Famines and Pestilence

November 17, 2013 //

Sermon for Mattins at St Mary’s on the Second Sunday before Advent, 17th November 2013
2 Thessalonians 3:6-13; Luke 21:5-19 – Famines and Pestilences

‘Then he said unto them, Nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and great earthquakes shall be in divers places, and famines, and pestilences; and fearful sights and great signs shall there be from heaven.’ [Luke 21]

It might make sense for me to preach about this picture of the end of the world which Jesus paints for the disciples. You might think that I would go on to talk about the damage which Hurricane Haiyan has done in the Philippines, and all the other various natural disasters which suddenly seem to be happening. Is it a sign that the world is coming to an end, perhaps as a result of man’s careless use of the earth’s resources, so producing global warming?

I don’t think that I can be that definite. I think there’s a very high probability that, whatever I might try to say in relation to whether or not Jesus’ words here in St Luke’s Gospel actually do refer to disasters such as the one which has struck the Philippines, I think there’s a very high likelihood that I will turn out to be wrong. We are indeed horrified by what has happened in the Philippines, but it seems to me that Jesus’ message in relation to it is not that this is in some way evidence of the end of the world coming about, but rather that we must treat the people affected with as much compassion as we can muster, both through our governments and as individuals.

Both here in St Mary’s and at St Andrew’s today, there are collections for the Disasters Emergency Committee, and I do hope that you will give generously. There is a basket at the back as you go out.

But honestly, I don’t think there’s very much which I can usefully say about the end of the world, at least based on this passage in St Luke’s Gospel. From the earliest times, Christians thought that the end of the world was just round the corner. St Paul himself even counselled against getting married, in his First Letter to the Corinthians (7:8), if people could possibly avoid it, because everything was about to come to an end. But it didn’t, and it hasn’t. We still have a working planet, which sustains more and more people all the time, and which provides enough riches to feed everyone, even today, if only food were fairly distributed.

No, what I’m interested in this morning are indeed some of St Paul’s words, in his Second Letter to the Thessalonians, which was our first lesson. ‘For even when we were with you, this we commanded you, that if any would not work, neither should he eat.’ If you don’t work, you don’t eat. Is St Paul saying something here which is relevant today in the context of the Welfare State? I hope you won’t groan inwardly, but I am going to say a few words about our new Cobham Area Foodbank.

The Foodbank will indeed, in some instances, feed people who are not working. As a matter of trite reality, people who are out of work may well not have enough money with which to buy food, as well as paying for rent, heat and all the other incidentals of life, on the £150-odd a week, or £600 a month, that unemployment benefit provides.

I am one of the team who have come together under the auspices of Churches Together to create a food bank in this area. Although it is now an independent charity in its own right, Cobham Area Foodbank was created by the local churches. It is affiliated to the network created by an organisation callee the Trussell Trust, which is a Christian foundation in Salisbury, which has been setting up food banks for the last 15 years.

In the last three years, there has been a vast increase in the number of food banks which are operating. There are over 400 food banks in the UK today. In the year from April 2012, 370,000 people in the UK came to food banks for food, which was 170% increase on the previous year.

Since then, since April this year so far, 355,000 people have come to food banks, including 40-odd thousand who have been fed in the prosperous south-east. In other words, the numbers needing to turn to a food bank have doubled again. We don’t expect that Cobham is going to be any different. The Oasis Childcare Trust is already, among its other good works, providing a hot meal once a week for fifteen families, and they tell us that in fact they could do this for double that number if they had the resources.

In the area behind the fire station in Cobham there is very high unemployment among the 18-30 year olds. I recall that the Envisage project found levels of unemployment around 25%. In our area there is a huge gap between those who are well-off, who are on the whole very well-off, and those who are not, who are in some cases destitute. We are in the Borough of Elmbridge, which, on some criteria, is supposed to be the second richest borough in the country, after Kensington and Chelsea.

Cobham Area Foodbank will be the third food bank in the Borough of Elmbridge, when it opens on 13th December. Instead of relying on St Paul’s rather fierce statement to the Thessalonians – which I think was really aimed at those in the church community, perhaps in particular the ministry team – I would prefer that we looked for our Bible text in relation to people who have to use the Foodbank in the sentences which precede the offertory in the Communion service: ‘Whoso hath this world’s good, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his compassion from him: how dwelleth the love of God in him?’ (From the first letter of John, chapter 3.)

The fact is that there are needy people, even here in Cobham and Stoke D’Abernon, for whom there is now often a choice between paying the rent and having something to eat. The Foodbank network has established that, in Britain today, there are 13m people who are living below the official poverty line. The reasons why people have used a food bank – which are known, because everyone who gets food from a food bank has to provide some information – included the following:

Delay in paying benefits – 30% of the people;
Low income – by itself, just not earning enough to be able to afford to live – nearly 20%;
Changes in the benefit system – 11.5%;
Getting into debt – 9%;
Unemployment is actually only 5.5%.
Being homeless – just under 5%;
Being refused a crisis loan – 3.5%;
Domestic violence – 2.7%.
Sickness – 2.2%. How come somebody who is ill does not have enough to eat?
Delayed wages; wages paid late – just under 1%.

Note how low the figure is for unemployment. Even if we accepted what St Paul said, in fact there are very few people coming to the food banks and asking for food, because they are unemployed.

The system is tough. The food bank system set up by the Trussell Trust, which we will operate, is designed to provide emergency relief only, for three days at a time. The food provided will be non-perishables, effectively the sort of thing which we give at Harvest Festival time. In Cobham we are very fortunate in that Sainsbury’s Local on the High Street have agreed to provide bread, which will be freely available to the clients of the Foodbank.

But basically the system is designed to provide only three food parcels to last three days at a time in any period of six months. It is not designed to provide long-term sustenance, because the Welfare State is supposed to provide a safety net. We will know whether that is still true once we start operations in the middle of December.

However, I can tell you that, here at St Mary’s, you have been the most pro-active of all the congregations in Churches Together locally, because you have already started to collect food, and indeed Arnie Gabbott, who is your representative on the Foodbank organising team, has provided, at the back by the font, the prototype of a very smart green bin, which will be in all the churches soon, for people to put their food contributions in.

From this week, food will be collected each week by the Foodbank van and taken to a warehouse on the outskirts of Leatherhead: please do keep on putting food in the church bin here.

