncovering of the deepest truth.

Perhaps these days you need to be ‘strangely warmed’, like John Wesley, or to be ‘born again’ at a Billy Graham meeting. Perhaps not: but once you have ‘got it’, once you have realised what the revelation of Jesus Christ is, then your life will be changed, and there will be no danger that you will drift away from the church.

Let us pray that we will all be given that revelation: that in the church, those of us who are tasked with preaching and evangelism – as John in Revelation puts it, those of us who are ‘in the Spirit’ – surrounded by the Holy Spirit – let us pray that we will be able to bring a vision of heaven, a vision of the Son of Man, the Son of Man who was at the same time the Son of God, into our lives, so that we can no longer just take Him or leave Him.

Tags 1 Corinthians 3, africa, apocalypse, Apollos, china, church growth, Church of England, Conservative Party, constantine, early churches, ephesus, from anecdote to evidence, Giles Fraser, αποκαλυψις, jesus christ, john of patmos, labour party, laodicea, libdem party, loose canon, milvian bridge, pergamum, philadelphia, premier league, revelation, Russia, sardis, south america, truth, UKIP

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Christian Sex

By publicsquare

November 11, 2014 //

Discussion Note given to Revd Sir John Alleyne’s Modern Church Group at Guildford Cathedral on 10th November 2014

My topic is homosexuality and the Church of England. It is whether it is sinful to be gay: whether gay marriage is sinful: whether the church can join gay people together in marriage: whether gay clergy ought to be bishops.

There are to be ‘facilitated discussions’ within the Church of England following the Pilling Report, to try to achieve some agreement between those who reject gay marriage and the ministry of homosexuals, and those who would accept either or both.

In this paper I haven’t tried to reach very definite conclusions, but rather to mention what I think are relevant things which ought to be considered in this context. You are invited to use my thoughts as prompts for further discussion.

I have just had staying with me a Nigerian Anglican priest. A delightful man, but his views on homosexuality are challenging.

He says – and I think his views are pretty standard in much of Africa – that to be homosexual is a sin. The Church can forgive the sinner, but must condemn the sin.

The reason for this, he says, is what is said in the Bible, which is the Word of God. One must not contradict God’s word in the Bible.

For the record, I’ll list below some anti-gay Bible references, and then we can talk more about each one later. Suffice to say at this point that they are all said to support the proposition that gay sex is sinful.

Genesis 19:4-5 – a bad end befalls the young men of Sodom, the eponymous Sodomites, who called to Lot to bring out his companions ‘so that we can have intercourse with them’.

Lev. 18:22 – ‘You shall not lie with a man as with a woman: that is an abomination.’ The context suggests that it is addressed to a male: and that it is addressed not in the context of his permanent sexual orientation, but on the contrary, that he is basically heterosexual – he must be, in order for some of the other prohibitions in this passage to bite on him – e.g. ‘You shall not approach a woman to have intercourse with her during her period of menstruation’ – and that the homosexual acts prohibited are deviant acts rather than expressions of a basic sexual orientation.

Mark 10:7-9 – Jesus’ saying (quoting Genesis), ‘God made them male and female ‘.

Romans 1:26f – It is a sign of godless depravity that ‘… their men, … giving up natural relations with women, burn with lust for each other.’

1 Cor. 6:9 People who won’t get into the kingdom of heaven include μαλακοι, malakoi, soft, effeminate people, and αρσενοκοιται, arsenokoitai (there is no transliteration, despite appearances) men who ‘go to bed with men’.

Against this are other readings:

2 Sam. 1:26 – David and Jonathan: homosexual love is rated more highly than hetero.

Genesis 2:18-25 – the creation of woman from Adam’s rib. She was to be a ‘partner’ for the man. No mention of procreation: no shame in nakedness – this came before the Fall.

Ephesians 5:23-33 – wives, be subject to your husbands. Man is the head of the woman, as Christ is the head of the church.

Cf. The Song of Songs, often said to symbolise Christ’s love for his church! [See, esp., 1:13 and passim in the KJV, which is less bowdlerised than more modern versions!]

See also Matt. 19:11-12. Whether it is better not to marry at all. ‘… there are others who have themselves renounced marriage for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven. Let those accept it who can’.

Martin Bucer, the great Reformer of Strassburg, argued from Genesis 2 and Ephesians that God’s intended purpose in marriage was not procreation, but companionship; and that the simile between Christ’s love for his church and the husband’s relationship with his wife ‘gave a glimpse of the divine’ (MacCulloch p649).

In analysing, applying reason to, these Bible readings, I suggest that one can distinguish the questions

what we are, what is our nature, how we were created; and
what we do, how we behave.

Questions of nature, how we are created, are questions of fact. Science ought to be referred to. Our Nigerian friend, however, when I suggested this – for example suggesting that a number of people are born with sexual orientation which is not, or not exclusively, heterosexual, immediately raised the question ‘what is truth’? Science’s conclusions change, he said, but God’s word is immutable.

So one question is the relationship between God and truth. It’s relevant in that context to mention Plato’s dialogue Euthyphro, and the dilemma in it. If God says that something is good, is it good because God says so, or because there is some independent standard of goodness which God recognises?

Even if the former is right, that something is good because God says so, how can we be sure that God is saying so?

Further questions of nature, how we are made, include questions of sexual orientation: maleness and femaleness. Is this simply to be decided by reference to the possession of genital organs of a particular type?

If so, what about people who have sex change operations, or who otherwise adopt apparently contrary sexual identity?

Even within physically homosexual relationships, one partner is ‘male’ and the other is ‘female’. In making love, one is giving and the other receiving.

I would suggest for consideration that therefore texts such as Genesis 2 or Mark 10 – God made them male and female – could in fact cover gay relationships. If maleness and femaleness can be understood independently of physical, genital characteristics, then same-sex couples can nevertheless be ‘male’ and ‘female’ within the ambit of the Scriptures.

Next, as opposed to how we are made, is how we behave. In this area questions to consider include questions of equality. The golden rule in Leviticus 19:18 – ‘you shall love your neighbour as a man like yourself’ as the NEB puts it, which Jesus adopted as his second commandment, implies equality. Therefore sexual relations which rely on inequality, such as rape and pederasty (‘child sex abuse’), are wrong.

Note that this is where the Judaeo-Christian tradition differs from the customs of classical antiquity, of Ancient Greece and Rome, where the love between men and beautiful (handsome) boys was often praised as being the highest form of love.

There are also questions of reciprocity: in any sexual context, do both parties agree? A positive answer implies equality, and also equality of bargaining power – which is why pederasty is wrong. In this relationship, we both want to do it; neither of us is being forced into it.

Behaviour, in this context, involves both nature, being disposed to feel sexual attraction, and action, actually feeling such attraction; and further action – making love. Greek terms are useful here – Έρως, ‘Eros’, Φιλία, ‘Philia’ and Αγάπη, ‘Agape’.

One suspects that Victorian Christians, if none others, thought that only ‘agape’ could be Christian. Eros was permissible, but only within the confines of marriage, for the purpose of procreation. In this they were clearly heavily influenced by St Paul, and the Jesus of Matt. 19.

But that is clearly unrealistic. Young people (if not older ones!) will find the words of the Song of Solomon highly evocative. It is not about trying to start a family! It is about desire, lust, even. That is the currency, the language, the toolbox, of sexual behaviour. One must fancy someone, in order to have sex with them. As Martin Bucer pointed out, in Genesis 2 Adam and Eve had no shame in being naked together. The Fall came later. He argued that therefore there is nothing wrong with sex, with sexual desire, Eros.

