‘… the house of Mary, … where a large company was at prayer.’

By publicsquare
July 27, 2014 //
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Sermon for Evensong on the Sixth Sunday after Trinity, 27th July 2014 at St Mary the Virgin, Stoke D’Abernon
Acts 12:1-19.

What a week! The church is being persecuted: Christians are being killed, just for being Christians: there are disciples in prison. Brutality, killing, everywhere. Equally true in our lesson from Acts, and still – even more so – today. In Mosul, near to the ancient city of Nineveh, which Canon Andrew White, the Vicar of Baghdad, memorably said yesterday on Radio 4’s Today Programme, was ‘made famous by that dubious submarine evangelist Jonah’ – you know, Jonah and the whale – fundamentalist Moslems have been confronting Christians and giving them a choice between converting to Islam and death. It was reported that there was an option of paying a fine, but Canon White says he doesn’t think it was real. Convert or die.

Or if you live in Sudan and they think you have changed your religion away from Islam, again you will be killed, killed by due process of law. Dr Meriam Ibrahim was brought up a Christian, but her father, who deserted his family soon after she was born, was a Moslem. Somehow she was accused of apostasy and sentenced to be flogged – 100 lashes (when they reckon 40 is life-threatening) – and then executed. She was heavily pregnant, and was forced to give birth in prison while shackled to the floor. A completely harmless, innocent doctor. But she still had the courage to stand up for her faith. She refused to renounce it. She would rather suffer – and she did. She is worried that her baby may have been damaged by being born when she was unable to move her legs because of her chains.

What a week. We cannot understand the unspeakable horror that is happening in Gaza. 1,000 Palestinians dead and countless more seriously hurt. According to the United Nations and the BBC, almost all were innocent civilians. About 40 Israelis dead, all but three of them soldiers.

Yesterday an British Apache attack helicopter flew over my garden. You could see its machine guns, missile and bomb pods. Imagine that helicopter – because that’s what the Israelis have too – flying towards you and letting loose that vast destructive force at you and your house. Or if not a helicopter, a fast jet or a so-called drone – actually some of them are as big as an airliner – or a Merkava battle tank. You have nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. They hit hospitals. On Friday they shot up an ambulance and killed a doctor. One in four of the people they have killed, according to Save the Children, is a child.

I’m not going into the merits of this as between Israelis and Palestinians. The great conductor Daniel Barenboim, who holds both Israeli and Palestinian passports, has written a very good piece in yesterday’s Guardian, http://gu.com/p/4v8bg, in which he says that what is wrong, at bottom, is that both sides want each other’s land. You can argue it all ways – but only one thing is certain, he says, and that is that violence, the use of force, solves nothing.

Of course the Israelis don’t want the constant threat of rockets falling on them (although they have developed the highly effective Iron Dome anti-missile shield system). Of course the Palestinians don’t want to be annihilated by one of the most powerful armed forces in the world. But – and this is what Daniel Barenboim says – it doesn’t help either side to continue the use of force. Remember, Daniel Barenboim knows about getting the two sides together. He created the famous West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, in which musicians from both sides play wonderfully together. They have been at the Proms, although I don’t think they’re coming this year.

And then there’s MH17, the airliner shot down over the Ukraine. Whatever else may be true about that, the people who died were innocent bystanders. No wonder the Dutch prime minister is so angry, blaming the Russians.

What a week. The poor early Christians must have felt similar emotions, in that Passover time that our lesson was about. They were innocent. But the majority around them, the Roman army of occupation and the Jewish majority, didn’t like them. They wanted to be rid of them. Maybe some of the animus against them was like the prohibition against apostasy in parts of Islam today. The early church contained a lot of people who were of Jewish origin. They were seen as apostates, people who had turned away from the true religion. They must be killed.

That was what they had in mind for St Peter. He knew. He said, ‘The Lord hath sent his angel, and hath delivered me … from all the expectation of the people of the Jews’. Sinister understatement – to have been delivered from all the ‘expectation’. What did they expect? More death. Execution. Stoning. What a wonderful escape!

But now, here, unless you work for one of the relief agencies or for one of the broadcasters or newspapers, it’s difficult to be really involved. Really involved – not with the Roman world 2,000 years ago, and not with the Middle East today, but here in Stoke D’Abernon. What are we supposed to do?

What would Jesus do? It’s clear, in the Sermon on the Mount. Matthew chapter 5. ‘You have learned that they were told, “An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.” You know – the Israelis say, we will stop our military operation for 24 hours – but if there are any rockets, we will retaliate. An eye for an eye. But Jesus said, ‘…. resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.’ Daniel Barenboim. I don’t think he’s a Christian – but he’s got it. Turn the other cheek. Don’t launch an artillery strike. And certainly, don’t fire off any more rockets either. No more war, however angry, however justified you feel you are.

Now that may be absolutely right – but is that likely to do any good? Just for all of us good Surrey people to nod sagely and say, yes, they must stop killing each other: it’s surely not very likely to do anything, is it?

I’ve held back from my look at this terrible week two good things, two good things which might still give us a glimpse of grace, a reason to hope.

The first is in our lesson from the Acts of the Apostles. It says, ‘Peter was kept in prison under constant watch, while the church kept praying fervently for him to God’. Kept in prison under constant watch – just like poor Meriam Ibrahim. But the church was praying to God for him – just as, all over the world, and certainly here at St Mary’s, Christians have been praying for Meriam. So the first is that there was a lot of prayer, prayer for release from the tyranny of oppression, prayers for release from imprisonment for Peter and for Meriam.

And of course the second is that the prayers were answered. St Peter escaped. His chains fell off. ‘Now I know it is true’, he said; ‘the Lord has sent his angel’ – he has answered all those prayers. A million people signed petitions calling for the Sudanese government to release Dr Meriam. Many, many of those online petitions were also prayers. And now she has been freed: not only just freed, although that is good enough: but she has been welcomed and blessed by Pope Francis. The prayers were answered. ‘The pope thanked Meriam and her family for their courageous demonstration of constancy of faith. Meriam gave thanks for the great support and comfort which she received from the prayers of the pope and of many other people who believe and are of goodwill’, said Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi, according to Friday’s ‘Guardian’.

At the ‘house of Mary, … where a large company were at prayer.’ We are also in the house of Mary. Although we are far away from the strife in the Middle East, I think we can learn from these happy stories, of Peter’s escape from prison and from Dr Meriam and her family getting away safe. We can learn that it is important always to pray. Prayers are answered. They were, they are, answered here.

As we pray, let us pray for all the injustice and violence in the world to stop, and for the innocent prisoners to be freed. Let’s not forget that, as we bring our concerns before God in our prayers, He may speak to us. He may inspire us to take action. We can give, or we can agitate, we can even be political.

Canon Andrew White said yesterday that in his work in Iraq, the most important help and support had come from the people of the UK. Britain more than anywhere else had tried to help the Christians in Iraq. So let us consider what we can do to help the Foundation for Reconciliation and Relief based in St George’s Church in Baghdad. Look them up with the help of Google – http://frrme.org. Look them up. Give them some money, if you can. And say a prayer.

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The Conduct Costs Project – Description and Suggested Prescription

By publicsquare
July 21, 2014 //
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Roger McCormick and his colleagues in what is to become the ‘CCP Foundation’ (see http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/conductcosts/contacts-2/) have produced research which shows that fines and damages paid and estimated for misconduct, in the 10 banks which they have studied, in the last 5 years have amounted to £157 billion worldwide. In the UK alone this amounts, on average, to nearly £6 billion per annum.

These figures are now being analysed further to identify whether any of the banks under review are improving their performance: and to identify criteria by which performance in this area can be compared, across different countries, markets and types of bank.

It is however clear that conduct costs, or rather the cost of misconduct, are a very significant impost on the cost of trade and the efficiency of the banking system, and are therefore, as a matter of public policy, a mischief which urgently calls for a remedy. Indeed even the bankers themselves recognise that there is an urgent need for public trust in their activities to be restored.