People must obtain a voucher in order to get food for the Foodbank. They can’t just turn up and demand food. Vouchers will be available from the Citizens’ Advice Bureau, from Oasis Childcare, from the Cobham Children’s Centre, from the schools in the area, from the doctors’ surgeries, from all the ministers in the churches and from the social services and housing benefit offices – and, we hope, from the Jobcentre.

The Foodbank will open initially once a week, on Fridays, at Friday lunchtime, and we aim to extend to a second day of opening, probably on a Monday, once everything is working. The recent meeting which we had for volunteers who want to work in the Foodbank brought in over 50 people, and there has been wonderful generosity shown in giving money for the launch and sustaining of the Foodbank operation. So I am confident that we will be able to provide an effective service.

But it will need continuing support. As well as giving out food, there will be members of the team at the distribution centre – which will be at the Methodist Church in Cedar Rd – who will be trained to listen to the clients carefully and sympathetically, and then to provide ‘signposts’ to possible ways to make their situation better. And last, in the Foodbank there will always be somebody who will be willing to pray with a client who felt that they needed to bring their situation to God in prayer.

I know when you read the newspaper today, you very often read that if people are poor, it is because they are in some way feckless. But I have to say that, the nearer we get to the sharp end, trying to alleviate poverty on our doorstep, the less I believe in that. The churches nationally have done research into the causes of poverty today, and found that less than 2% of people are out of work for more than a year. It is natural for people to want to work, and they do. The problem is that there are too many jobs which pay the minimum wage, or possibly even less – which is the situation with so-called zero-hours contracts, where somebody is contracted to work for a particular employer – can’t work for anybody else – but that employer does not commit to give him a set number of hours of work – and they are paid by the hour. So they could be unable to claim benefit (because they are employed), but not earning any money.

The people of the Philippines, and the poor people of Cobham, both need your prayers – and your gifts. Please be generous.

Tags Cobham, Elmbridge, end of the world, family, food bank, global warming, Haiyan, heat, hunger, hungry, Jesus, minimum wage, no food without work, Oasis Childcare, Philippines, poor, poverty, poverty line, rent, St Paul, Trussell Trust, unemployment, Workfare, zero hours

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Biblical Cats

By publicsquare

November 17, 2013 //

Sermon for Evensong at St Mary’s on 17th November 2013, Second Sunday before Advent
Daniel 6 – Biblical Big Cats

In the 1960s, if you had gone shopping at Harrod’s, you would have found that they had an Exotic Animals Department. You may remember the wonderful story of the lion cub who was sold in Harrod’s and who became known as Christian the Lion. He lived in Chelsea with two young men who owned a trendy furniture shop, for a year before he got too big and was taken to Kenya to be released into the wild. There is a very sweet story about him meeting up with his former owners several years later, and fondly remembering them.

We tend to be rather soppy about cats – and that includes the rather daft idea that lions and tigers and leopards, big cats, are just that, big cats. If only they got to know us properly, we think, they would be just like big pet cats, with sweet, gentle dispositions, keen on sleeping and climbing under counterpanes on the spare bed when no-one is looking: happy to be stroked and to have their tummies tickled.

You will remember the famous zoo owner and gambler, John Aspinall, who kept tigers and encouraged his keepers to go into their enclosures with them, to play with them as pets. Unfortunately, those tigers didn’t know what Mr Aspinall expected of them, and on several occasions, they devoured their keepers.

The truth is that even domestic cats do not have entirely reliable tempers. My two Bengals are very good at rolling on their backs, purring and generally appearing very friendly, inviting you to tickle their tummies: but you should be aware that the height of ecstasy for both of them is then to grip your hand in their paws and give you a good bite! Nothing personal, of course. It’s just what cats like doing.

Which brings us to the story of Daniel in the lions’ den. There were several Persian kings called Darius, but most scholars agree that this was Darius I, who died in 486BC. He set up a complicated administration structure for the Persian empire. According to the Book of Daniel he divided Persia into 120 administrative zones, although the contemporary account in Herodotus’ Histories suggests that Darius only set up 20 regions, called satrapies, and his descendant, King Xerxes, increased the number of satrapies, perhaps indeed to 120.

It is possible that the Book of Daniel was written not just in order to tell historical stories – and indeed it may be that the history is a little bit shaky in places – but rather for prophetic teaching purposes, to demonstrate the power of God. So Daniel going into the lions’ den illustrates this. It is an escape story, just as in the earlier chapter, chapter 3, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, three other Jewish exiles in Persia, in Babylon along with Daniel, were cast into a fiery furnace because they refused to worship a golden image which Nebuchadnezzar, the king before Darius, had made. And again, God saved them and they were unhurt, even though the fiery furnace was so hot that the people who were throwing them into it were themselves consumed by fire.

Daniel portrays Darius as a benevolent king, who was tricked into signing into law an edict, that anyone who prayed to anyone apart from him, the king, for thirty days – and according to the commentators, ‘prays’ should better be translated as ‘makes a request’ either of gods or of humans – that anyone who prayed to anyone apart from the king, should be punished by being thrown into a den of lions.

Interestingly, none of the historians can find any evidence that the Persians had dens of lions, or that they used them to deal with criminals as a way of execution. The Romans certainly did. They had a special expression for it, damnatio ad bestia, condemnation to the beasts. The main reason why the early Christians were martyred by being thrown to wild beasts was because they refused to worship the emperor; similar circumstances to those in which Daniel found himself.

There are a couple of other interesting things which we should note in the story of Daniel in the lions’ den. One is the way in which King Darius refused to contradict the law which he had made, the edict. The laws of the Medes and the Persians could not be changed. Indeed that expression, ‘The laws of the Medes and the Persians’, became synonymous with the idea of immutability, unchangeability in the law.

I think also that we are meant to understand that it was not one of those cases where the Israelites on the one hand were God’s chosen people, and on the other hand there were their oppressors, the Gentiles, the ‘nations’, people who didn’t believe in God and who were vastly inferior to them. In this case, the Medes and the Persians were decent people, who treated the Jews in exile fairly and well. One defining characteristic of the Medes and the Persians was that they recognised the rule of law.

As Lord Denning famously said, ‘Be you never so high, the law is above you.’ He was quoting Dr Thomas Fuller, who said this first in 1733. This is a hallmark of civilisation. This is something we look for today as a desirable feature in all countries. When we talk about ‘failed states’ – Somalia, perhaps Iraq, Afghanistan and the North-West Frontier of Pakistan, the rule of law is said to have broken down.