Homosexuality of circumstance, where people, who are usually oriented heterosexually, get into situations where they also feel homosexual attraction and act homosexually – examples are boarding schools and prisons – may fall more squarely under the apparent prohibitions in the Bible. Perhaps it could be argued that they are going against ‘nature’: but again, I believe that scientific research has indicated that many people are not exclusively oriented either hetero- or homosexually. At one extreme are bisexuals, and at the other, there is the supposedly ‘normal’ person who is all one or the other.

My Nigerian friend did not accept that homosexuals could ever represent ‘normality’, though. He did not accept the commonly-stated figure of 10% of the population being homosexuals. Only freakish abnormalities would account for homosexuality. Apparently he felt that Christians could, indeed should, love and care for such freaks of nature – but that they were by their nature sinful. This seems to me that, notwithstanding the stricture, he acknowledges that God made them that way. But do we believe that sin depends on how you are, rather than how you behave?

Is there anything intrinsic in marriage which would make it impossible for homosexuals to be ‘married’? It would seem that this question really depends, in a Christian context, on whether one can understand maleness and femaleness in a wider way than simply by reference to the possession of genitalia. As a matter of language, there is at least one gender-unspecific use of the word ‘marriage’, on a car factory assembly line, where the body and power train or chassis come together.

I haven’t talked about failures of sex such as rape or divorce. Equally, I haven’t mentioned the ways in which homosexuals have been persecuted. I am simply taking it for granted here that we are looking for ‘good’ sex: sex without prohibition or hurt to anyone. ‘They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain: for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea.’ (Isaiah 11:9)

Can there be agreement about gay marriage and gay bishops? I suggest that the discussions should focus on whether a common understanding can be reached about what it means to be male and female (creation, our nature), and how Jesus’ teaching about how to behave, how to love our neighbours, should be applied to that understanding. As a preliminary, some agreement about the nature of truth would be useful.

I invite your thoughts and comments.

_____________________________________________________________

References – in preparing this note, I referred to the following.

The Holy Bible – KJV and NEB

Η Καινή Διαθήκη, the Greek New Testament, with the readings adopted by the revisers of the Authorised Version, 1882, Oxford, The Clarendon Press

MacCulloch, D., 2003, Reformation; London, Allen Lane – see chapters 15 and 16

Childress, J. F. and Macquarrie, J., eds, 1986, A New Dictionary of Christian Ethics, London, SCM Press – see articles on Marriage (Helen Oppenheimer), Homosexuality (James B. Nelson)

Hornblower, S., and Spawforth, A., eds, 1996, The Oxford Classical Dictionary, Oxford, OUP – see article on ‘Homosexuality’ by David M. Halperin

Vardy, P., 2010, Good and Bad Religion, London, SCM Press. See chapter 3, The Euthyphro Dilemma

Review of “More Perfect Union?: Understanding Same-Sex Marriage” by Bishop Alan Wilson

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Greater love hath no man

By publicsquare

November 9, 2014 //

Sermon for Evensong on Remembrance Sunday, 9th Nov 2014
John 15:9-17 – Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.

I wondered whether tonight I should just read you some of those stories of heroism and self-sacrifice which perhaps we all know, and which Remembrance Sunday reminds us of. They are almost sermons in themselves. For example:

Maximilian Kolbe, the Polish priest imprisoned in Auschwitz, who volunteered to take another prisoner’s place when the Nazis selected ten men at random to be starved to death after someone had escaped; or

Jack Cornwell, the boy sailor, ‘Boy’ Cornwell, who was only 16 when he was mortally wounded at the battle of Jutland in 1916, who stayed at his post by the ship’s gun which had been hit and put out of action. He stayed there, although all the rest of the gun crew were dead, ‘in case he were needed’, as he said before he died. Or

Robert Leiper Lindsay, the superintendent of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company oil-well compound in ‘the side of Persia that slopes down into Mesopotamia’, as the story in Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopedia [Arthur Mee, ed., c.1922 (undated), London, The Educational Book Company Limited, vol.9, p.6194] puts it, who died shutting down an oil leak to a furnace and saved 300 colleagues. This was one of my favourite stories when I was about ten, and it still moves and shocks me.

‘The quick mind of Lindsay sees at once that the pumps must be stopped and the supply of oil feeding the furnaces must be cut off; so he calls to his assistant to shut off the pumps, and sets off to cut off the furnace supply. But to get to the furnaces he must pass through the fountain of streaming oil, and arrive at the furnaces with his clothes saturated with petroleum. He knows what the end will be, but he does not shrink. He passes through the oil shower, turns off the oil tap of the furnaces, and then turns away, and falls, a blazing torch.’

Terrible stories. So moving. Would we be so brave, we ask ourselves. The first two stories were from wartime: Father Kolbe in the Second World War, and Jack Cornwell VC in the First. Robert Leiper Lindsay was in 1918. As you will know, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, that he worked for, became BP.

Jesus’ great saying, ‘Greater love hath no man ..’, is about love. He has said, ‘This is my commandment, That ye love one another, as I have loved you’ [John 15:12]. It isn’t the sort of soft love, companionable love, that Jesus means here. This is sacrifice, violent, painful. Like Lindsay, a ‘blazing torch’.

We can say amen to that. We know what terrible sacrifice Jesus went on to make, how He suffered.

But the mention of Jack Cornwell and Maximilian Kolbe, those wartime martyrs, and the fact that we are remembering those who made the ultimate sacrifice in wars, makes me think, what is the point of all that undoubted bravery in war? What was it for?

It is reported that, before Jack Cornwell, Boy Cornwell, died, he was told that the Battle of Jutland had been won; and he was pleased. ‘The strife is o’er, the battle done.’ He had died for his friends.

Similarly Maximilian Kolbe and Robert Lindsay, by their sacrifice of themselves, saved others. They died in order that others might live.

Now there are two other sacrifices which we have to consider today. First, our forces – now in harm’s way again in Iraq. Who will their sacrifices save? It is very difficult to be sure. We have seemingly moved a long way from the Ten Commandments and ‘Thou shalt not kill’. Even back in the 13th century, Thomas Aquinas restated the ancient Roman doctrine of the ‘Just War’. He suggested three criteria (Summa Theologiae vol 35, 40(1)):

war must be waged by the ‘due authorities’;
The cause must be just; and
Those waging war must intend to promote good, and avoid evil.

Right authority, just cause, right intention. Even so, Thomas must have reflected that his concept of a ‘just war’ didn’t sit very easily with what Jesus had said, notably in the Sermon on the Mount: ‘But I say unto you, that ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also’ (Matt. 5:39).

Thomas wrote, ‘The Lord’s words, “I say to you, offer the wicked man no resistance”, must always be borne in mind, and we must be ready to abandon resistance and self-defence if the situation calls for that.’ That begs the question when ‘the situation’ would call for resistance to be abandoned. What could be such a situation?

Why would one make war in the first place, why would one feel justified in going against Jesus’ command of peace and non-violence: His commands, not only ‘thou shalt not kill’, but also ‘turn the other cheek’?

St Augustine, Augustine of Hippo, writing, in the fourth century, much earlier than Thomas, identified another reason for which a Christian might be justified in using force, which I think is perhaps the only really good reason – as a matter of charity: to go to the aid of his neighbour who was being attacked.