Given that such misconduct is clearly a bad thing, how is it to be stopped? McCormick tells a story to bankers and others at his seminars. Imagine you are on one side of a transaction, and you notice that your counterparty has made a serious mistake, which they have not noticed. The result of the mistake is that you will do much better out of the transaction than you would have done if the other side had not made their mistake.

What do you do? Keep silent and pocket the profit, or point out the mistake – and get what you would reasonably have expected to get out of the transaction, but no more?

Today, McCormick has said, many of those, to whom he puts the story, find it difficult to answer. It might be thought that their chief objective is to make money, to maximise profit. It is not part of their objective to do this in an ethical way. Instead, their only thought of ethical considerations is whether they will, by acting in a particular way, lay themselves open to regulatory sanction. The criterion is not whether it is bad to do something, but whether a policeman will catch me if I do it.

But regulators, almost by definition, offer no solution: we are, after all, trying to reduce the amount of fines and penalties. If we simply say that regulators should regulate less strictly, it would reduce the fines, but it would not necessarily improve the conduct. (We can observe in passing that in identifying the mischief which is banking misconduct, we have defined it by the amount it costs rather than by its moral badness – but it nevertheless remains a serious mischief.)

What is to be done? Lawyers will be familiar with the alleged antithesis between what is lawful, and what is morally right. The existence of that antithesis is, it could be said, a major factor in facilitating banking misconduct. It might look as though bankers’ conduct is determined not by any consideration whether something is morally right, but rather whether it is legally permitted – or whether, even if it is unlawful, whether there is a risk of being caught out by a regulator.

It seems that the only way to obviate conduct costs entirely is to improve conduct – morally. If it were true that a course of action needed to be both lawful and morally right, this would leave no room for moral arbitrage of the kind which McCormick’s story brings out.

How can this be brought about? I suggest that, as well as experts in the upholding of professional standards – such as members of the International Accounting Standards Committee, say – it would be helpful to invite the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, to widen the scope of his activity, for example in the St Paul’s Institute, so as to include advice to and involvement with the Conduct Costs Project.

Hugh D Bryant
Reader (Licensed Lay Minister) in the Church of England; former Solicitor and Marine Underwriter

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Publicans and Sinners

By publicsquare
July 6, 2014 //
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Sermon for Evensong on the Third Sunday after Trinity, 6th July 2014 at St Mary the Virgin, Stoke D’Abernon
Luke 18:31-19:10

When I was little, I was rather puzzled in Sunday School and in scripture lessons at school, when we came across Bible references to ‘publicans and sinners’ (the exact phrase comes in Luke 15:1 – KJV). I know that modern Bibles translate ‘publican’ as ‘tax gatherer’ or ‘tax collector’, but in the Authorised Version, which is the one I grew up with, they are called ‘publicans’.

Maybe it was my Methodist upbringing, but for a long time I thought that the Bible had it in for pub landlords – presumably, because they allowed the dreaded alcohol to be taken on their premises.

In time I learned the correct meaning. ‘Publican’ comes from publicanus in Latin: somebody who looks after publicum, the public, or state, revenue.

But I was still to some extent puzzled, why tax collectors should be singled out as being automatically, by their very nature, sinful. ‘. when the Pharisees saw it, [they asked], “Why does your master eat with publicans and sinners?” Matt.9:11, KJV.

And here is the same thing, in the context of Jesus eating with Zacchaeus, Zacchaeus the superintendent of tax gatherers. However much one may hate paying tax, it does seem extreme to equate being a tax gatherer with being a sinner, just because of what you do for a living.

Even the people who were tax gatherers, publicans, acknowledged the fact that they were sinners. Think of the parable of the Pharisee and the publican, both saying their prayers. The Pharisee prayed, ‘God I thank thee that I am not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican …’ The publican would only say, ‘God be merciful to me, a sinner’ (Luke 18:11,13, KJV).

It’s not obvious what the sin involved in being a tax gatherer was. It doesn’t seem to contravene any of the Ten Commandments. The Romans had privatised the business of tax collection in what we would recognise as a rather modern way. Publicans had to bid for franchises, the right to collect taxes in a particular place. They weren’t paid a salary. So long as they paid over to the Roman governor the amount assessed for their district, whatever they made on top, they could keep.

That made them uniquely reprehensible to their fellow Jews. I don’t think we would feel very warmly towards tax inspectors if they’d been privatised. Imagine – you might have a special division of Wonga, or nPower, collecting your tax. Instead of the tax office simply collecting what the government had decreed should be your tax liability, the Wonga Tax Division would charge a steep uplift on top of the basic tax price. Because they had negotiated an exclusive franchise for collection of tax in Stoke D’Abernon, say, there would be nothing you could do about it. You would have to stand idly by while these people made huge profits out of something which you might well think ought to be a government function.

So they were hated; so much so, that just being a publican, being a tax collector, was equated with being bad, with being sinful. Perhaps Zacchaeus had heard that when Jesus met Matthew, he had enjoyed a meal which had been attended by a lot of tax-gatherers. So Zacchaeus might have inferred that Jesus wasn’t automatically opposed to tax gatherers (see Matt. 9:10-11).

In a way, you might think it was a bit strange that Zacchaeus, being a top tax man and rich, would cast aside his dignity, run ahead of the crowd and climb up into a tree. Of course some people do clamber up into inaccessible places in order to get a better view of some VIP coming by. I wonder whether we’ll see people climbing into trees to get a better view of Sophie, Countess of Wessex, when she comes to open the Riverhill beautification on Wednesday afternoon.

Somehow I have a feeling that, although there will be plenty of rich people there, I don’t think they’ll be climbing up into trees. But Zacchaeus did – and Jesus spotted him in the sycamore tree. ‘Be quick and come down; I must come and stay with you today.’ (Luke 19:5). Said Jesus, ‘Because it’s imperative that I come and stay with you. [My literal translation].’ Not, ‘Would it be all right if I came and stayed with you?’ It’s an imperative; it’s necessary [δει] that I come and stay with you.

And Zacchaeus came down, and made Jesus welcome at his house. ‘He received him joyfully’, it says. But everyone who saw it ‘began to grumble’. There’s a wonderful onomatopoeic Greek word in the original here, διεγογγυζον [‘diegonguzon’]: what a wonderfully grumbly word it is! ‘διεγογγυζον’ – they muttered, they murmured, among themselves.

What they muttered was, ‘He has gone to stay with a man who is a sinner: a publican, a tax-gatherer.’ Then the story cuts to Zacchaeus’ house, because we hear – almost as though Zacchaeus knows what they are saying – that he reacts to it by doing good. The modern translation [NRSV] says he said, ‘Half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor… and if I have defrauded anyone .. I will pay back four times as much.

The Greek doesn’t say that. The Greek says, ‘I am giving [διδωμι] half my money to the poor … and I am repaying four-fold’ [αποδιδωμι τετραπλουν].

I think that’s quite important. There isn’t any conditionality to it: no if something-or-other, then I will do something. He’s saying, ‘I am doing it.’ If it was, ‘I will do it, I will give half my money to the poor, and if I have ripped anybody off I will give them back four times what they gave me’, then it would look like a sort of a bargain. Look, Jesus: if I give half my money to the poor or if I give compensation for all the exploitation I’ve done, will you let me into the Kingdom of Heaven? Will you forgive me my sins?

But that’s not what he says. Jesus has already said he wants to come and stay with him. Indeed, he must stay with him, he says; and Zacchaeus has received him gladly. So it’s not a question that Zacchaeus needs to do things, in order for Jesus to want to come to him, to be at home with him. That has already happened.

It’s more a question of how Zacchaeus reacts to Jesus being at home with him. Having Jesus in the house makes Zacchaeus want to be generous and to right the wrongs which he has done.