So here Darius felt that, whatever he personally may have wanted to do in order to be compassionate to Daniel, he was not allowed to do, because there was a higher principle, the rule of law. And so he very reluctantly sealed the lions’ den with Daniel in it, with his own signet ring.

This is a terrible story. So often in ancient literature we don’t get the gory details. The King simply decrees that somebody should be done in, and he is: witness Herod with John the Baptist. But here, King Darius personally supervises his good friend and trusted minister Daniel being fed to the lions.

Clearly those lions were very fierce, because when Daniel’s story has had a happy ending, and Daniel has survived a night in the den without being eaten, King Darius makes sure that all the people that tricked him into making the law and putting Daniel in mortal danger by it, are themselves thrown into the den, with their children and their wives; ‘Before they reached the bottom of the den the lions overpowered them and broke all their bones in pieces.’ So it’s not the case that the lions’ den had been filled with special soft lions like Christian the Lion. These were normal cats, and for Daniel to survive a night with them really was a tremendous miracle.

This is one of the great Bible stories, which I’m sure we all remember from Sunday School, from our earliest days. It’s right up there with Rudyard Kipling’s Just So stories. But are there any lessons which we can learn from it as grown-ups today? What about the laws of the Medes and the Persians? Are there laws today which result in cruelty? Is there anyone like Daniel, who, despite being innocent, is being thrown to the lions? Can we by prayer, by relying on God like Daniel did, in fact negate the effects of these immutable laws?

I will leave you to ponder on that. There are 38 shopping days left until Christmas. It’s a fortnight until the beginning of Advent. Christian the Lion and his descendants are no longer available in Harrod’s. Perhaps in Advent there is another lion that we should remember. What about Aslan, the lion in ‘The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’? Now there was a Christian lion!

Tags Abednego, Afghanistan, Aslan, Bengal cat, Chelsea, Christian the Lion, CS Lewis, damnatio ad bestia, Daniel, Darius, failed states, Harrod's, Herodotus, Iraq, John Aspinall, leopard, Lion Witch Wardrobe, lions' den, Lord Denning, Medes and Persians, Meshach, Nebuchadnezzar, NW Frontier, Pakistan, rule of law, Shadrach, Swinging Sixties, Thomas Fuller, tigers

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We are here, because they are not here

By publicsquare

November 3, 2013 //

Sermon for the Time to Remember Service at St Andrew’s, 3rd November 2013
Revelation 21:1-6

We are here, because they are not here. In a few minutes we will read out their names, the names of our loved ones, which we have written down, and whom we will remember together, here in God’s house. We will make an act of remembrance by lighting candles in their memory.

We will remember our mothers, our fathers, our wives, our husbands, our sons and daughters; our friends. They are not here. It makes us sad to think of all those people who have died, all those whose company we have lost.

Some of those who have died have left us after a full life, when perhaps they themselves would even have said that they were ready. You will remember Jesus’ saying, that in his Father’s house there are many rooms, many ‘mansions’. Some people, when they reach the end of their lives, are quite happy, quite happy to pass from one room to the next. My late father-in-law surprised many of his friends, days before he died, by ringing them up, and announcing that, as he wasn’t going to be around much longer, he wanted to say goodbye properly. He was quite relaxed about his future. He was truly blessed.

But some people are taken from us too soon, before they are ready and before we are ready. It is a great challenge to us to understand it, when people die suddenly or accidentally or unexpectedly. We are struck with the unfairness of it. We protest. We ‘rail against heaven’. Why them? Why should we lose the ones we love? There is no easy answer.

At the heart of the Christian gospel is Jesus’ promise of eternal life. We believe that Christ Jesus was raised from the dead. In the Bible, Jesus assures us that there will be a resurrection for everyone; there will be eternal life.

You will remember that wonderful aria in Handel’s Messiah: ‘The trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised, incorruptible’. How it works, is surely a mystery. But we have the assurance that it will happen, because of the good news that it happened to Jesus himself.

When Jesus said, ‘In my Father’s house are many rooms,’ [John 14:1-6], he said that those rooms are for everyone who follows Him. So whenever one of our loved ones is taken from us, Jesus says that there will be room for them in God’s house.

How it works, St Paul explains in his first letter to the Corinthians, where he reminds us that we all have a body and a soul. Two separate things. Although the body may die, may perish, the soul does not. This is what St Paul says. ‘There are heavenly bodies and earthly bodies; and the splendour of the heavenly bodies is one thing, the splendour of the earthly, another. The sun has a splendour of its own, the moon another splendour, and the stars another, for star differs from star in brightness. So it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown in the earth as a perishable thing is raised imperishable. Sown in humiliation, it is raised in glory; sown in weakness, it is raised in power; sown as an animal body, it is raised as a spiritual body.’ [1 Cor. 15:40f, NEB]

There is now scientific work which bears out the possibility of the life after death. There is a well-known book, ‘Proof of Heaven’, by Dr Eben Alexander, who is a neurosurgeon, and that book, together with the work of other scientists who have analysed near-death experiences, strongly supports the conclusion that there is a life after death.

Now other leading academics, such as Prof. Richard Swinburne in Oxford, have examined the latest neuroscience findings on the way in which our brains work, how they control our movements, and have concluded that the only way to explain how our bodies are actually controlled involves the existence of something separate from our bodies, something which corresponds which our idea of a mind or a soul. There is no reason, as Prof. Swinburne says, that that soul should not survive the death of the body. [Swinburne, R., 2013, Mind, Brain & Free Will, Oxford, OUP]

Or, you can be simply blessed with faith, as the saints were blessed according to the letter to the Hebrews; in chapter 11, there is a wonderful catalogue of faith shown by the leaders of the Israelites all through the Old Testament. Hebrews says, ‘Since we are ‘surrounded by … so great a cloud of witnesses, … let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us.’ A great cloud of witnesses.

If we have run that race, as we heard in our lesson from the Book of Revelation, the vision is that there will be a new heaven and as new earth, ‘where God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more.’

We are here because they are not here. But the Gospel message is that that separation, that loneliness, will not last for ever. So in our act of remembrance, we need not be without hope. We can have the Gospel hope, the ‘sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life.’ [The Book of Common Prayer: At the Burial of the Dead]

Of course we do feel sadness. We do feel the pain of loss, the pain of separation. But we can also feel joy. We can rejoice in hope, in the Christian hope of eternal life, that we will not be separated for ever.