This is clearly a really difficult area; when it isn’t a case of going to the aid of Poland, when it isn’t a case of a threat to our own independence, but a bloody dispute between governments whose legitimacy is in some cases questionable, and who have shown brutality and a contempt for the rule of law, on the one side, as, say, may be argued to be the case in Syria and Iraq, and opposing factions upholding a particularly vicious and intolerant type of militant Islam – who are killing Christians and other non-Moslems simply for not being Moslems, unlike their opponents, the dubious governments, so unsatisfactory in so many ways, but who at least allow freedom of religion. Where is the ‘just war’ in this context?

But I have left to the end the biggest self-sacrifice, Jesus himself. Greater love hath no man. ‘This is my blood of the New Testament, which is shed for you and for many for the remission of sins’ (The Communion, at p.256 in the Book of Common Prayer). Greater love hath no man, than that he die for his friends. Is it, die instead of his friends? That was Maximilian Kolbe. Or was it to help his friends? That would be like Jack Cornwell or Robert Leiper Lindsay.

The idea is said to be like taking someone else’s punishment for them – again like Maximilian Kolbe. We are sinful; instead of punishing us, as He could, God put up His own son, and punished him instead. ‘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’: that’s what the Prayer Book says, in the Prayer of Consecration on p. 255.

I hope that God isn’t really like that. The language of human sacrifice – or of blood feuds: having ‘satisfaction’ is the language of D’Artagnan, the language of duels – ‘redemption’, paying the price, the price of sin, does not really square with the idea of a loving God. The idea of ‘substitutionary atonement’, as it’s called, seems to me to be very barbaric.

We may be fallen people. We may indeed be sinful. But what does that really mean? It surely doesn’t mean that we have a price on our heads, which has to be paid, or else we go into the fires of Hell.

‘Sin’ isn’t a question of persistent badness, or criminality, or just plain evil. All those things might be signs of sin, but they aren’t sin itself. In the New Testament, ‘sin’ is the translation of the Greek ‘αμαρτία, from the verb ‘αμαρτάνω, I ‘miss the mark’, I don’t hit the target. It has a connotation of distance, separation from the goal. So sin is separation, distancing, from God’s kingdom. ‘Remission’ of sins is forgiveness, release from prison.

I would like to emphasise not only the sacrifice, Jesus’ greater love, on the Cross, but also the Resurrection. God is assuring us that not only are we grateful for Jesus’ taking upon himself the punishment that perhaps we might have deserved, but also that it isn’t a story with a sad and pointless end – like the story of so many wars.

Here ‘The strife is o’er, the battle won’; but instead of a posthumous VC, we have a living God, who raised Jesus from the dead. What a sign! Let us indeed remember them: let us remember those who gave their lives in order that we might be free. But let us always remember that biggest, that most meaningful, sacrifice. Greater love hath no man – Jesus had that love, and it was for us.

Tags Anglo-Persian Oil Company, Arthur Mee, Augustine of Hippo, Auschwitz, blood feud, BP, Children's encyclopedia, Christians and Moslems, cross, D'Artagnan, duel, fires of Hell, greater love, heroism, Iran, Iraq, άμαρτανω, άμαρτια, Jack Cornwell VC, John 15, Just War, Jutland, loving God, Matt. 5, Maximilian Kolbe, Mesopotamia, Nazis, Persia, Poland, posthumous VC, redemption, remembrance sunday, Resurrection, Robert Leiper Lindsay, satisfaction, self-sacrifice, Sin, St Augustine, substitutionary atonement, Syria, Thomas Aquinas

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Search and Rescue in the Mediterranean

By publicsquare

October 29, 2014 //

29th October 2014

Dominic Raab, Esq., MP
House of Commons
London SW1

Sent by email to dominic.raab.mp@parliament.uk

Dear Mr Raab

Search and Rescue of Refugees in Peril in the Mediterranean

As a former marine insurance underwriter and member of the British Maritime Law Association, and as a Christian, I am horrified that the Government has refused to support search and rescue missions to save refugees in danger of drowning in the Mediterranean.

This country has ships and helicopters which could be used in this vital work, and is sufficiently wealthy to commit military resources to bombing campaigns seemingly with little hesitation.

The reason given for our failure to support this vital humanitarian work, that it would ‘operate as a pull factor’ is grotesque, and intellectually insulting.

We have a clear humanitarian duty, as a leading maritime nation, to save life at sea. I hope that you will agree with me and make representations urgently that this immoral and inhuman policy be changed forthwith.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Yours sincerely

Hugh Bryant

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The Bible and the Tower Experience

By publicsquare

October 27, 2014 //

Sermon for Evensong at St Mary’s on Bible Sunday, 19th Sunday after Trinity, 26th October 2014
Isaiah 55:1-11, Luke 4:14-30

It’s been a challenging week to be a Christian. The other night I was listening to The Moral Maze on the radio, when a panel of people, including the Reverend Giles Fraser and Melanie Phillips, who is Jewish, were discussing the footballer Ched Evans, and the question whether he should be allowed to rejoin his former club and play football again. Had he paid his debt to society and therefore was he entitled to be rehabilitated into society and continue his normal life, or was he in some way disqualified from his previous career because of the nature of the crime that he had committed?

I heard stories about the terrible virus Ebola in Africa. This week we were worried by a couple of instances where people appear to have caught the virus and come to areas which have not so far been affected, in Europe and also in the United States.

We had a report from the new chief executive of the National Health
Service, on what the health service in this country is going to need if it is to survive and continue to give the wonderful service which we expect.

There was a very sad story, here in Cobham, of a 21-year-old boy who was in the middle of a glittering career at university, with great prospects ahead of him, from a wonderful family, who suddenly dropped dead with a heart attack.

I listened to the debate on The Moral Maze about Ched Evans the footballer – and one of the things that rather surprised me was that neither Canon Giles Fraser not Melanie Phillips, the two expressly religious people on the panel, mentioned the Bible. Neither of them tried to relate what had happened and the punishment process which Ched Evans had been through to any passages in the Bible or anything which Jesus or the prophets had said.

In relation to the Ebola virus I have been struck by how it is very much a story about third world countries and poor people. Up to now none of the big drug companies had decided to put any money behind trying to find a cure or trying to develop a vaccine – I hope I’m not offending any of those companies by saying this – until it looked like becoming a threat to the developed part of the world. All of a sudden we now have the hopeful development that GlaxoSmithKline is claiming to have to developed a cure and a vaccine and that they will very fortunately be ready for use very shortly after Christmas; but the observation remains that it does look as though it matters more if you are a rich person in the northern hemisphere rather than a poor person in Africa, if there is going to be an epidemic.

Nearer to home, of course there is the whole question of the future of the National Health Service. The great thing that we all love about it is that it is free at the point of need: in other words it doesn’t matter whether you’re rich or poor; it’s just a question whether you are a human being and whether you are sick as to whether or not you are going to get treatment under our health service.

And finally, the poor chap who died just at the beginning of an adult life, which which probably was going to be very successful and very happy, clearly prompts the question, how could a loving God allow something like this to happen?

To add to those general challenges to Christians, I personally had an interesting thing happen to me this week, which was that I went to attend the inaugural lecture of the new Regius Professor of History in Oxford, Professor Lyndal Roper, an Australian scholar whose speciality is Martin Luther. Her lecture was all about Martin Luther’s dreams. I never knew that Martin Luther had dreams.

I hope it’s not a reflection on the quality of teaching in the diocesan ministry course, but the only revelatory experience involving Martin Luther which I could remember having been taught about was what was called the ‘Turmerlebnis’, the ‘Tower Experience’, when Martin Luther, who apparently was said to suffer dreadfully from constipation, had had to go to the loo in the tower in the monastery where he was, and was said to have experienced spiritual and physical release at the same moment.