So this is a parable, a piece of Jesus’ teaching, not just a nice story of a little chap in a sycamore tree. If you compare Zacchaeus with the blind man, whose faith has made him whole, just earlier in the story, Zacchaeus is much more tentative. He’s not specially faithful. He’s just curious – which is why he climbs up in the tree for a better look. But he didn’t make any protestations of faith. He simply made Jesus welcome.

It’s a lesson which still holds good today. If we are open to the good news of Jesus – if we always ask, ‘What would Jesus do?’ – then we will want to follow Him. We will want to go the extra mile, to make generous charitable gifts, to face up to things we’ve done wrong, and do more than we have to, to put them right. And it doesn’t matter if we aren’t especially good people. Indeed, we could be really bad people – but Jesus will still want to come and stay. Publicans and sinners. Could one of them be one of us?

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A New Beginning

By publicsquare
June 16, 2014 //
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Sermon for Evening Prayer on Saturday 15th June 2014, after the Prayer Book Society, Guildford Branch, AGM
Exodus 34:1-10, Mark 1:1-13

After the AGM. A new beginning. A new deal. Moses had broken the tablets written by God – ‘tables of stone, written by the finger of God’ [Ex. 31:18]. He broke them when Aaron made the Golden Calf and got the Israelites to worship the Golden Calf rather than the One True God. They broke their covenant with God, so Moses broke the tablets containing the words of the covenant [Ex. 32:19].

And then Moses met the Lord, who came down in the pillar of cloud, and begged The Lord to forgive the Israelites and renew His covenant. The God of Israel was not a vengeful god; the Lord forgave His chosen people and renewed the covenant, giving Moses two new replacement tablets of stone on which the Lord had written: various commandments, (more than just the 10 Commandments), all designed to make for decent humane living.

The Israelites experienced God in the most direct way. God, JHWH, revealed Himself to His prophet Moses and He told Moses what He wanted His people to do.

In those days, scripture, holy writing, was supposed to be, literally, the word of the Lord. Even today, Moslem people believe that their scripture, the Quran, is the result of direct divine inspiration.

By the time Jesus came along, the Commandments had been copied, written down many times, and the Jews all knew what the commandments of God were. God had made an agreement with the Israelites, through their representative, through Moses. It was written down: it was a written contract.

With John the Baptist, people were renewed in their Jewish religion by ritual washing, being baptised in the River Jordan. There was no contract-making, nothing written except the original Jewish Bible, containing the words of the covenant between God and Abraham – renewed between God and Moses.

The covenant, the understanding, the link between God and his chosen people, was expressed to be by water and the Spirit. When Jesus presented Himself for baptism, God appeared. God spoke, not just to a prophet, but to anyone who was listening. ‘Thou art my beloved Son’ …[Mark 1:11]. And this began Jesus’ adult mission on earth, those three momentous years which changed the world.

We should perhaps pause at that point, since this is the Prayer Book Society at worship, and observe in a respectful way the fact that, whereas the Lord’s covenant with Israel through Abraham and through Moses was a matter of words. Jesus came in water and spirit [John 3:5] – and then above all, in the flesh, as a man. It wasn’t a question what was written or the detail of what was said, but of who He was that made a difference; so although we set great store by having the right words, the best words, to express the most important things in life, our relationship with God – and we find those words in the Book of Common Prayer – we must draw a respectful distinction between that situation and Moses and Abraham’s tablets of stone.

That covenant, that contract, those words written under the finger of God, were not replicated when Jesus came to be baptised by John the Baptist. Indeed I would suggest that there has been quite a lot of harm done by the idea that Scripture is literally written down by God. I think we can take some comfort from the fact that the Book of Common Prayer was clearly the work of human hands, indeed human hands informed by a lot of prayer, and by the response of the Holy Spirit to that prayer.

But albeit with the benefit of prayer, the book was written by a man, by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, in the middle of the 1500s. Cranmer based it on existing liturgy, usually in Latin, so he wasn’t making it up. Instead he was using the best bits that had evolved over the hundreds of years beforehand.

I started out by mentioning new beginnings, new years. This, the week of Pentecost, Whit week, is the beginning of the Christian year, the beginning of the Church year. Last Sunday was Whitsunday, when we celebrated the coming of the Holy Spirit: mysterious flames, the disciples speaking in tongues. Although they were recognised as being just ordinary bods from Galilee, what they said was understood by everyone, irrespective what country each person listening came from.

Tomorrow is Trinity Sunday: Father, Son and Holy Ghost, Holy Spirit.

God appearing in the pillar of fire or out of the burning bush to Moses: the father, the creator.

God the Son – ‘Thou art my beloved Son’

and last weekend, God the Holy Spirit, the breath of God. ‘The wind wills where it listeth’ [John 3:8].

None of this will translate literally, either as a matter of language or as a matter of metaphysics.

It’s difficult for us to believe in the sort of God who dealt with the Israelites, taking a very personal interest in what they did and responding to very basic prayers – ‘Save us from the Egyptians!’ ‘Save us from the Ammonites and the Amalekites. Give us victory in battle.’

It’s very difficult for us to believe in that kind of God. Easier for us to believe in God incarnate, in Jesus Christ. He was clearly a historical figure.

It may be easier, today, to recognise the work of the Holy Spirit. All of us, however unspiritual, surely have had those moments when something has happened, or a thought has popped into your brain, which you can’t really account for, but which nevertheless suddenly helps you to make sense of a difficult situation.

Obviously those sort of feelings don’t just pop up at will every time we pray. But it does seem to me that it would be worthwhile to carry on looking out for them. I suppose our take on that, as PBS members, is that on listening out for the ‘still, small voice of calm’, we feel that we may find it more easily using Cranmer’s words than in some twenty-first century banality.

Wherever you are going to find it – that still, small voice of calm, the voice of the Spirit – it is worth looking out for.

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God in Three Persons, Blessed Trinity

By publicsquare
June 15, 2014 //
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Sermon for Mattins on Trinity Sunday 2014
Isaiah 6:1-8, Mark 1:1-11

Today is Trinity Sunday. We commemorate the Holy Trinity: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. If you turn to page 27 in your little blue Prayer Books [Book of Common Prayer], you will see that there is a rubric which tells you when the words which follow can be used. That includes Trinity Sunday. So instead of what we did chant, the Apostles’ Creed, ‘I believe in God, the Father almighty, maker of Heaven and earth … and in Jesus Christ His only Son our Lord, ….’ and then, ‘I believe in the Holy Ghost …’, instead of that, we could have said the Creed of St Athanasius, called ‘Quicunque Vult’, Latin for ‘Whoever wants’, that is, whoever wants to be saved; this is what they must believe, if they are to be fit for salvation at the day of judgment.

If you read it afterwards at home, you’ll see that this Creed really goes into the question who God is, and what He is. This all comes from the revelation of Jesus: that Jesus appeared on earth, as a human being.

‘Day by day like us He grew.
He was little,weak and helpless.
Tears and smiles like us He knew.’
[Mrs C.F. Alexander, Once in Royal David’s City, Common Praise, hymn 66]

But He did more than a normal human being could possibly have done. Specifically, of course, He did miracles. And the biggest miracle of all, He was resurrected from the dead. So whatever else you might say, He wasn’t exactly like other men.

‘Thou art my beloved Son’ [Mark 1:11]

Then, when Jesus had ascended, after His wonderful life and death and resurrection, at Pentecost, last Sunday, Whit Sunday, the Holy Spirit came on the disciples. They realised that God still cared for them. Their Lord was still there. His Spirit is with us.

So when we think of God, the Christian way to do it is to think of the three ‘persons’ of God, as they’re called: the father, the creator; the son, and the Holy Ghost, the Holy Spirit.

‘God in three persons, blessed Trinity’ we sing in the hymn [Reginald Heber, Holy, holy, holy! Lord God Almighty! Common Praise, hymn 202], but what does it really mean? It’s a slightly odd way of thinking about our Heavenly Father, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit. Normally we approach those sacred mysteries one by one, and especially through thinking about Jesus Himself and studying the Gospels, His life and teaching here on earth.