Sometimes when I look at old family pictures I do feel rather sad. But then, I look again at those pictures, and remember the happy times, the achievements we celebrated, the love. It was real. It is real. It is still good.

So therefore, in our memories we can feel happiness as well as pain. We can celebrate as much as we regret. We can understand that it is not enough, simply to say that we are here because they are not. ‘Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?’ We are here because we remember them. Let us remember them with joy.

Tags All souls, cloud of witnesses, died, Eben Alexander, Hebrews, Jesus, Oxford, Resurrection, Richard Swinburne, souls, spiritual body, St Paul

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Bible and Barnabas

By publicsquare

October 28, 2013 //

Sermon for Evensong on Bible Sunday at St Mary’s, on 27th October 2013

Luke 4:14-21 – And he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up: and, as his custom was, he went into the synagogue on the sabbath day, and stood up for to read.
And there was delivered unto him the book of the prophet Esaias. And when he had opened the book, he found the place where it was written,
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised,
To preach the acceptable year of the Lord.
And he closed the book, and he gave it again to the minister, and sat down. And the eyes of all them that were in the synagogue were fastened on him.
And he began to say unto them, This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears.
And all bare him witness, and wondered at the gracious words which proceeded out of his mouth. And they said, Is not this Joseph’s son?
And he said unto them, Ye will surely say unto me this proverb, Physician, heal thyself: whatsoever we have heard done in Capernaum, do also here in thy country.
And he said, Verily I say unto you, No prophet is accepted in his own country.

My younger daughter Alice is a medical student at Cardiff University. She is in her fourth year, and she is now doing clinical training. She’s just finished a stint in a psychiatric hospital. Apparently on her first day, when she met the consultant psychiatrist who would be training her, he introduced himself and then he said what Alice thought was a very strange thing.

He said, ‘You know, as a consultant psychiatrist, I sometimes think that I’m living very dangerously indeed: because nearly every week, I meet the son of God – but I never take any notice! What if I get it wrong some time?’

I feel a bit sympathetic to that consultant. We read stories about Jesus, where he did remarkable things or said remarkable things, which could only really have made sense if he were actually the Son of God. We read about the Pharisees and the scribes getting very angry, disbelieving him, and indeed threatening to do him in: just as they had done here. When he had read the lesson, read the scroll, and then said, ‘Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing,’ they didn’t get it. ‘Isn’t this Joseph the carpenter’s son? He’s just an ordinary bloke, from an ordinary background – and here he is, claiming to be divine, to be God, to be the Messiah.’

It’s interesting how the people in the synagogue reacted. If you read on beyond the bit of Luke chapter 4 which I just read, you’ll find that everyone in the synagogue was ‘were filled with wrath,
And rose up, and thrust him out of the city, and led him unto the brow of the hill whereon their city was built, that they might cast him down headlong.’

They threatened to kill him. Quite a difference from the people claiming to be divine in the psychiatric hospital. The worst thing that the people there would say was that they were harmless, mad, not bad. There was certainly no question of getting angry with them.

But for the people in the synagogue hearing Jesus’ words, it was a capital offence. They wanted to rub him out, to annihilate him, by throwing him off the cliff.

That does seem to be a very strange and unwarranted reaction. In today’s language, what’s not to like about the message that Jesus was proclaiming? Good news to the poor: release to the captives: recovery of sight to the blind: freedom for the oppressed: the year of the Lord’s favour, the year of jubilee, when debts are forgiven: why on earth should all that be so hated? Why was the man who said it thought to have done something so awful that he deserved to die for it?

It was a good message, a happy message, a message of benefit and goodwill. How could you possibly be against it? Perhaps an explanation why the Pharisees and scribes were so cross was not that it was to do with what Jesus was saying, but it was all about who he was to say it. You know, ‘Who are you? You’re just Joseph’s son. How can you say things like that?’

When I was about seven, my aunt Pegs came to stay. She was rather a formidable history don from the Institute of Education in Malet Street, so I was a bit wary of her. One morning I was just coming out of my bedroom to go downstairs to breakfast when I bumped into Aunt Pegs, who was also about to go downstairs to breakfast.

She looked over my head into my bedroom and said, ‘I think you ought to make your bed.’ I was outraged. It wasn’t that my bed didn’t need making – it was indeed a piggy mess – but: the problem was that Aunt Pegs was not the right person to tell me. Only Mum or Dad could give me those sort of instructions!

The same sort of thing was in the minds of the people in the synagogue, only to a much higher level. What Jesus was saying could only mean that he was God. He was the Messiah. Only the Messiah, only God, could say the sort of things that he was saying. Only God would have the power to bring about those happy outcomes, of poverty relief, freedom and healing.

It wasn’t that these were bad things. What made the people angry was that Jesus was saying the same things that the psychiatric patients do, but he was in deadly earnest. He was really setting himself up to be the Son of God. And the Jewish leaders were affronted. It was a deathly serious business for them. It couldn’t just be shrugged off as the ramblings of a harmless nutcase.

There was something revolutionary about what Jesus was saying. When the Messiah came, this would indeed be a moment of revolution. But it was outrageous that an ordinary carpenter’s son could claim to have that kind of life-changing power, and what got them angry was that they felt that he was a cheat: that he was in effect making light of something which was absolutely central to their belief. God was so awesome that you couldn’t even speak his name. To impersonate God was something truly dreadful, a terrible blasphemy, and it deserved the death penalty.

I don’t know how I would react if Jesus reappeared today. I don’t know whether I’d get it right: whether I would turn my back on my life and follow Jesus. I’d like to think that I would – but it’s at least possible that I’d be like many of the people around Jesus, who didn’t get it.

But the fact is that around the world today, hundreds of millions of people have got it. They do acknowledge that Jesus is Lord, that we are the beneficiaries of God’s grace.

How come? If some people didn’t get it when Jesus was there in person, how come now so many people do believe now? Worldwide, Christianity is far and away the most successful religion. In China alone, there are a million new Christians each year. There’s great growth in Africa, in South America and in former Soviet Union. So what is it that has brought the good news of Christ so effectively to so many people in the last 2,000 years?