Funnily enough, Prof. Roper didn’t mention the Turmerlebnis. It obviously didn’t count as a dream. He had apparently had five other experiences which she counted as dreams, including a vision of a giant quill pen, writing on the door of the church in Wittenburg, where his 95 Theses were subsequently pinned up, and another dream about a cat in a bag, which fortunately did not come to a bad end, but was not simply a question of letting the cat out of the bag.

If we were addressing the task, which Giles Fraser and Melanie Phillips addressed on The Moral Maze, as Christians here at St Mary’s, surely we would have gone to our Bibles. ‘Judge not, lest ye yourselves be judged’: ‘The sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the sons’: ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’; and what Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount and elsewhere, on the question of adultery.

If we looked at Ebola and at the National Health Service as Christians we might remember what it says in the Acts of the Apostles: ‘From each according to his ability and to each according to his need’. We would worry about the huge gap between the rich and poor, the verse which we no longer sing in ‘All things bright and beautiful’, ‘… the rich man in his castle and the poor man at his gate’.

The fact that we are so keen on the NHS and we think it is so special is surely all to do with the fact that it does not distinguish between the rich and poor. It’s not perhaps so much a question that we don’t approve of the gap between the rich and the poor, but we certainly do approve of something where there is no distinction between rich and poor.

What would Jesus do? Remember what he said to the rich young ruler, that he should give away everything that he had to the poor and follow Him – and indeed he then went on to make the famous remark about it being harder for a rich person to get into the kingdom of heaven then for a camel to go through the eye of a needle.

Shall we quote to the parents of the poor chap who has died, ‘Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?’ [Romans 8:35]. Will that hit the spot with them? Will they listen to that? Will it mean something properly to them? Does it sound realistic to them that that is what God is like?

Well perhaps the first thing to say in relation to all these challenges for a Christian is that in each case I am coming up with a quotation from the Bible. I am going to my Bible first, in order to try to find out what Jesus would do, what God feels about this particular situation.

The difficulty, of course, is that the Bible does not give you straightforward answers; it’s not a textbook in that sense or an instruction manual for life. It’s not a guidebook to the divine. It’s not a description of God and how he works.

We believe that God is omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent: the creator and sustainer of everything we now about, of our entire life. But we can’t be said to know much about God, in the same way as I know for example how many people there are here in church.

That’s deeply frustrating, because we could easily say that the most important things that we could possibly know would be the things that we can find out about God: but he is the one thing that we can probably know least about! What we can say is that what we do know, what we can infer, starts off with what we read in the Bible. Holy Scripture is the beginning of our experience of God and as such there is nothing more important than what we can learn from Holy Scripture.

There are so many questions – starting with, of course, what is Holy Scripture? What is the criterion by which we decide which books are in the Bible and which books from the same era are out, are apocryphal, or just not part of the canon of accepted books?

Right from the very earliest times Christians have debated what the Bible, the gospels and the various letters of St Paul and the Acts of the Apostles all really mean. What did Jesus say and what did he mean by it? What would Jesus do in particular circumstances? Who was Jesus really? Was He the son of God, and if so, is that the same thing as being God, in some way?

Terribly important questions, because, depending on the answers to them, we are talking about the most important things that we can possibly have in our lives today: that’s why I was particularly fascinated to go to the lecture about Martin Luther.

The Reformation may have happened in the 16th century – and we’re now in the 21st century – but all the various questions, which are relevant to the problems that I was looking at earlier, were around in Martin Luther’s time and he tried to understand better the message of the gospels in order to deal with them.

Was God ‘judge eternal’, inclined to condemn us, stern and unbending, or is he a loving God who forgives us despite our imperfections and our sins? Can we earn his forgiveness by the way we act? What happens to people who don’t know about Jesus and God and are good nevertheless? Are they saved or are they condemned because they are in ignorance?

We all know the story of Martin Luther pinning up his 95 theses on the door of the church in Wittenburg, mainly aimed at the Pope and his sale of so-called ‘indulgences’: that you could in fact buy yourself a shorter time in Purgatory, which was supposed to be the kind of antechamber to heaven, where you had a chance to make amends for all those dreadful things that you had done, all the sins you had committed in your life, so as to have a sort of second chance to get into heaven.

The Pope was selling the right to shorten your time in Purgatory by making charitable gifts to the church. It all sounds very far-fetched, if not slightly corrupt, now and we’re not really surprised that Martin Luther was against it.

We should perhaps not be too hasty to condemn the Pope because the background to the sale of indulgences was the need to raise money for Saint Peter’s in Rome. It was in fact a parish fundraising campaign by another name.

Who was right? Was Luther right or the Pope right? Was Henry VIII right? Was Cranmer right? Who has the authoritative statement of what Jesus would do in all these various circumstances?

Who has an authoritative view on what the correct interpretation of the Bible in relation to any given instance is? Because you can find contradictory things in the Bible.

Professor Roper had a thesis behind her lecture that in fact whereas John Calvin, the other great reformer, would say that his inspiration was ‘sola scriptura’, only Scripture, only Holy Scripture alone, and whereas the Pope would point to his apostolic succession from St Peter and the tradition of the holy Fathers, Luther could point to revelation, revelation from God, in the various dreams which he had had.

I have to say that I rushed to my copy of Diarmaid MacCulloch’s great book ‘Reformation’, and couldn’t find any reference to Luther’s great dreams – although the lavatorial experience, the Turmerlebnis, was quite well covered!

The point is, on this Bible Sunday, that whatever view you take and however you fit in with church history and the various strands of theology that have grown up over the ages in dealing with this incredibly important but terribly difficult topic, the important thing is that everything starts with the Bible: nothing is more authoritative.

It may not be the be-all and end-all, and it may not be literally the result of God dictating to somebody, but it is the word of God in the sense that it is the best source we have for our knowledge of God and Jesus; so let us never stop reading our Bibles; never stop wrestling with the words in them and trying to understand them.

Tags Acts of the Apostles, Bible Society, Bible Sunday, Ched Evans, Cobham Surrey, crime, Diarmaid MacCulloch, dreams, Giles Fraser, Jesus, John Calvin, Lyndal Roper, Martin Luther, Melanie Phillips, Moral Maze, nhs, prison, punishment, Reformation, The Pope, Turmerlebnis

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Render unto Caesar

By publicsquare

October 20, 2014 //

Sermon for Mattins at St Martin’s, East Horsley on the Eighteenth Sunday after Trinity, 19th October 2014
Matt. 22:15-22

None of us really like the brown envelopes which periodically come through from the Inland Revenue. For some reason we never think of our tax bill as the price we pay for a fantastic bunch of goods and services. We are kept free and safe by our armed forces; we’re kept healthy by the National Health Service; our streets are safe because we have police, and so on. But we tend to forget all that when we see our tax bills. We just see it as a sneaky way the government cuts down our income.

I don’t think it’s really the case that we think that we would be able to spend that money better, better than the government has done, if we’d kept it. Perhaps we’d spend more on schools and hospitals, less on bombs and rockets for foreign wars. But others, of course, would have different priorities. As you go to the post box with your tax return, if you bump into a friend who sees the brown envelope going out again from you, you will shrug your shoulders, perhaps, and say, ‘Well, I’ve got to render unto Caesar’.

What Jesus was talking about when the Pharisees tackled him was perhaps not really about paying taxes. The question was, are we permitted to pay taxes to the Roman emperor – to Caesar? The Holy Land was occupied territory, which had been conquered by the Romans. The Jews had a certain amount of self-government, but they did have to pay tax to the Roman emperor. That tax was greatly resented.