The voice from heaven said, Thou art my beloved Son’. So if we accept that this was the voice of God, He said he had a Son. Somehow related to, or representative of, that god, but in the form of a human being. God is not just the Creator.

But then, perhaps those two, Father and Son, are no longer visible: but surely, we are still able to discern lots of greater or lesser occasions when it becomes apparent in various ways that God is still at work here among us. That is the third face of God, the Holy Ghost, the Holy Spirit.

If there hadn’t been Jesus Christ, or if we hadn’t accepted that He was more than just a prophet or a great teacher, and if we had not recognised the presence of the Holy Spirit, then one would be left with worshipping God as Creator, but not knowing whether He was still actively involved with us; whether He cared for us, or whether in fact God had simply wound up the mechanism of life and set it going: and then gone on to look at other things.

(Incidentally that is roughly where the Jewish and Moslem religions are. They recognise the life of Jesus and they acknowledge Him to have been a great prophet: but nothing more.)

But we know that He did things that would normally be completely impossible, culminating in His glorious death and resurrection. Resurrection from the dead. So Jesus has god-like powers. He isn’t just a great preacher. He really had power to heal, in fact even to raise people from the dead; and when He Himself died, power to be resurrected, three days later. We read they heard the voice of God, saying, Thou art my beloved Son’.

The early church had big debates about how to understand the true nature of God and of His Son. One of the early fathers, Arius, decided that in fact, God was not just God in three persons, but that there were effectively three gods: father, son and Holy Spirit were all gods independent of each other. But if that were true, our understanding of God would be very odd indeed. If the father created the son in the normal way, and if the father and the son together created the Holy Spirit, then who created the creators?

Is it true, or would it be true under that arrangement, that Jesus was divine? It’s a very difficult thing to hold in our heads. ‘God in three persons, blessed Trinity.’ There is a distinction made, in all the early theology, between ‘persons’ and ‘substance’. Thomas Aquinas puts it very simply. A person is who we are: a substance is what we are. Thomas wrote:

‘We can say the Father is another who from the Son, but not another what.’ You can say God is one ‘what’ but not one ‘who’. [Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, vol 6, 31-2] The answer to the question ‘who?’ can give you three separate persons within the divine nature, within the Godhead, within the ‘Godness’.

You have in the Nicene Creed, which we say in the communion service, a reflection of this. Did the Holy Spirit come from the father or from the father and the son – and if the latter, was there some kind of family tree, so that the father created the son and the son created the Holy Spirit, so that the son and Holy Spirit were not really God? So that was the controversy. The Council of Nicaea, 325AD, decided that the right answer was that the Holy Spirit ‘proceeded from the father and the son. Who with the father and the son together is worshipped and glorified’ [Nicene Creed].

That corresponds with what the Athanasian Creed says (at the beginning of the Prayer Book, on page 27). ‘But the Godhead of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, is all one…. The Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible and the Holy Ghost incomprehensible’.

(Not completely impossible to understand, but impossible for us to understand every bit of it.) It goes on:

‘So there is one Father, not three Fathers; one Son, not three Sons: one Holy Ghost, not three Holy Ghosts.

… He therefore that will be saved: must thus think of the Trinity.’

The key thing in this whole area is how to think correctly about Jesus. ‘It is necessary to everlasting salvation: that [you] believe rightly the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ’. If you read this part of the Athanasian Creed (on page 29), it sets it all out:

‘… Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is God and Man;
God, of the Substance of the Father, begotten before all worlds: and Man, of the Substance of his Mother, born in the world;
Perfect God, and Perfect Man: …
Equal to the Father, as touching his Godhead: and inferior to the Father, as touching his Manhood.
Who although he be God and Man: yet he is not two, but one Christ.’

So that is the Trinity: one God, in three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

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Farewells: who did the Washing-Up?

By publicsquare
June 1, 2014 //
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Sermon for Evensong on the Seventh Sunday of Easter, 1st June 2014
2 Sam 23:1-5, Eph.1:15-23

First we heard the last words of King David, and then St Paul’s prayer for the Christians at Ephesus. The context is the Ascension, which the church celebrated on Thursday. Leave-taking. The end of the party. I wonder who did the washing-up. When the disciples – and certain women, including Mary the mother of Jesus as well as his brothers, when they were all together after Jesus had left them and a cloud had taken Him out of their sight, when it was over, when the ‘farewell tour’, Jesus Christ Superstar, had come to the end of its run: what do you think they all did?

They went back to the upstairs room and said prayers. And maybe they got busy doing the washing up. Because they must have been feeling very flat. We know that when Jesus had been crucified, if we think of the story of the disciples on the way to Emmaus, they were very sad then, when they thought that Jesus had been taken away from them.

So I think we can reasonably expect that they were also feeling very flat and very sad when Jesus had been taken away from them the second time, when He had ascended into heaven. Whitsuntide, Pentecost, had not yet come, although Jesus had assured them, ‘You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses … to the ends of the earth’ (Acts 1:8). But that hadn’t happened yet.

It must have been very difficult, after all the momentous things that had happened. After the roller-coaster ride of following Jesus, suddenly He wasn’t there any more. In the church, we have commemorated that roller-coaster ride, through the Easter season, though the time of Jesus’ passion, and suffering, Good Friday; and then the glorious Resurrection on Easter Sunday; and then His risen appearances, the road to Emmaus, doubting Thomas: all the wonderful stories of the risen Christ.

It is a revelation to us, a sure and certain hope that we have, because of God’s presence with us, His gift of His only Son and His Resurrection from the dead. In Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, Paul prays that God will give them ‘a spirit of wisdom and revelation as they come to know Him, so that with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which He has called you, what are the riches of His glorious inheritance among the saints.'(Eph.1:17)

If you are a Christian, if you go to church, this is a wonderful time of year: the Easter season. It is a time of hope and joy. But in the world outside, there is a sense of challenge. Not everyone is a Christian. Not everyone is aware of, let alone believes in, the wonderful story of Jesus. The Boko Haram people who have kidnapped 200 children, 200 girls, in Nigeria, are actively opposed to the Christian message. They want forcibly to convert people to Islam – forgetting perhaps that the god of Islam is very like the God of Israel and the God of the Christians – and certainly forgetting that God is a god of love.

Also in the world outside, we had an election. Some of you may have heard of my huge success in the Cobham Fairmile Ward election. It was a massive success, honestly: despite representing the Labour Party, I managed to poll in double figures! St Mary’s has much more successful politicians – congratulations to James Vickers!

After the elections, the press and the BBC are talking about the phenomenon of UKIP and what they stand for. It seems that a major part of UKIP’s message is that they are opposed to large-scale immigration and they are opposed to our membership of the EU, perhaps because they see the EU as being a major cause of the immigration which they don’t like.

And then there’s the controversy which has grown up concerning the new book by the French economist Thomas Piketty, called ‘Capital in the 21st Century’, which is all about the widening gap between the rich and the poor worldwide. Prof Piketty offers, at the end of his 573-page tome, some suggested alternatives to the economic policies which are being pursued in all the leading economies. But a Financial Times journalist, Chris Giles, has argued that Prof Piketty’s figures are wrong. If you put more than one economist in a room, they will inevitably disagree! I see that Ed Miliband confessed that he’d only just started reading Thomas Piketty. I have got to page 51.

It does all seem quite a long way away from the world of Easter, from the Resurrection and the Ascension: from the hopeful question from the disciples to Jesus just before He was taken from them, ‘Lord, is this the time when you are to establish again the sovereignty of Israel?’ (Acts 1:6 – NEB), a long way from all that, to the rather gloomy fact that only a minority of people cared enough about the way they are governed, even to cast a vote.