The answer of course is this, is the Bible. Through reading the Bible, through listening to the teachings of the church – indeed, even through listening to sermons – about the Bible’s message, people have come to faith. In the second letter to Timothy chapter 3, we read that all scripture is ‘given by inspiration of God’. There is something in holy scripture which is genuinely revelatory. The Bible is a window on God. It is a hugely varied book, a book of books. As well as straightforward instruction, how to be a good and effective disciple, like St Paul’s letters to Timothy, there is ancient ‘wisdom literature’ like the Book of Ecclesiastes, the Preacher, or the Teacher. In the two chapters which Isabelle read for us, describing the venture of faith, ‘Cast thy bread upon the waters’; the life of joy: ‘the light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun:’ and how important it is to decide to follow a virtuous path: ‘Remember your creator in the days of your youth, before the days of trouble come’. Common sense. Folk wisdom. History. And the Gospel, the story of Jesus. All in one book.

So reading our Bibles, and supporting the work of the Bible Society, which we remember on this, Bible Sunday, is important. Translating the Bible, distributing it where it has not been before, printing it in sufficient quantities – all the work that the Bible Society does, is really important.

But today there is a twist. Just as in Jesus’ time, his preaching, his message, did not evoke universal enthusiasm, but also sparked opposition, so today, although the Christian gospel is just as much a message of love as it has ever been, nevertheless there are many places where to be a Christian is to be in a minority, to be oppressed and persecuted for your beliefs.

The reason, just as much as it was in Jesus’ day, is not so much about the message, but about who the messenger is. If you look at the Qur’an, much of its message is very similar to the Bible: but for Moslems, to get that message from anyone except the prophet Mohammed is unacceptable. And if you, as a Christian, stand up and affirm your faith – by having a Bible, or wearing a cross, say – this is an offence, a blasphemy, in some countries.

So today, as well as celebrating the Bible and the work of the Bible Society – and, I hope, sending them something if we can spare it – I commend also to you the Barnabas Fund, the charity which exists specifically to give support to Christians who are oppressed for their beliefs – for example, in Syria, or Northern Nigeria, parts of Pakistan, or Iraq. Think of Canon Andrew White, suffering from MS, but still leading his big congregation in Baghdad, in his flak jacket. These are the sort of people whom the Barnabas Fund supports.

So let us give thanks for the Bible today, for its unique power in spreading the good news of Christ: so let us support the Bible Society. But also especially today let us remember those places where it is actually dangerous to read a Bible, and where to belong to a church might mean you risk being bombed in the middle of the service. That is where Barnabas comes in. They carry on getting the Bibles through, supporting Christians where it is dangerous to be a Christian. Bible Society and Barnabas Fund. Let us support them.

Tags Andrew White, Barnabas, Bible, Cardiff University, Christians, death penalty, don, history, jubilee, medical student, Mohammed, Pharisees, psychiatrist, Qu'ran, relief of poverty, son of God, vicar of Baghdad

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Dedication

By publicsquare

October 6, 2013 //

Sermon for Holy Communion at the Dedication Festival, 6th October 2013, at St Mary’s, Stoke D’Abernon, Surrey

Ephesians 2:19-22 – You are … built upon the cornerstone of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone.
John 2:13-22 – Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.

Collect: John Wesley’s Covenant Prayer

I am no longer my own, but thine.
Put me to what thou wilt, rank me with whom thou wilt.
Put me to doing, put me to suffering.
Let me be employed for thee or laid aside for thee,
exalted for thee or brought low for thee.
Let me be full, let me be empty.
Let me have all things, let me have nothing.
I freely and heartily yield all things to thy pleasure and disposal.
And now, O glorious and blessed God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit,
thou art mine, and I am thine.
So be it.
And the covenant which I have made on earth,
let it be ratified in heaven.
Amen.
[John Wesley, 1780: as used in the Book of Offices of the British Methodist Church, 1936]

Dedicated. A ‘dedicated follower of fashion’, according to the Kinks. ‘A subtle book which I cannot praise as I would, because it has been dedicated to me’, as W.B. Yeats once wrote in a book review. Dedicated. In a church sense, dedication means consecration, means devoting a building to sacred purposes, means dedicating a building to God. Today is our dedication festival.

A dedication festival in a church can be a celebration of that church’s birthday. If you know exactly when in 680AD St Mary’s was first consecrated, dedicated, we could celebrate that day as the dedication festival. But we don’t know when it was, exactly. The Lectionary, which lays down all the dates and celebrations in the church’s year, says rather sniffily, ‘When the date of dedication is unknown, the Dedication Festival may be observed on the first Sunday of October (6 October), or on the Last Sunday after Trinity (27 October), or on a suitable date chosen locally.’

So this, the first Sunday of October, is our dedication festival. We are celebrating the beginnings of St Mary’s, the oldest church in Surrey and probably the second-oldest in England, in Saxon times, in 680. Over 1300 years ago.

Just by the entrance to the Norbury Chapel, on the shelf, there are three charming little models which show how our church evolved from a kind of Saxon shed to the pretty building with a bell tower, a chantry chapel, and a side aisle, as we know it today. We’re very fond of our church. We feel that, as a place dedicated to God, it is as good as we can make it. We wouldn’t like to see anyone being rude about how we look after it, how we run it – much less if anyone even talked about knocking it down.

We can sympathise with the Jews in our gospel story, being affronted by Jesus sweeping the money-changers out of the Temple, telling them that they were not looking after the Temple properly. On what authority was He doing this, what was the sign to show He was justified? Jesus, as He often did when asked difficult questions, gave a difficult answer. If the Temple were knocked down, in three days He would build it up again. What did He mean?

Their Temple had been 46 years in the building, so not surprisingly the Jews didn’t get it. But Jesus was talking not about the building, but metaphorically about the ‘temple’ (in quotes) which was His body; that He would be destroyed, and then He would be rebuilt again in three days. It was a prophecy.

St Paul picked up on that, and realised that the new meaning of the word ‘Temple’ in the light of Jesus Christ was the church: the church was not just a place, not just a building, however lovely, but much more importantly it was the gathering together of the people of God, as our lesson from Ephesians eloquently explained. ‘You are … members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. In him the whole structure … grows into a holy temple.’

So you can see that Jesus, and then St Paul, are encouraging us to think of dedication not just in terms of dedicating a temple, a church, but of dedicating ourselves, ‘our souls and bodies’ as we say in the prayer after Communion: ‘Through him we offer thee our souls and bodies to be a living sacrifice’. We dedicate ourselves.

The greatest dedication prayer that I know is the so-called Covenant Prayer of the Methodists, which we used today as our Collect. It was originally written in 1755 by John Wesley as part of his ‘Covenant Service’. He wanted a form of worship which would ‘help people to open themselves to God more fully’, and he used material from the 17th century Puritan divine Richard Alleine for the purpose.