You will remember all the references to ‘publicans and sinners’, meaning ‘tax-gatherers and sinners’, in the Bible. Jesus was accused of consorting with ‘publicans and sinners’ (for example at Matt. 9:11), instead of being always with virtuous people. Publicans, tax-gatherers, were hated. They operated under a sort of franchise system, whereby they acquired the right to collect taxes and pass them on to the emperor. They would charge a gross amount, to include their fee, and pass on the net amount which the Roman authorities had set for the tax. There was no limit to the mark-up which a tax-gatherer could charge. It was a good system from the point of view of the Romans, but it did make the tax-gatherers themselves very unpopular, hated.

Indeed the question was, Is it possible to pay taxes to Caesar? The catch was that Roman emperors counted themselves as gods, and there was a state religion, so paying tax – the word in Greek is κηνσος, census, so the sense may really be of registering for a census, rather in the way that Mary and Joseph went, before Jesus was born, to Bethlehem in Judaea to be ‘taxed’ (Luke 2:1f). The Authorised Version of the Bible says ‘taxed’, and other translations talk about ‘registration’, taking part in a census.

I don’t know whether it’s a little bit irreverent to say that it occurred to me that this was rather the same procedure as asking the faithful – this congregation, for example, in this church – to join the electoral roll of the parish. Nothing wrong with that – it helps to keep the church family together, makes sure that everybody gets the news, gets invited to the parish picnic.

But of course it also allows the Planned Giving Secretary to send you a banker’s order form and ask you to consider regular giving.

So censuses do have a taxation aspect to them. And the catch, of course, was that in the eyes of the Pharisees, Jesus was going to be wrong whatever he said. If he said it was OK to go and sign up for the census, paying a token amount to signify that you were in the scheme, it would involve using a Roman coin, a denarius, a ‘penny’ sometimes so-called, but also reckoned to be a day’s wages.

This would be tantamount to acknowledging the authority of the emperor – as a god – which of course would be blasphemy. If on the other hand, Jesus could be caught out advising people not to pay, then he could be condemned as a revolutionary engaged in sedition against the emperor.

And the answer that Jesus gave was pretty mysterious. By asking to see the coin that you would use to pay the tax, it looks as though Jesus wasn’t familiar with foreign exchange. These days, I’m sure the Revenue are very happy to receive money’s worth in any currency which is exchangeable. But Jesus says here, ‘Show me the currency that you would have to pay the tax in’, and because that currency has a picture of the emperor on it, he says, in effect, this is a matter for the emperor: it’s nothing to do with us here in the Temple.

It was actually pretty shocking that the Pharisees had brought a Roman coin, with its purported image of a god, the Roman emperor as a god, into the sacred space of the Temple. So not surprisingly, Jesus didn’t want to have anything to do with it. But it does seem to be a slightly odd idea of Jesus’, that tax is payable only if you have the right currency.

What about the other side of what Jesus said? Render unto God the things that are God’s. The third-century scholar Tertullian said that this meant ‘us’, human beings. We are the things that belong to God. We are made in God’s image. So Tertullian argues that we are the things that are God’s. We belong to God. So Jesus is saying that, in a narrow sense, those things which bear the image of the emperor belong to the emperor: and those things, which bear the image of God, belong to God – and that is us. It still needs some careful consideration. Is there, according to Jesus, a hard distinction between the temporal authorities, the state, and the spiritual authority, the realm of God himself? You certainly can take what Jesus says to mean very simply, that we should be law-abiding citizens, obeying the laws that government has laid down for us, but also worshipping God and reserving our ultimate allegiance for him.

But St Paul, in his Letter to the Romans (13:1-7), pointed out that actually God is the supreme authority, over everything. Even governments are subject to the will of God. That is a reason for obeying the government; because the government actually derives its authority ultimately from God.

There is in fact no conflict between obeying the government and obeying God. That of course immediately begs the question what a Christian is to do, if the government is a bad government. Effectively it is the same dilemma which the Pharisees were challenging Jesus with. It’s the dilemma which Christians living in Nazi Germany faced, and it’s the dilemma which faces Christians in many parts of the Middle East today.

The government may ultimately be subject to the will of God, but that doesn’t by itself, necessarily, make it a good government, or worthy of our assent to it. As with all other aspects of the problem of evil, a bad government is nevertheless free to carry on making bad decisions and engaging in sinful acts.

We are so fortunate, that all we may find relevant in the story of Jesus and the denarius, ‘Render unto Caesar,’ and so on, is a fresh look at paying tax. No-one is trying to kill us because we aren’t swearing an oath of allegiance to a government which regards our Christian belief as blasphemy, as some of the radical Moslem opposition groups in Iraq and around would do. For those people, ‘Render unto Caesar’ has extra poignancy.

So let us, in our prayers, ask for God’s blessing on the people who are threatened today by militant Islamists all over the Middle East: let us call to mind the goods and services which our taxes pay for, and ask for God’s blessing on the people who physically deliver the benefits. And let’s pay our taxes with a good grace. Let’s also remember that our taxes buy a huge amount of benefit for all of us, and not begrudge paying our fair share.

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Whoso hath this world’s good

By publicsquare

October 20, 2014 //

Sermon for Evensong on the 18th Sunday after Trinity, 19th October 2014, at St Mary’s, Stoke D’Abernon

1 John 3:17 – 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?

How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help?

I think this is a very timely passage for us to look at.

If you ‘have this world’s good’, if you are well-off … The funny thing is that, if I took a straw poll of everyone here tonight, I expect that not many of us would consider themselves to be ‘well-off’. We would immediately point to some footballer’s palace in Queen’s Drive, or a Bentley with blacked-out windows driving past, and we might well say, ‘I’m not in that league! I’m not really well-off.’

But if you think of the news stories about Ebola in Africa, and the pictures of Sierra Leone or Liberia, compared with those people, even those of us on a modest pension are really well-off.

Closer to home, just by virtue of our living in Cobham and Stoke D’Abernon, we are much better-off than people who live in the slums of Glasgow, or Liverpool, or Portsmouth. Even in Cobham, as we know in the Foodbank, there are people living in great need.

There was a big demonstration yesterday organised by the trades unions, with the slogan that ‘Britain deserves a pay rise’. The bosses, it was said, had received pay rises and bonuses, even during the recession and during this time of austerity, but normal working people were on average £50 a week worse off.

For the first time in 50 years, Health Service staff such as nurses and midwives went on strike last week. The government had refused to give them a pay rise which an independent review body had awarded to them. The government’s answer was that, if they had awarded the pay rise, then fewer people could be employed.

In other words, it was better that more people had jobs which paid too little for them to live on, than that the government should find the money to pay our nurses and midwives properly for their vital work. And, at the same time, apparently the government can find the money for bombs and missiles in Iraq, and for tax cuts for the wealthy. I’d better not go into that area; you will complain that I am being political.

But clearly, there is a big gap – and a widening one – between the haves and the have-nots, both internationally, as between the western nations and the third world; say, between people in Britain and people in Sierra Leone: and nearer to home, in the towns and villages of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland. ‘The rich man in his castle, and the poor man at his gate.’ [Mrs C. F. Alexander, ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’]

In this context, I think we can all acknowledge that, relatively speaking, we are well-off. We ‘have this world’s good’, in Biblical terms.

So does this passage apply to us? Remember the ‘summary of the law’, which Jesus gave. We must love God, and love our neighbour. [Deut.6:5; Lev.19:18; Luke 10:27]

If we ‘see a brother or sister in need’, we are reminded about Jesus’ great parable of compassion, the story of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:29f). The Samaritan didn’t know much about the fellow he found lying injured in the road. He was in need, in need of medical attention and in need of a place of refuge.