There does seem to be a big gap at the moment, between our church lives and the world outside. It’s all very well St Paul saying in his Letter to the Galatians that ‘the harvest of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, fidelity, gentleness and self-control’. (Gal. 5:22f), but how is that relevant to UKIP and to the world of macroeconomic theory?

What we are not hearing, in all this ferment of debate, is a Christian voice. What about immigrants? A politician says he couldn’t hear any English spoken in his carriage on the Tube. An election flyer says that there is some impossible number of East Europeans just waiting to come to the UK, take our jobs and claim all our benefits. Someone else points out, against this, that the NHS would collapse without doctors and nurses from abroad. Another expert points out that immigrants contribute more in taxes than they receive in benefits, and that fees from foreign students are vital to the survival of our universities.

But – and perhaps I haven’t been reading the right paper or listening to the right station on the wireless – I don’t recall anyone bringing the Bible into it, which they could have done. In the Old Testament, it’s a fundamental point of the Jewish Law that you must look after strangers, aliens, foreigners – in Deut. 10:19, Moses says that God ‘loves the alien who lives among you, giving him food and clothing. You too must love the alien, for you once lived as aliens in Egypt.’ In Jesus’ staggering picture of the Last Judgment in Matt. 25, He says that the righteous shall ‘enter and possess the kingdom’ because ‘… when I was hungry, you gave me food; when thirsty, you gave me drink; when I was a stranger you took me into your home …’ When the righteous didn’t get it, and queried when they had done this, Jesus said, ‘I tell you this: anything you did for one of my brothers here, however humble, you did for me.’

Jesus didn’t blame people for being poor. He didn’t think there was anything wrong with being a refugee. His ancestors, the Jewish people, had all been refugees. He didn’t talk about benefit cheats and scroungers. He didn’t talk about corporate tax avoidance – although he did say, ‘Render … unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s’. Maybe that is a good message for Starbucks, Vodafone and Google.

What about the widening gap between rich and poor, which Thomas Piketty has written about? Are the only things, which can be said, ‘It’s the market’, and ‘There is no alternative?’ If the government gives a tax cut to the highest earners, (which one commentator said was enough for them to go out and buy a Porsche with), at the same time as over 1 million people have had to go to a food bank to avoid starvation – and by the way, that includes 307 people in Cobham and Stoke D’Abernon who have used the Foodbank since we opened five months ago – if there is that seeming bias towards the rich, what is the Christian way to look at it?

Perhaps the answer is in the Magnificat, the song of Mary, the mother of God:

He hath put down the mighty from their seat:
And hath exalted the humble and meek.
He hath filled the hungry with good things:
And the rich he hath sent empty away. [Luke 1:46-55]

You might also remember what Jesus said about camels and the eye of a needle. [Matt.19:24]

But Jesus has been taken away from us. He has disappeared behind a cloud. Disappeared behind a cloud, a cloud of modern stuff. But, you might say, things were much more simple in Jesus’ day. There weren’t any benefit cheats. There weren’t any Romanians using the EU as a way to come and steal our jobs. You just can’t compare how it was then with the situation these days.

I think we should think carefully about it. I know that, in this week in the church’s year, you might argue that Jesus has ascended, and the Holy Spirit is coming – Jesus told his disciples to expect it, in Acts chapter 1 – but it doesn’t arrive till next Sunday. If it looks as though our world is rather godless, that fits with Jesus having left us, with the Ascension time.

But in this world, in our day to day lives, of course the Holy Spirit is here. The Lord is here. His Spirit is with us. So why does it look as though we are we ignoring Him? Is it OK not to want strangers? Is it OK that the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer?

As Christians, what do we think? Have I chosen my Bible references too selectively? Or is it more a question that the world today is more complicated than it was in Jesus’ time, and that some of Jesus’ sayings are out of date these days?

Or have we Christians really got something very distinctive to say, which doesn’t necessarily fit in with conventional wisdom? I’d be interested to hear what your thoughts are.

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Sure and Certain Hope

By publicsquare
May 18, 2014 //
0

Sermon for Mattins on the Fourth Sunday after Easter, 18th May 2014
Ezekiel 37:1-12, John 5:19-29

‘Dem bones, dem bones; dem dry bones’. I’m sure you can hear in your head that very jolly spiritual. ‘Dem bones, dem bones; dem dry bones: now hear the word of the Lord.’ Ezekiel in the valley of the dry bones.

We have just said, in the Creed,

I believe in the Holy Ghost … the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.’

A cornerstone of our faith is our belief in the Resurrection. We believe that Jesus was raised from the dead. But also there is a strong thread of personal resurrection, not only in the Old Testament – and certainly in this passage in Ezekiel, where Ezekiel the prophet has this vision of being in a valley full of bones. The Lord tells Ezekiel to prophesy over the bones: ‘O ye dry bones, hear the word of the Lord.’ The Lord God says He will cause spirit, ruach in Hebrew, which also means breath, to enter the bones.

And the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood up upon their feet, an exceeding great army.

The explanation given by the Lord to Ezekiel was that the ‘exceeding great army’ who had come alive from the dry bones were the Israelites, who were in exile, and generally at a low ebb, until the Lord showed that He still cared for them, by ordering Ezekiel to prophesy, and breathe life into them.

Breathing. Ruach, Hebrew for wind, spirit; Holy Spirit. The divine spirit: ‘.. the breath came into them, and they lived.

At funeral services, and in Handel’s Messiah, we often have that beautiful passage from Paul’s first Letter to the Corinthians, chapter 15,

Behold, I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised, incorruptible …

In today’s lesson from St John’s Gospel, we read about Jesus’ teaching about the Resurrection: not just His own Resurrection, but the end of time, the coming of the Kingdom of God.

Verily, verily, I say unto you, the hour is coming, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God; and they that hear, shall live. … For the hour is coming, in which all that are in the graves shall hear his voice, and shall come forth; they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done ill, unto the resurrection of damnation.

This is the other side, if you like, of the resurrection of Jesus. This is the resurrection of us. It is part of the Creed which we faithfully rehearse as part of the divine service. The earliest Christian writings certainly mention it. It’s generally accepted that St Paul’s Letters to the Thessalonians were the earliest books in the New Testament, written maybe no more than ten years after the time of Jesus. In 1 Thessalonians chapter 4, verse 13 and following, St Paul says,

But I would not have you to be ignorant, .. concerning them which are asleep; that ye sorrow not, even as the rest, which have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with him.

For The Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first: then we that are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord.

‘Lo He comes, with clouds descending’, as Charles Wesley’s hymn puts it. What is this? Is it like Ezekiel, the product of ecstatic prophecy – and perhaps not to be taken literally? Because, actually, none of us have ever seen anyone raised from the dead, at least since the time of Jesus Himself. Jesus, of course, did raise people from the dead: Jairus’ daughter, and Lazarus for example.

But these days, the idea of dead people being brought back to life – particularly people who have been buried and perhaps decayed, coming back out of their graves – is something which we keep for horror films perhaps, but nowhere else. It doesn’t really make sense to us.

And yet, when we come to a funeral, we cling to that ‘sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life’. Is it just, really, wish-fulfilment, wishful thinking? St Paul, in 1 Corinthians 15, suggests that the resurrection of the body is to be understood in the context of our having a physical body and a spiritual body, and that the idea that there could be two bodies for one person, one soul, is something which we see in nature, where plants die, and the seeds fall on the ground and grow again. Life comes out of death.

It seems to me that indeed this is something which we can reconcile with a modern scientific approach. They talk about geneticists ‘playing at God’ when they clone embryos – but it seems to me that there is still a real mystery over the whole question how things actually come to life.

You can, as I understand it, mechanically make all the bits of a living thing. But it does not just automatically spring to life. Of course, negatively, we can cause death. But I’m very doubtful whether we can completely explain the business of coming to life. A baby is born, and it starts to breathe, and greets us with its first cries. But unless I am completely mistaken, that coming to life can’t be totally explained by the biological processes by which the physical body of the baby has formed in the mother’s womb.