The Methodists have what they call Covenant Sunday, which is either the first Sunday in January or at the beginning of September, which is the beginning of the Methodist church year. The aim of the service is for people to re-dedicate themselves to God. ‘To hear God’s offer and God’s challenge. To provide space for God to prompt, and for people to respond.’ http://www.rootsontheweb.com/content/PDFs/346041/Methodist_Covenant_Prayer_study.pdf

‘Covenant’ is another name for a contract. The Covenant Service, and the Covenant Prayer, are a collective bargain. The whole church joining together to dedicate themselves, to make their covenant with, God.

‘It is a commitment to being a disciple and putting God first in our lives and in everything about our lives. What we do and what we say and who we are. It is a surrender to and a trust in God.’ ‘You are mine and I am yours’. We are not self-sufficient. We accept God’s grace, God’s gift to us, and in return we give ourselves to Him.
http://www.methodist.org.uk/who-we-are/what-is-distinctive-about-methodism/a-covenant-with-god/the-covenant-service

John Wesley remembered Jeremiah 31: ‘The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant …. I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts: and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.’

Even though the words of the Covenant Prayer might not be totally familiar to us here, the idea of our dedicating ourselves to God is something that we nevertheless almost take for granted. We’ve been baptised; we’ve been confirmed; we’re about to say the Creed. That’s it, surely? But the idea of real dedication, in the sense of consecration, being the Temple of God, is actually something more.

At the time of John Wesley – who of course didn’t have a church, although he was an Anglican vicar till he died: he went about preaching on horseback – the annual Covenant Service ‘came out of the Puritan tradition of pastoral and spiritual guidance’. Therefore the Covenant Service wasn’t just an annual service, but it came at the end of a series of services and sermons ‘laying out the nature of Christian commitment’.

Then there was an invitation addressed to ‘those as will’ – that’s what Wesley’s words were – to come to the Covenant Service. Not so fast! First there would be a day’s retreat, for the people to prepare themselves ‘in prayer, fasting, reflection and self-examination’, and after that, the Covenant Service itself, which would end with the Lord’s Supper, with Holy Communion. Afterwards there would be pastoral guidance and follow-up for a period of days after the service, to ensure that people were not ‘backsliding’! Tough stuff.

I think it’s not out of order just to finish by mentioning my own experience. For years I would go to church most, but not all, Sundays. Things might crop up. If I was away on business or something, over a weekend, I wouldn’t bother to go to church. I did various jobs in the church – was on the PCC and things – but I would stop short of saying that I was really ‘dedicated’.

Then I was talked into becoming a churchwarden. A couple of days afterwards, the senior warden mentioned to me in passing that ‘of course, the warden’s job is to attend all the services.’ And I did. I became more dedicated. And things started to change. I really began to feel the Holy Spirit at work in me. I was drawn in. God was drawing me in, and at the same time God was giving me grace to enable me to go out – ‘Send us out, in the power of your spirit.’

John Wesley’s idea was that the Covenant was like a marriage, the marriage between Jesus and His church. The marriage vows were those defined in Ephesians 5. Wesley’s original covenant prayer involved taking Jesus Christ as ‘my head and husband; for better, for worse; for richer, for poorer; for all times and conditions; to love, honour and obey, before all others; and this to death’.

So I hope that you will take home your daily notes and look at the Covenant Prayer again; and perhaps, quietly pray it again tonight and maybe a couple of days later on this week. Pray the prayer. Enter into the covenant: be dedicated.

Tags body, church, consecration, Dedication, horseback preaching, Jews, John Wesley, Methodist, Resurrection, Saxon, St Mary, temple

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The Generosity of Cyrus the Great

By publicsquare

September 22, 2013 //

Sermon for Evensong on the 17th Sunday after Trinity, 22nd September 2013
Ezra 1; John 7:14-36

‘By the waters of Babylon, we sat down and wept: when we remembered thee, O Sion …
How shall we sing the Lord’s song: in a strange land?'(Psalm 137). The Israelites had been enslaved by Nebuchadnezzar, and they had spent fifty years in a strange land, Babylon, from 587BC until they were freed by King Cyrus, Cyrus the Great of Persia, who defeated the Babylonians and generously decided to allow the Israelites to go free, to go back to Jerusalem and to rebuild the temple.

That’s the story we hear from the book of the prophet Ezra, written in the fourth century BC, Ezra being the great prophet of the Second Temple, the temple which was rebuilt following the return to Jerusalem under the Persians.

The great story of Israel, leading up to the Christian gospel, is one of obedience to the Law, to the Law of Moses; and the question whether the Israelites were faithful to one god. ‘Thou shalt have none other gods but me.’ When the Israelites turned aside and did worship other gods, Baal and Moloch for example, as a result they were deserted by God and the Temple was destroyed.

You can read all this story very succinctly in the Acts of the Apostles, in the sermon delivered by St Stephen in Acts 6 and 7, or in one of the ‘history psalms’, such as Psalms 78 or 106. The Israelites regarded the Temple as being of huge importance. They made a house for God to live in. It was the same idea that the apostle Peter had at the time of the Transfiguration, to make tabernacles, little houses, for Jesus, Moses and Elijah. (Matt. 17:4)

But Stephen in his sermon explained that Jesus had changed things. ‘Howbeit the most High dwelleth not in temples made with hands; as saith the prophet, Heaven is my throne, and earth is my footstool; what house will ye build me, saith the Lord: …. Hath not my hand made all these things?’ (Acts7:48f)

In our New Testament lesson from St John’s gospel, Jesus is pointing out that the Jews are very literal in their adherence to the Law, so there are certain things that the Law allows them to do, for instance carrying out circumcisions, on the Sabbath, but not, according to them, healing the sick.

So the Jews were questioning Jesus about what authority, what basis he had, for challenging them, and Jesus answered that he wasn’t simply a man, but that he got his knowledge also from his divine origin. St John’s gospel has a major theme, which is that Jesus was the Son of God.

It’s interesting how these theological questions evolved. In 600BC, 2,700 years ago, it was a live issue whether there was one god; but it was already part of the Jews’ vision that that one god had to have a house, and the house had to be magnificently furnished. The idea of God being beyond time and space had not really taken hold; but it was true that the Jews understood God as not being something made, like a golden calf – God was not a ‘brazen idol’. He was the Creator and sustainer of the world.