Just think for a minute about what would happen if we came across a scruffy bloke lying in a gutter, perhaps looking the worse for wear, who’d been in a fight. Not really our sort of person. We might even think that he’d got himself into the fight. A bit bashed-up: but nothing to do with us. Remember the people who passed by on the other side, the priest and the Levite: respectable people. They didn’t want to get involved.

But Jesus taught us in that parable that whoever is in need, however unsuitable or strange they are, they are our neighbour, and we ought to show compassion, love, to them.

The people here at St Mary’s are great supporters of the Foodbank, and I know how much food and how much money you all give. It’s much appreciated.

But, not necessarily here, of course, I do sometimes hear comments or questions about what the Foodbank does, here in Cobham. Are there really needy people here? Are they really needy, or are they just swinging the lead?

I had a chat with a couple from Effingham the other day while I was at the car wash. They wanted to know how the Foodbank worked. I explained that it provides food for people who are hungry, but who don’t have enough money to buy food. I explained that they get a food voucher from an agency which can assess their needs objectively, such as the Jobcentre, Citizen’s Advice Bureau, Housing Benefit office or Cobham Centre for the Community, for example. Then they take their voucher to the Foodbank and receive a nutritionally balanced pack of food to last them and their family at least three days.

‘Oh, I know a Foodbank customer’, said the man I was talking to. ‘He keeps losing his job. He always knows how to do the job better than his boss, and he gets fired. And he drinks too much. He inherited his house. He raised money on a mortgage on it, and drank the money. He defaulted on the mortgage so he lost his house. I bet he comes begging to the Foodbank!’

In other words, the man was in need, but he was in need because he had behaved badly. He had brought misfortune on himself. It was his fault that he was hungry. And the implied thought was that we should not be helping people like that.

You see articles in the newspapers about so-called benefit cheats, scroungers, who prefer to live on benefits rather than work. You should be reassured, incidentally, that a major piece of research undertaken by churches nationally here in the UK found that only a tiny percentage of people are out of work for longer than one year, and that benefit fraud is similarly very small. I can give you the reference if you would like to read the report. [http://csc.ceceurope.org/fileadmin/filer/csc/Social_Economic_Issues/Truth-And-Lies-Report.pdf]

But go back to what S. John wrote in his letter here. ‘Whoso…. seeth his brother have need’: the only criterion is, does he have need? Not, is he deserving? Not, has he brought misfortune on himself? Did the chap on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho get himself into a fight? Did he provoke someone? The Samaritan didn’t ask. He did the right thing.

As you may know, the Foodbank keeps a record of the causes of people’s poverty, of the reasons why they have had to ask for food. The biggest cause, here in Cobham, is not withdrawal of benefit or any other reason to do with the cuts to the welfare state (although these do feature in our statistics); no, that’s not the biggest reason for hunger here. It is that the people, many of whom do have jobs, are just not being paid enough to live on.

We don’t ask whether they organise their lives badly: we don’t judge whether they could do things better. It may well be that, with our knowledge and, perhaps, superior education and intelligence, we could find a way out of poverty if it was us who was suffering it.

What we do is to offer as much advice and as much what’s called ‘signposting’ as we can, to organisations such as Christians Against Poverty, so our clients can get as much practical help as possible.

But, when it comes to a brother or sister in need, we try to follow Jesus’ advice, not to judge, not to be judgmental. The first thing is to feed them. Then we can try to see if there is a way for them to get out of the poverty trap. But it is never OK to blame a poor person for being poor.

Why should you agree? Why should you not feel that some people are more deserving than others? I suggest that S. John, in this saying, ‘Whoso hath this world’s good,’ and so on, is linking compassion for the needy with Jesus’ – and the Jewish law’s – first commandment, to love God, with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your strength. If you are not generous to the needy, then, S. John asks, how can you have love for God in you? Love God, and love your neighbour. But if you don’t love your neighbour, then it means you don’t love God either. As S. John says, in this wonderful lesson,

My little children, let us not love in word, neither in tongue; but in deed and in truth.

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Authority and Power

By publicsquare

September 28, 2014 //

Sermon for Holy Communion on the 15th Sunday after Trinity at All Saints’, Ockham, 28th Sept 2014
Ex. 17:1-7, Phil. 2:1-13, Matt. 21:23-32

‘Have you got a licence for that thing?’ I remember, when I was a graduate trainee, having a conversation with another trainee, visiting our office from Germany for a few months, who pointed out that, whereas In England everything is permitted, everything is authorised, unless it is forbidden, in Germany it is safer to assume that things are not allowed unless they are specifically permitted. Incidentally it used to be that way round in the golden age of the railways here too; coaches were designated ‘smoking’ rather than ‘non-smoking’.

I think that Jewish practice in the Temple around 33AD was closer to the German model which my friend described than to what we’re used to. ‘Have you got authority to preach in the way you’re doing? – to carry out miraculous healing, and so on?’ I suppose you might get a similar sort of reaction if a speaker prophesying the end of the world on Speakers’ Corner suddenly popped up in St Paul’s Cathedral. ‘Is he properly authorised?’ people would ask.

Authorised. I’m not sure that the concept of authority hasn’t sometimes brought its own problems. The whole question, to whose authority one defers, can be fraught with difficulty. In the time of the Reformation, Catholics were outlawed because it was feared that they owed allegiance to the Pope rather than to the King or Queen.

Both the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England are built on the concept of authority, on the apostolic succession, so-called, from Jesus’ Great Commission in Chapter 28 of St Matthew’s Gospel, where Jesus said to the disciples,

Full authority in heaven and on earth has been committed to me. Go forth therefore and make all nations my disciples…

So every ordained person is ordained by a bishop, who in turn is in a line of ordination which, the church says, it can trace back to the disciples, or specifically to St Peter.

People who were against women’s ordination tried to say that the apostolic succession was just from male disciples (although there were female disciples like Dorcas or Lydia very early in the church). The idea of ‘authority’ wasn’t at all helpful.

Authority isn’t all bad, however. There was a very happy event in the Church of England at Evensong in Guildford Cathedral on Friday, when our new Bishop of Guildford, who will actually be installed and will start work officially in February, was introduced to us. He is Bishop Andrew Watson, who is currently the Bishop of Aston – you know, as in Villa – in Birmingham – the suffragan bishop, as it’s called, the number 2 bishop in that diocese.

So very soon we will have a Bishop of Guildford again, and the service, when he is inducted, will use the idea of apostolic succession to confer authority on him, that he is in the tradition of ordination starting with Jesus’ first disciples.

In our lesson from St Paul’s Letter to the Philippians, St Paul gives advice to that very early church in Philippi on how they should conduct themselves as Christians.

They should be modest and look out for each other, selfless in their desire to put others’ interests first. Because, St Paul said, Jesus was ultimately modest in the same way: he ’emptied himself, in the form of a slave’, even though he was ‘in the form of God’, so that, even though demonstrating utter human weakness, Jesus gained the highest status in the Kingdom of God.

Something which, in the Old Testament, in the book of Isaiah, was supposed to be an attribute of God, that

… at the name of God, every knee should bend (Isaiah 45),

has now been refocused by Paul to be about Jesus: that in heaven at least, Jesus would have authority, would command respect. That is the authority which is said to come down to a new bishop, and indeed in his first words to us, as he anticipated receiving his new authority, Bishop Andrew did seem to show real modesty. We will pray for a continuing welcome for him and his family.