Tragically, not all babies, which grow in the mother’s womb, do come to life. Sometimes we can know why this is. We can say that particular illnesses or failures in the growth process have caused life to fail. But some just simply fail to start, fail to come to life. So, what about all the babies that are born: what is that makes them start going?

We call non-human living creatures ‘animals’. This word comes from the Latin ‘anima’, spirit – the Latin equivalent of the Hebrew ruach. Animals have life, they depend on an animating, life-giving spirit.

Surely this life force, in humans as well as in animals, is indeed something like the ruach of the Old Testament, the wind, the spirit, the breath of God. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t continue to believe in it. There’s also a very good argument for saying that this spirit, this Holy Spirit, is at work now: it doesn’t need to wait till the end of time. In St John’s Gospel, Jesus is saying that He has all the power from God, and that He is judging – present tense; it’s not a question of judgment at the end of time. He is the good judge already.

And if that’s the case, then we need to think about this rather stern point which Jesus makes, that the dead will all be raised to an eternal life, some to eternal good life and some, to bad, depending on whether they have been good in their earthly life. This is difficult teaching for us to understand or to follow. Traditionally the church has always said that the question, whether you are eternally to be saved, or eternally damned, is not something which you can earn. Salvation is a gift from God and not a prize.

But nevertheless, if we do have the sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life, both because we believe and trust in Jesus and in Jesus’ resurrection, and also, because we believe and trust in what He and the apostles have taught us, then we ought to behave as though we are chosen by God to be saved. That means, as St Paul put it in his Letter to the Galatians [Gal. 5:22f], that we have to lead a good life and not carry on with the old bad ways.

So in this Easter season, this season of resurrection hope, remember the meaning of the story in Ezekiel of his prophecy in the valley of the dry bones: ‘Dem bones, dem bones. Hear the word of the Lord!’ Hallelujah!

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Be Reconciled

By publicsquare
May 12, 2014 //
1

Sermon for Evensong for Churches Together on the Third Sunday after Easter, 11th May 2014
Ezra 3:1-13, Ephesians 2:11-22: Be Reconciled

So then you are no longer strangers …, but you are fellow-citizens with the saints and … of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. [Eph. 2:19-20]

Building a temple. Building a church. Being reconciled.

But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near, by the blood of Christ.

I want to welcome everyone to the church here at St Mary’s. We were excited when you, Godfrey, put your hand up in the Churches Together meeting and volunteered that we here would host the service to remember and celebrate the fellowship and spiritual growth which we enjoyed together in our Lent groups.

Our Lent groups, which were devoted to studying St Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, with a strap line which Jeremy Cresswell, in his erudite study notes, identified as ‘Be Reconciled’. Obviously St Paul was talking about Jews and non-Jews, at the time of Jesus Christ, whereas in applying this message today – and certainly in the context of our service tonight – we are talking about the different Christian denominations, and how we can be reconciled, brought together in fellowship, so as to become, in unity and diversity at the same time, the body of Christ.

Ezra, the author of our Old Testament lesson, was writing in the sixth century BC following the conquest of the Babylonians, who had destroyed the Temple, by the Persians – King Cyrus followed by King Darius and the three Kings Artaxerxes.

The Persians allowed the Jews to rebuild the Temple, and to have some self-government. But they were very much a minority, surrounded by people who did not necessarily sympathise with them, and who were much more powerful than they were.

Ezra tells the story of the rebuilding of the Temple. But before then, in the passage that we heard tonight, came the restoration of worship, of the One True God. It’s a theme throughout the Old Testament – certainly it comes out in Ezra, if you read Ezra and its sister book, Nehemiah – that there was one true God: that also, that one true God had made a covenant with a chosen people, and so the world was divided, divided into God’s chosen people and the rest.

It was difficult for the Israelites to maintain their faith, their belief in the one true God, when they had such terrible bad fortune. By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept. .. How shall we sing the Lord’s song: in a strange land? (Ps. 137).

The Assyrians conquered the Israelites in 722, and when in 587 BC the southern kingdom of Judah was conquered by the Babylonians, the Temple, which had stood for so long, was razed to the ground. All the precious things in it were taken by the victorious Babylonians. You can read all about these disasters in the Books of Kings and the Books of Chronicles.

It didn’t really look as though God’s covenant with the Israelites, His covenant with Abraham, was really working. Then the Israelites started to understand that it was God, God Himself, who had caused all the misfortune, and it was because they had not followed God’s commandments. But God forgave them, and during the time of the Persians, they were treated much more kindly. Eventually they went about rebuilding the Temple.

Flash forward 600 years to the time of Jesus, and the time of St Paul immediately afterwards, and imagine what a huge step – a huge mental step – St Paul was making when he realised that God was not exclusive in the way that he had been brought up to think He was.

It wasn’t the case that there was one God, and that that one God favoured only the Israelites, the Jews. The lesson of Jesus was that God was – God is – a god for all of us. God created the whole world after all. The message of Jesus’ appearance is that there is still a covenant between God and His people: but his people are all people, not just one small nation.

That is, of course, a momentous step. Once St Paul had recognised that, it made it possible for the good news of Christ to spread throughout the world, and not just to stay as a minority cult among the Israelites.

So look at this timeline: Ezra, about 500 BC: St Paul, no more than a dozen or so years after the death of Christ, so, let’s say, just over 500 years later. And we are just over 2,000 years after that.

But back to the fact that we are tonight in St Mary’s. St Mary’s is the oldest church in Surrey – it was built originally in 680AD. Indeed, it’s a Saxon church: if you look, after the service, at the three little models that are on the shelf over there in the transept, you will see that it was originally a sort of Saxon shed – and then it grew progressively in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries to be the shape of church which it is now.

So if we go back to the timeline – Ezra, 500 BC: St Paul, maybe 40 or 50 AD: St Mary’s, just over 500 years later, 680. And our service, written in the 1540s by Archbishop Cranmer – so, about another 5- or 600 years later.

You should know that the Book of Common Prayer, which we’re using tonight (it’s the little blue book in your pew), actually took 100 years to settle into its final form, but the key bits of it were written by Archbishop Cranmer in the middle 1500s – so, the time of Henry VIII – and we are about 700 years after that. We are joined – reconciled, sort of – with all those Christians before us.

Remember that in the 1540s Archbishop Thomas Cranmer was writing the Book of Common Prayer in the crucible of the Reformation. Martin Luther had nailed his 95 theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg: John Calvin had preached in Geneva; Zwingli in Zürich, and of course, Henry VIII; all contributed to a time of theological ferment and disagreement.

We are using words which haven’t changed for 700 years. We really are walking in the footsteps of the saints. Because Cranmer didn’t just dream up all the words in the services which went into the Book of Common Prayer. He based all the services on his translations, and on his understanding, of even older services which the church had been using before he compiled the Prayer Book in the 1540s.

The BCP was meant to be a prayer book, a service book, for use in common, meaning shared by everyone. Against the background of all the different strands of the Reformation, the BCP was a powerful tool for reconciliation.

So the fact that tonight we are using the BCP, a prayer book written 700 years ago which goes back even earlier in its origins, is, I think, very apt in the context of Churches Together: in the context of our variety, all our different ways of worshipping, in our seven churches.

Just like the time of St Paul. Faithful Christians in Ephesus, in Rome, in Corinth, in Colossae, in Galatia, were all confronting something which was far bigger than they were, and they didn’t know what the right answers were.

St Paul talked about it in 1 Corinthians 1:12.

‘ …. each of you says, ‘I belong to Paul’, or ‘I belong to Apollos’, or ‘I belong to Cephas’, or ‘I belong to Christ.’

Which one of these great preachers had it right? Terribly important; once you are confronted by the Revelation, the Good News, that God cares for us, that He sent His only Son: nothing is more important than to respond appropriately.