It is perhaps a bit salutary to realise that these steps in the history of our own civilisation – the Persians conquered the Babylonians, the Greeks conquered the Persians, the Romans conquered the Greeks and the Romans conquered Britain – those early steps took place in those mysterious and rather feared places which perhaps today we would see on the map and say, just represent threats and trouble: Iraq, Iran, Israel, Syria. That’s where it happened. It is perhaps difficult for us to remember that these places together represent the cradle of our civilisation.

It does look as though things have regressed from the time when the great king of Persia, Cyrus, could be so generous to the Jews living in exile in Babylon. The dreadful use of chemical weapons recently looks to be an innovation in brutality – but if you look at Herodotus’ Histories, you will realise that even in the days of Cyrus there were some ghastly inhumanities going on.

I don’t think it’s appropriate to go into the gory details here, but suffice to say that man’s inhumanity to man seems to have been a hallmark of this part of the world, at once the cradle of civilisation and at the same time the scene of bestial cruelty. That was true even in these heroic times, when the Jewish exile was coming to an end.

The idea that God did not live in a particular place was not something which Jesus started. ‘Heaven is my throne and earth is my footstool’ is an idea which comes from Isaiah chapter 66. So Jesus’ preaching was not that revolutionary – it was simply emphasising what was in the prophets’ teaching already – but, as often seemed to happen, the Pharisees didn’t understand, and thought that Jesus was some kind of a charlatan.

I think it’s not very fair that we should have this idea that the Pharisees were all bad. I think we have to have some fellow-feeling. What would we have thought if we’d been there? For instance, if we’d heard a rumour that Jesus might be the Messiah, but we’d compared it with what we could remember had been prophesied about the Messiah: ‘You won’t know where he has come from.’ But we did know exactly where Jesus had come from.

Would we have been clever enough or trusting enough to become disciples? Or would we have stood on the sidelines, going with the flow, like the majority of the Jewish people? Would we have recognised all the miracles that Jesus did and realised that He was who He claimed to be?

But hang on a minute. Isn’t that all really rather academic? What possible difference could any of that stuff make to our lives? How does the fact that we go to church and we call ourselves Christians affect how we look at what’s happening in the Middle East today? Or if we come across people who are in need, or suffering from disabilities; do we put it down to their ‘lifestyle choices’, as a government minister did the other day?

Where is God in all this now? Is God speaking to us through His Holy Spirit, or has He left us to sort things out by ourselves? I think Jesus would be cross with us, just as He was cross with the Jews, if He saw us not taking care of the hungry, the weak, the poor, those who are not as fortunate as ourselves in our society: not, in other words, loving our neighbours as ourselves.

Jesus was clearly right in saying that the Pharisees had forgotten the law of Moses, because they were setting out to kill him. They had conveniently forgotten ‘Thou shalt not kill’. He was absolutely serious when He pointed out that, even on the basis of conventional wisdom, on the basis of the Law of Moses, ‘Thou shalt not kill’. That was true in the early years of the first century, when Jesus said it (or at least when Jesus implied it); and it’s true today. The right answer to the crimes of someone like Mr Assad of Syria is not more killing.
Nearer to home, Jesus’ emphasis, when faced with the fact that many people are hungry today, even in England, even in the rich borough of Elmbridge, in Stoke and Cobham, Jesus’ emphasis would surely be on feeding those people rather than trying to blame them for somehow bringing hunger upon themselves.

I can’t help the feeling that, although I don’t think Jesus actually said it in words, what is implied by his great commandment to love our neighbours as ourselves – which is in the Law of Moses; it’s in Leviticus, chapter 19 verse 18 – is that you have to take people as you find them. The Good Samaritan didn’t check to see whether the man, who had fallen among thieves and was lying injured on the road, he didn’t check whether the man had been imprudent or had not gone out properly prepared, or even had perhaps said the wrong thing.

None of that mattered. The only thing that mattered was he was hurt and in need. That should surely be our motivation too. Remember what Jesus said that the eternal Judge would say at the day of judgement: ‘Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.’ (Matt. 25:34f).

Tags Baal, Cyrus, Ezra, God, Good Samaritan, Greeks, Herodotus, Iran, Jerusalem, Jesus, Jews, Moloch, Moses, Nebuchadnezzar, Persia, Pharisees, Romans, temple, waters of Babylon

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Comfortable Words

By publicsquare

September 16, 2013 //

Sermon for Mattins on the 16th Sunday after Trinity, 15th September 2013
1 Timothy 1:12-17

‘Hear what comfortable words our Saviour Christ saith unto all who truly turn to him: …
This is a true saying, and worthy of all men to be received, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.’

I’m sure the passage in the Holy Communion service in the Prayer Book (p. 252), called the ‘Comfortable Words,’ is very familiar. In it come these words, which I want to look at this morning, and which were in our first lesson. For completeness, I ought to remind you of the words which come immediately after these Comfortable Words in the Bible, namely, ‘… sinners, of whom I am the foremost’, literally in the Greek, ‘of whom I am the first’ – number one. So all together, the quotation, in the NRSV translation, is, ‘The saying is sure and worthy of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost’.

Scholars have said that this letter to Timothy, St Paul’s constant companion, isn’t really by St Paul, but is a letter in the style of St Paul, ‘pseudonymous’, written by an early church leader. Anyway, most of it is consistent with things that St Paul clearly did write in his other letters. But what do these ‘comfortable words’ really mean?

They’re deceptively simple. They describe the work that Jesus came among mankind to do. Not what He was, but what He did. The objective, the purpose, for Jesus coming among us. To save sinners. Among whom, the writer of the letter in the guise of St Paul claimed to be No 1, the No 1 sinner. That means that, if St Paul, or someone who writes in the guise of St Paul, says he’s in it up to his neck, so are all of us.

We need to understand first what a ‘sinner’ is. Is it just a bad person? It is not just badness, but knowing that it is against God. The writer says that although he was ‘a blasphemer, a persecutor and a man of violence’, he ‘received mercy because [he] acted ignorantly in unbelief.’ He didn’t know. But if you know you are doing wrong, and still do it, that is sinful. Remember St Paul wrestling with this in Romans chapter 7: ‘For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing that I hate. … But in fact it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me.’ (Romans 7:15,17)

So St Paul suggests that someone who doesn’t know what they are doing, who has no conscience about it, may be doing wrong, but it isn’t sinful. Sin is a crime against God. Idolatry – ranking something other than God higher than God – is perhaps the quintessential sin. Just saying that makes us realise that this is still very relevant today. We can all think of instances where it has been more important, we thought, to do something, something where God didn’t come into it, rather than to take time for God or to follow His commandments. We are still prone to worshipping idols.