If there was at least one happy authority-event this week, in Bishop Andrew being announced as bishop-designate for Guildford, there was unfortunately also an unhappy one. This is our Parliament’s vote to wage war yet again in Iraq, against the background of the continuing crisis involving Islamic State in Iraq, Syria and perhaps wider in the Arab world.

Yet again we are seeing pictures from aircraft, or from cameras in the noses of UAVs, so-called drones, unmanned aerial vehicles, which show a building in black and white, perhaps with a few small stick men outside it, and perhaps with the odd vehicle coming in and out: then the target designator places a cross on the building in the picture, and seconds later, you see cataclysmic explosions, after which the building is obliterated. And, of course, so are the people.

We have heard here, and also in the context of the conflict in Palestine, in Gaza, that what is called ‘collateral damage’ occurs, that when bombing and shelling takes place, you can’t guarantee to hit only combatants, only soldiers. You may risk hitting innocent civilians as well. The Third and Fourth Geneva Conventions are clear that you are not supposed to shoot if there is a risk that you will hit non-combatants – even when they are human shields. Sadly, this is a provision of the Geneva Conventions which has been observed in the breach recently.

There is a huge contrast between this military might – ‘shock and awe’ – and the way that Jesus went around, emptying himself, taking the form of a slave, not deploying overwhelming force. I’m worried that, by going to war, we are deploying overwhelming force, but we are not persuading anybody, we are not changing hearts and minds.

But I know that there are other arguments along the lines that it is necessary to go to war because there is no other way of preventing genocide, which the IS, the so-called Islamic State, is threatening against anyone who does not subscribe to their version of Islam.

But who has authority in this? The pilot of a Tornado will say that he is acting under orders. His orders come from the military hierarchy, who are in turn ordered by Parliament. Where does Parliament’s authority come from?

‘From the will of the people’, you might say. But as the Scots proved, there is democracy and democracy. They had an 80+ % turnout. I’m not sure what the equivalent at the last General Election was, but it was far less. Instead would anyone seriously say now that he had authority from God to take a particular line? There are no easy answers, but it does seem to me that the same question could be asked today as the Jews asked Jesus all those years ago:

By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority?

Tags apostolic succession, Aston Villa, authority, Bishop Andrew Watson, Bishop of Guildford, Church of England, collateral damage, disciples, Dorcas, Evensong, Geneva Convention, Iraq, Islamic State, jesus christ, knee bow, Lydia, non-smoking, Parliament, railway, Roman Catholic, Syria, Tornado, UAV

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Where Sausages come from

By publicsquare

September 21, 2014 //

Sermon for Mattins for Harvest Festival at St Mary’s on 21st September 2014
Deut.8:1-10, 1 Cor. 15:35-44

Apparently many children today are not quite sure where sausages or chicken nuggets or hamburgers come from. They even have the same sort of difficulty with beans, especially baked beans. They think that perhaps they come from a special chicken nugget or baked bean factory! There is often consternation when the truth comes out, and they realise that they are eating what was once a bird, a chicken, or a cow – and that the delicious tomatoey baked beans were actually rather boring white things when they were harvested.

Some children even think that food somehow miraculously materialises from the supermarket, that Waitrose or Sainsbury’s is where chicken nuggets and the other favourites come from: and they don’t really look behind that.

Harvest Festival is a time for some gentle correctives to these thoughts. There are a few prize marrows and other large, improbable vegetables which people have grown in their gardens and which they bring to church in celebration of the fertility of their garden.

But the children’s greatest source of food, the supermarket, also provides a lot of the food which we bring to church at Harvest Festival, in tins, in packets, in bags: and leaving aside for the moment the question where the food came from, we can say that another important thing about Harvest Festival is where the food is going to go: that we intend to give the food to people who don’t have enough to eat. That’s fine.

But I sometimes wonder whether it’s not just children who, in a way, think that food just comes, just comes from the supermarket, and don’t look behind it to piece together the full creation story.

It’s rather tempting, even for us, not to worry where the food comes from, if the food just comes. Most of us are fortunate enough to have enough money to be able to go into Waitrose or Sainsbury’s, or to the fish van, to the Patisserie or to Conisbee’s or to the Surrey Hills butcher in Oxshott – and just pick up the food that we need, that our families need.

Because we’re grown-ups, we know that the meat and the fish don’t just come from steak trees or salmon bushes, and we know that peas and beans have to be grown and harvested. We’re pleased when the beans come from a farm in Surrey or Sussex. We sort of don’t mind when the beans come from Kenya, because we feel we’re helping to support the economy of a poorer country by buying their beans – and they are very good beans.

Some people say, in the light of this, that there’s not much point in worrying about the question of creation. They look at the creation stories in Genesis – God creating the world in six days and resting on the seventh – and they dismiss it all as being just picturesque stories with no scientific basis in fact.

They go further than that because they say that just because the Creation story in Genesis is clearly just a story, and we now know better about how things are created, as a result of Darwin’s work, for example: that things just evolve, and through the principle of the survival of the fittest, they get better, more apt for their purposes, as each generation comes forward; because of that, there’s no need to think about a creator or a sustainer of life.

The stuff just gets made, it just grows, it turns up at Waitrose and Sainsbury’s, we buy it and we eat it. There’s no need really to think about a creator any more. Things just work anyway. That’s what people say.

But imagine that you could in fact construct all the physical bits that go to make up a living thing, say, a seed for potatoes. Supposing your seed had all the right biological makeup so that it was just like a naturally occurring seed. And if you planted your synthetic seed in the ground alongside a naturally occurring one, what would happen? I’m pretty sure that in the current state of knowledge at least, our synthetic seed would not grow. There is no spark of life in it, whereas a naturally occurring seed, which has been grown in a nursery, Tozers for example at Pyports, will, if you plant it and water it, have a very good chance of growing into a plant and having life.

St Paul makes the distinction in his 1st letter to the Corinthians, chapter 3: ‘I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase.’ It does seem to be still true that God gives life. We can infer our way back to the presence of God precisely because we can’t ultimately create life.

We can create all the things which may give rise to life: we can mess about with genetics so as to create cloned sheep like Dolly; we can certainly interfere with genetics by selective breeding; but what we can’t do is to provide that spark of life.

For many people who feel there’s no need to look behind the supermarket, that might tempt them into becoming atheists. No need to bother with a creator. No need to think about how that creator might regard us, if you think there is no need to be concerned about how and why our supermarket basket can be filled with such wonderful things. I’m afraid that accounts for quite a lot of people today.

But supposing you turn the thing on its head, and you say clearly that, although we know it grows, we don’t know what starts it growing, what that spark of life is, that makes a real seed, a naturally occurring seed, grow, whereas the synthetic seed, which we have made up from artificial materials, stays inert. If we accept that it is God the creator at work, then all of a sudden the idea that all you need to bother about is how you get hold of things, from the supermarket or wherever, not where they ultimately come from – all of a sudden, that idea becomes very inadequate.

Because if there is a creator, if we accept that there is a creator, that our seed will not grow unless God gives the increase, then it’s very difficult to ignore the presence of the creator. Moreover, because creation, and what we would now call sustainability in creation, clearly does happen, because seeds do grow, we can see the tracks of God. We can see God at work.

The harvest shows us that God is sustaining our world. It’s another dimension, a spiritual aspect, to what we see and enjoy. Hence the various places in the Bible which suggest that the physical things, which we use or which nourish us physically, are not the only things we need. ‘Man does not live by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God’ comes in Deuteronomy, in our first lesson this morning, and Jesus quotes it when he is being tempted by the Devil in the wilderness [Matt.4:4].