But, as the Roman poet Terence said, ‘Quot homines, tot sententiae’ – (for as many as there are people, there are just as many opinions). That’s why the message of Ephesians is so very important. Its message of reconciliation, coming together, of agreeing together – even in circumstances where we disagree – is vitally important.

So he came and proclaimed peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near; for through him both of us have access in one Spirit to the Father. So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God.

I pray that that has been your experience in our Lent course – and that it will continue to be: that you will come and share with us here, and we will come and share with you. In our different ways, we will spread the good news of Christ and will receive the good news of Christ; and we will live like people who have seen the Kingdom.

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The Man who Wasn’t There

By publicsquare
April 27, 2014 //
0

Sermon for the Second Sunday of Easter, 27th April 2014
Acts 2:14a, 22-32, 1 Peter 1:3-9, John 20:19-31

Yesterday upon the stair
I met a man who wasn’t there.
He wasn’t there again today,
I wish, I wish he’d go away. [Hughes Mearns, 1899]

I hope that’s not too irreverent a way to introduce some reflections on the story of Doubting Thomas, which is one of my favourite stories in the Bible. I’ve always thought that, if I’d been around at the time, and had been fortunate enough to be one of Jesus’ circle of friends – if not one of the actual disciples – if I’d bumped into the disciples, and they had been saying, ‘We have seen the Lord’, I think my reaction would have been a bit like Thomas’: ‘Unless I can see him, touch him: I couldn’t believe it.’

But then Thomas is put out of his misery, because Jesus does come: Thomas does see, he does touch – and he does believe. But Jesus himself says that the really marvellous thing is if someone doesn’t have Thomas’ good fortune, wasn’t actually there, wasn’t able to see, feel, touch the risen Jesus – but nevertheless still believes – that is the real marvel.

St Peter wrote in his first Letter, Although you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and rejoice …

This is a very important message for all of us Christians. Starting from the disciples on the way to Emmaus, Christians have always had a tendency to be a bit despondent when they haven’t had Jesus right there in front of them. Now 2,000 years further on, there are an awful lot of people, like the Prime Minister, for whom their Christian faith ‘comes and goes’, but clearly doesn’t exactly get him by the throat.

Let’s go back a minute to the man who wasn’t there.

Yesterday upon the stair
I met a man who wasn’t there.

The Jesus that Thomas encountered, the Jesus that all the disciples encountered, was there – and then he wasn’t. He was a man, but he was also God. So in a sense, he was a man who wasn’t there.

The bit that Thomas saw, and felt, and touched, was Jesus the man. But the fact that he saw, and felt, and touched Jesus, the risen Jesus, the man who wasn’t there: the man who had died, shows that this was a revelation, a revelation of God: God showing himself.

You can approach that in all sorts of different ways. If you believe in God as a sort of benevolent old chap with a beard above the clouds, who somehow created everything that there is, that may be fine – and it may indeed be perfectly OK to believe in someone like that, simply because you know that the question, what it is to be God, is actually beyond our comprehension, and therefore a picturesque metaphor, like an ancient Greek god on Mount Olympus or in the heavens – or indeed, all the imagery we have in the Bible, ‘sitting on the right hand of God’, and so on, may be perfectly OK as a way of talking about something which we really can’t comprehend – but which, nevertheless, we can believe in.

The point about the Resurrection is that it was God’s ultimate way of demonstrating, not only that He, God, is there, He exists, but that He is still interested in His creation, and in us in particular.

There have been signs of God’s involvement all down the ages. Moses and the burning bush: Daniel in the lions’ den; all the various miracles that Jesus did, are very difficult to explain, unless they are to some extent revelations, revelations of God at work in the world.

Many of us will be able to say that they have experienced the power of prayer; that prayers are answered. Again, very difficult to analyse this in any way. Why, for example, are some prayers answered, and others aren’t?

The philosophers of the Enlightenment – Spinoza, Locke, Hume – all had difficulty with the idea that God was something, God was a something, something made, when at the same time He was the ultimate cause of everything, the ‘unmoved mover’ as Aristotle called him, or the ‘first mover’, the first cause, in Thomas Aquinas.

The idea of the ultimate cause, the unmoved mover, ‘τι ό ού κινούμενον κινει’ [Aristotle, Metaphysics, Λ 7, 1072a25], could lead you to William Paley’s C18 idea of the ‘divine watchmaker’; that Nature was so marvellous in its construction and operation, that it must have been constructed by, and organised by, a divine craftsman. The most complex mechanism which Paley could think of was a watch – pretty rare in C18 – so God’s skill must be at least that of a watchmaker – he was the Divine Watchmaker.

Charles Darwin is said to have been inspired to start his own researches into evolutionary biology by reading about Paley’s idea of the Divine Watchmaker.

But the problem with those understandings of God – sometimes called ‘deist’ ideas – which were popular in the C18, is that they don’t make sense of Jesus. They imagined a divine watchmaker, a god who set up the world, programmed it, pressed the start button – and then had nothing more to do with it.

It would be fairly difficult to justify worshipping, or having any kind of interaction with, that sort of a god. There wouldn’t be a lot of point in praying to the divine watchmaker, because he wouldn’t be there. He would probably have moved on.

It would be difficult to understand any ideas about ethics, why we should choose to do one thing rather than another, on the basis that some things are good or bad – because the divine watchmaker, having made the mechanism to run at a certain speed, and perhaps in a certain direction, wound it up and set it going, has left it to get on by itself. The world has to evolve by itself. As Richard Dawkins put it, the watchmaker is blind.

There’s nothing that the clock itself can do to change its time or to run in a different direction. So if all there is, is God in the form of an unmoved mover, then we are ultimately pre-programmed, predetermined, and there’s no point in our trying to choose between the good and the bad.

If, on the other hand, we accept that the point about Jesus is that His life, death and resurrection is a revelation, is God showing His hand – then it is the revelation. The divine watchmaker is not blind. He is still there, caring for what He has made and sustaining it. The fact of Jesus, his life, death and above all, his resurrection, is the evidence. How should we respond to it?

Although I’m sure you’ll all realise that I’m mighty tempted to have another dig at our hapless Prime Minister and his lukewarm faith, I don’t think it would be very fair to do that. Let’s concentrate on what we should do. St Peter, in his first letter, suggests that when you have faith in Jesus, ‘you believe in Him and rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy, for you are receiving the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls’ (1 Peter 1:8-9).

You, you who have come to church, have faith that God cares for you, and that God will save your soul, will bring you home. I suppose the thing today is that, for many people, there is no sense of being lost in the wilderness and needing to be brought home. There is no sense of being cut off from God – which is what sin is – because people feel that they can get by perfectly adequately without addressing their minds at all to any questions about God. They just don’t engage.

If you’ve got a nice family, if you’re doing reasonably well: if you’ve got a decent job or a decent pension: if you live in a nice place, if you drive a nice car: if you have decent holidays: if you have all that, it’s very tempting to think that there’s nothing really missing in your life.

And yet, of course, very commonly, people experiencing that sort of earthly-paradise prescription, which might even be normal life in Cobham, say – are often the ones who confess to not being entirely fulfilled, to having a sense that there’s something missing in their lives. Perhaps they turn to some New Age philosophies or fads – Yoga or special diets – in the hope that it’ll fill the gap in their lives.

Yoga or special diets. I hope that doesn’t sound impossibly sniffy. What I’m leading up to, is that you don’t need pet rocks or fancy diets. You just have to get your head round what the encounter with Thomas, or the meeting on the road to Emmaus, or the empty tomb, all add up to.

Blessed are those who have not seen, and yet have come to believe’ [John 20:29]. That’s the message. It changed people’s lives 2,000 years ago – and it can still do it. We need to think hard about what that revelation can do in our lives, and how we ought to respond to it.