And then – you see – it all goes much further. St Paul realises that the power he sees at work in creation, what makes the seed, just a bare seed, grow into something quite different, is the key to understanding – well, maybe not fully understanding, but believing in, the resurrection of the dead at the end. The key is how God’s creative power transforms and grows things. ‘Behold, I shew you a mystery; we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed’ (1 Cor. 15:51).

Now, what price your scientific scoffing, the sort of thing Richard Dawkins says here? If you can just ignore creation, and get the wherewithal for your life just from the supermarket, is that enough? Would you really want to pass up the possibility that there is so much more, that you can have so much more?

I say that we should see harvest, by all means the harvest here at Harvest Festival, and the harvest we can get any time from Waitrose, as signs of something altogether greater. It’s not just what you pay at the checkout. There is an eternal checkout to consider too. ‘It is sown in corruption; it is raised in incorruption: … It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body.’ So remember –

We plough the fields and scatter
The good seed on the land.
But it is fed and watered
By God’s almighty hand. M.Claudius, tr. Jane M. Campbell

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Magicians

By publicsquare

September 8, 2014 //

Sermon for Evensong on the Twelfth Sunday after Trinity, 7th September 2014
Acts 19:1-20 – The Sons of Sceva

All being well, I shall see you on Wednesday. Touch wood, fingers crossed, it’ll stay fine until then. Touch wood: fingers crossed; I expect some of you will be preparing to tackle me on the way out already!

I expect some of you may say that touching wood and crossing one’s fingers and so on are superstitious gestures – and that no true Christian should get involved with superstition.

What’s the difference between what S. Paul was doing, in performing ‘extraordinary miracles’ [Acts 19:11], so that, when handkerchieves or aprons that had touched Paul’s skin were brought to the sick, they were cured, and ‘evil spirits came out of them’, and on the other hand what the seven sons of Sceva did? We are told that they were also casting out demons, making people better, and curing people by invoking the name of ‘Jesus whom Paul proclaims’.

Presumably, some of the time it must have worked for the sons of Sceva. They must have cured some people, because it says that they ‘were doing this’ [ησαν … ποιουντες], not that they had just come along to see whether they could do it. On this occasion an evil spirit challenges them, saying that he recognises Jesus and Paul, but not the sons of Sceva.

This is all very strange. These days we have some difficulty understanding miracles at all, but here we are being asked to distinguish between authentic miracles and mere superstition, mumbo-jumbo.

Even today some people still do perform exorcisms, to drive out ‘evil spirits’. There is still in some quarters a belief in demonic possession. The distinction which we’re supposed to draw here is between mere superstition, black magic or something, and God, genuinely working through S. Paul and the disciples.

Miracles are said to be all right – and indeed they demonstrate the authenticity of the Christian message – but black magic, superstition, is not all right. But what is the difference?

If I was a wizard in Harry Potter and I declaimed a spell invoking powers, magic powers, and presumably the names of powerful witches or wizards and magicians in order to make my spell happen, this is said to be entirely different from praying to God, and asking in one’s prayers for Him to do certain things, for example, to heal a sick person.

I think this is very tricky; because if you pray for God to do something, for example, praying that somebody who is ill should get better, we traditionally invoke Jesus to help us in this. We end most of our prayers, ‘through Jesus Christ our Lord’. Through Jesus Christ: we pray through Him, our advocate in heaven.

We say that, but we can’t possibly know the mechanics in any detail. Why do we pray ‘through’ Jesus Christ? Prayer is ‘talking to God’, not, surely, giving Him a message through an intermediary, or asking for somebody to intercede for you, like a barrister in court. Of course, if you are a Catholic, this isn’t a strange idea. ‘Hail Mary, mother of grace, … pray for us’, they say. There is a difference between Protestants and Catholics here. Article XXII of the 39 Articles (on page 620 of your little blue Prayer Book), says,

The Romish Doctrine concerning … Worshipping, and Adoration, as well of Images as of Reliques, and also Invocation of Saints, is a fond thing vainly invented, and grounded upon no warranty of Scripture, but rather repugnant to the Word of God.

The Catholic idea is described in Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae (22.1). ‘We have a high priest who has entered the heavens: Jesus, the Son of God. The characteristic role of a priest is to act as a go-between between God and his people, handing on to the people the things of God, offering to God the prayers of the people …’

We are in Reformation territory here – Calvin resisted Thomas’ idea of priesthood, and put forward instead the idea of a priesthood of all believers. As Anglicans, we still hold to the compromise between the Catholicism of Queen Mary and the Protestantism of the boy king Edward (or really, of his advisers) made by Queen Elizabeth I in 1559. This kept the Catholic orders of bishops, priests and deacons, and used the word ‘ministers’, ministers of religion, standing between God and people. So it’s not a big mental step from having your worship mediated, passed on to God by a minister, to being comfortable with the idea of Jesus as our ‘mediator and advocate’ as several of the prayers in the Book of Common Prayer call Him.

In the light of this, were the sons of Sceva doing anything particularly wrong? They were praying, invoking, calling on the evil spirit to come out of the afflicted person, and invoking the power of Jesus to strengthen their petition.

What is magic supposed to be all about? If I ‘magic’ something, I am trying to bring about something in the future. But it’s not supposed to be necessarily a good thing. In this passage, many of the people who were converted had previously believed in magic and had practised magic – Ephesus was apparently known for magical formulae (the Εφησια Γράμματα or Ephesian Letters) which were said to ward off evil spirits. When they were converted, they gave it all up and burned their magic books.

What is it that we can get from this today? Is there something harmful in Harry Potter, and does it matter if a good Christian crosses his fingers or touches wood? I think the difference is that crossing one’s fingers or touching wood is not something which we take very seriously. Doing these gestures is not a sign that we are really invoking some magic powers or undermining our belief in one true God, all-powerful, the creator.

It might be different if we were, to some extent, hedging our bets spiritually, as perhaps some of the early Christians may have done, believing in God, believing in Jesus Christ, but still – just to be on the safe side – making sure they didn’t do anything to offend their old gods.

The difference is perhaps this. If one invokes Jesus as mediator and advocate, the prayer is always subject to the overriding idea that ‘Thy will be done’, in other words, a prayer is always as Jesus prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane, ‘not as I will, but as thou wilt’ [Matt. 26:39]. There is no question, in prayer, of trying to direct the future. God works through people, through believers, not the other way around. Indeed, if we look at our lesson again in Acts 19, at verse 11 we read, ‘God did extraordinary miracles through Paul.’ Paul didn’t cast spells. God did the miracles.

In magic, the idea of the magician making something happen is central. But the power to do this which is invoked is not divine, but mysterious and not necessarily good, not good in the sense of being beneficial for all. It implies that the magician believes – invokes – the power of something other than God: indeed, it’s possible that it could be something opposed to God.

Now all this is predicated on the assumption that we accept that there is such a thing as demonic possession, and that there are ‘evil spirits’ as opposed to mental illness. I think, however, that whatever our view on that is, we can understand the distinction which S. Luke, the author of Acts, is drawing. Harry Potter is harmless. But to pray to God, and to invoke our mediator and advocate, Jesus, is real and serious. Do tell me what you think!

Tags 39 Articles, Acts of the Apostles, advocate, Article XXII, Calvin, exorcism, Hail Mary, Harry Potter, Jesus, magic, mediator, prayer, Priesthood of all Believers, Reformation, Sceva, St Paul, superstition, Thomas Aquinas

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