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Resurrection and Sacrifice

By publicsquare
April 20, 2014 //
4

Sermon for Easter Day, 20th April 2014
Acts 10:34-43, Colossians 3:1-4, Matt. 28:1-10

When David Cameron published an article in the Church Times (which of course was widely quoted in the Telegraph and other less specialist newspapers than the Church Times), there were lots of people who said how good it was that the Prime Minister had said publicly that he was in favour of the Church of England and that the C of E should stick up for itself more.

Mind you, said the Prime Minister, he didn’t actually go to church very often, and his Christian faith ‘came and went a bit,’ he said. He did remind me a little bit of the caricature figure in WW2 dramas signing up for army service, where the recruiting sergeant asks what his religion is, and he mumbles, ‘Agnostic’, whereupon the sergeant writes down ‘C of E’.

On Thursday there was a big service at Guildford Cathedral for the renewal of vows of all the people in ministry in the Diocese. The Bishop of Dorking, giving the sermon, said that the Prime Minister’s article had been ‘somewhat surprisingly good’. Somewhat surprisingly. His caution might be explained by the comments on the Prime Minister’s article which had been made in various quarters, which tended to focus on the question how Mr Cameron’s Christianity didn’t seem to extend to making sure that people in Britain are not starving and going to food banks.

All this doesn’t take away the fact that the Prime Minister thought that it was important enough, in his busy life, to affirm his Christian faith in a public article. So for that much, I think we must be grateful.

Never mind the Prime Minister; Christianity has been getting a better and better name this year with the advent of the new Pope and the new Archbishop of Canterbury. Both of them are seen as very good adverts for the faith: very good examples of what it is to be a good Christian.

Today on Easter Sunday they reckon that 1.3m people will go to church in the UK. This really isn’t very many, out of the roughly 70m people who live here. So even if the Prime Minister, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Pope are all valiantly pointing up the importance of Christianity, the message doesn’t really seem to be getting through to that many people.

Does that mean there’s something wrong with that message? Our lessons from Acts and St Matthew’s Gospel have the key things. Jesus went about doing good, teaching and healing, but he was arrested and condemned to death as a troublemaker – a freedom-fighter, a terrorist (because always remember, one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom-fighter). He was put to death publicly in the cruellest fashion, being crucified. And He rose again from the dead.

The Gospel story is the most important bit. The story of the empty tomb, of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. I would risk saying that, unless there had been a first Easter Day, and unless there had been a resurrection from the dead, we would not be here, celebrating Jesus and worshipping God in the way that we are today.

Leave aside for a minute the fact that there are only a million or so of us in the UK who will bother to go to church today: if you take the worldwide figures for people celebrating Easter, it’s a very, very large number – and it is a growing number. Christianity is a very fast-growing religion: I believe it is still the fastest-growing religion in the world.

In his first letter to the Corinthians, St Paul explained the significance of Easter. St Paul said, ‘If Christ was not raised, your faith has nothing in it and you are still in your old state of sin’ (1 Cor.15:17).

Now pay attention! Resurrection from the dead, the resurrection of Jesus, is, of course, completely contrary to the laws of nature. It’s a super-miracle, the super-miracle. It is the sign, the sign by which we realise that Jesus wasn’t just a great teacher or a prophet: it’s how we know that he was God incarnate, God in human form.

I’m not going to argue here why I believe in the resurrection – which I, and you, surely do. This is, after all, a gathering of the faithful. But maybe I should encourage you a bit. It’s like adverts for Mercedes-Benz. Merc don’t need to advertise. They can sell every car they make, just by word of mouth. But they have great adverts, nevertheless. Have you seen the one with the chicken? It’s far and away the best ad on the telly at the moment. The reason they made it, and no doubt spent millions on it, was to reassure their customers: to reassure them that they have indeed made the right choice.

So maybe I should also just comfort you, in the same way, about what you already believe. There are plenty of eminent scientists who believe in the resurrection. For the atheists there is Richard Dawkins: for the Christians there is John Polkinghorne: both equally eminent scientists. Similarly in philosophy: for the atheist Daniel Dennett there is the Christian, Richard Swinburne – and Brian Leftow, another formidable logician, whose formal proofs of the existence of God were published recently [God and Necessity, ISBN 978-0-19-926335-6]. Or Roger Scruton, who plays the organ in his parish church.

If you want a good refresher course in why it’s intellectually respectable that we can believe in the resurrection, there’s the famous book, first published in the Thirties and still in print, ‘Who Moved the Stone?’ by Frank Morison. [ISBN 978-1-85078-674-0]. Morison was a sceptic who set out to prove that that resurrection couldn’t have happened, and ended up convincing himself that the weight of all the evidence went exactly the other way, and it did happen. Or of course you can read Richard Swinburne’s ‘The Resurrection of God Incarnate’ [ISBN 978-0-19-925746-1], for a heavyweight philosophy-of-religion treatment from the celebrated former Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion at Oxford.

Back to St Paul. In the lesson from his letter to the Colossians, the very short lesson this morning, he underlines the significance of Easter for us.

‘Were you not raised to life with Christ?’ he asks.

He then says, perhaps rather mysteriously, ‘You did die, and your life has been hidden away with Christ in God’. [Col.3:1,2 (NEB: my translation, resp.)]

Of course this doesn’t mean that somehow we are all ghosts. We have died in the sense that we die in baptism: we die to sin, and have new life in Christ. In that sense, we rise with him. We have been ‘raised to life with Christ.’

And we say He died to save us from our sins, to redeem us. In the words of the hymn ‘There is a green hill far away’, Mrs Alexander wrote, ‘He died that we might be forgiven, he died to make us good,’ and, ‘There was no other good enough | to pay the price of sin’.

The language is apparently language of ransom, of kidnap and ransom, even. But I think that’s not the right way to look at it. If you think of sin not so much as specific sins, specific crimes – although sin can make you do those bad things – if instead you think of sin as whatever it is that separates us from God, then Jesus’ redeeming work was really to bring us back to God, bringing us back home to the true ground of our being. In the words of the lovely prayer,

Father of all,
we give you thanks and praise,
that when we were still far off
you met us in your Son and brought us home.

Even here, where things seem to be very spiritual, very mythical, there isn’t a conflict with science. In her 2012 Gifford Lectures, Prof. Sarah Coakley looks at the idea of sacrifice, sacrifice in the context not just of religion, of Jesus’ sacrifice, or the Jewish idea of a scapegoat, but in the context of evolutionary biology. Apparently the latest analysis is that evolution doesn’t depend on the ‘Selfish Gene’, but much more on co-operation, on selfless behaviour, self-sacrifice. A defining characteristic, the real mark, of humanity is altruism, self-sacrifice, selfless behaviour. We are the most successful species, the theory runs, not because we possess a selfish gene, but exactly the opposite – because ‘greater love hath no man’ is something we can, and do, aspire to.

Professor Coakley mentions in her first lecture –
http://www.faith-theology.com/2012/05/sarah-coakley-2012-gifford-lectures.html%5D – that Charles Darwin was inspired to study biology by William Paley’s argument, that the complex workings of nature meant that they were evidence of the work of a ‘divine watchmaker’. Although the current rather fundamentalist ‘intelligent design’ movement, mainly in the USA, isn’t very believable, nevertheless there does seem to be perfectly good scientific evidence for God, as the creator and sustainer of the universe. It’s really not necessary to be an atheist if you are a scientist.

Oh – and if you want to compare and contrast Prime Ministerial words of faith, you might want to dust off Gordon Brown’s speech in 2011 about his Christian faith, which you can find on Archbishop Rowan’s website. http://rowanwilliams.archbishopofcanterbury.org/articles.php/903/faith-in-politics-lecture-by-gordon-brown.

Nothing political, honest – but Gordon Brown’s piece is head and shoulders over David Cameron’s: really inspiring stuff, not faith which ‘comes and goes’.

So I say, we should shout it from the roof-tops. It makes sense. Jesus was raised from the dead: Jesus is risen! Happy Easter!

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