To put it another way, sin is something which pushes us away from God, which separates us from Him. What utter bleakness, if there is in fact nothing higher, nothing greater, no ultimate heart of Being; if life is nasty, brutish and short, and there is no purpose in it.

But we are told that Jesus came amongst us to ‘save sinners’. How did He do it? What is this ‘saving’ process? How does it work? (Unfortunately, we might be tempted to ask if it works at all, seeing that dreadful things, sins surely, are still all around us.) Is it true that ‘Love’s redeeming work is done’, as we sing in Charles Wesley’s great hymn?

In simpler times perhaps, people might have been content, might indeed have been ‘comforted’, by the thought that somehow Jesus had ‘paid a ransom for our souls’, that by his death on the cross He had paid a price of our sins – a ‘full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction, for the sins of the whole world’, as the Prayer Book puts it.

But I would hope that we couldn’t really believe in a God who, on the one hand, is a loving creator, but on the other, must countenance human sacrifice if His terrible vengeance is to be bought off. But Jesus’ work isn’t some kind of a ‘transaction’, some crude and brutal trade-off. Even back in the time of Abraham, God would not let Abraham sacrifice his son Isaac to him. (Genesis 22)

Nevertheless there is an element of costliness, of sacrifice, in what Jesus did. ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends’ (John 15:13, AV). This is still the greatest love.

There is a calendar of ‘holy days’ which the church celebrates. Various saints and holy people are commemorated throughout the year. A few weeks ago, on 14th August, our church remembered, commemorated, a modern saint, Father Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish Franciscan monk who was in Auschwitz. At morning prayers on 14th August every year we listen to his story.

It was believed, wrongly, as it turned out, that someone had escaped from the part of the prison, Auschwitz, where Father Maximilian was held. The SS seized ten men at random to be executed, horribly, by starvation, as a deterrent to others who might try to escape. Father Maximilian asked to take the place of one of them, so that that man might see his wife and children again. He gave his life in that man’s place. It is a very terrible and moving story.

That story, I think, gives us a better understanding of how Jesus ‘saves’ sinners. It wasn’t just a question of Father Maximilian making the ultimate sacrifice or being inspired by Jesus’ willingness to die on the cross, not just a question of his trying to follow Jesus’ faithfulness, wrestling with temptation in the garden of Gethsemane: ‘Father, … take this cup away from me’, but eventually accepting the Father’s will.

If that was how salvation works, by inspiring us to follow Jesus so closely that we never sin again, not many of us would make it, not many of us would qualify. Just as St Paul pointed out in Romans, we are sinful. We can’t help it. Jesus’s death on the cross hasn’t put an end to our still being challenged by sin. So salvation doesn’t just work by inspiring us not to be sinful any more – although again, there’s an element of truth. What Jesus did does inspire us – and it may well make us better people. But that in itself wouldn’t justify saying that He ‘saved’ us.

By his supreme expression of love, Father Maximilian triumphed over the evil of Auschwitz. He has never been forgotten. Even the guards were astonished at what he was willing to suffer. The reaction of the SS guards was very reminiscent of what the Roman centurion said at the foot of the cross. The Holy Spirit was definitely at work, in 1941, in Maximilian Kolbe. It wasn’t annihilation. It was a victory. Father Maximilian Kolbe won a victory.

Jesus won a victory. Not a blood sacrifice. Not just a wonderful example – but something extra, over and beyond sacrificial love and inspiration. It was a triumph – Christ the Victor. Christ had conquered death. In so doing, Christ revealed the power of God at work. That revelation is that God cares for us, even though we may be cut off from Him – or though we may cut ourselves off: even though we may be sinners.

The idea is that we are like the lost sheep, the lost coin or the prodigal son. The prodigal son acknowledged that he had messed up, he had missed the mark in life – and ‘missing the mark’ is the literal meaning of the word we translate as ‘sinning’. But his father welcomed him back, no questions asked. The fatted calf – if it had happened today, that would be roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, using Kobe beef – was his father’s free gift, his ‘grace’, in religious language. He sinned: he repented: he was welcomed home.

This still works. Maximilian Kolbe proved it in 1941, and I’m sure that, if we only knew about them, there are lots of saints at work today, also making colossal sacrifices, sustained to do it by their faith.

You might still think that all this talk of ‘sinners’ doesn’t mean you. But let me remind you of one of the ‘sentences of scripture’ which I read before the service: it’s from the first letter of St John, chapter 1:

If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us; but if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

So reflect on these comfortable words in the week ahead. They still mean something significant, they still offer real comfort, even for you.

Tags Auschwitz, Book of Common Prayer, Jesus, Maximilian Kolbe, save sinners, Sin, SS guards, St Paul, substitutionary atonement, Timothy

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The Holy Spirit on my iPad

By publicsquare

September 9, 2013 //

Sermon for Evensong on the 15th Sunday after Trinity, 8th September 2013

John 5:30-47 – ‘The works that the Father has given me to complete, … testify … that the Father has sent me.’

Last week I had a few days’ holiday in Italy, in one of Palladio’s villas, outside Vicenza. You’ll be relieved to know that I will spare you my holiday stories – and you’ll be even more relieved that you won’t have to soldier through the 383 pictures that I took. No lantern slides here at St Mary’s!

What I do want to mention is something strange which happened last week, which actually happened to all of us; it was on the news, not just in Italy. But it struck me perhaps more than it would otherwise have done, because I was getting the news each morning by downloading my English newspaper on to my iPad; it was my only source of news, as I wasn’t listening to the radio or watching the TV – indeed the Villa Saraceno didn’t have a TV.

I’d flown out on Tuesday and I stayed through till Saturday afternoon. When I set out, the situation in Syria was very bleak – as indeed it is today. The new development then was the dreadful use of chemical weapons, most likely by the Assad regime, and the way in which the USA and our own government were shaping up to react. ‘Assad must be punished’ was the line. There was a perception that the United Nations was deadlocked, and that it was unlikely that there would ever be a resolution from the United Nations permitting military action against the Assad regime.

So the government proposed a motion in the House of Commons which would lead on, if it were passed, to a further motion which would authorise British forces to attack Syria.

I should pause at that point, before everybody in church walks out, and say that nearly everything one can say, in this context, is capable of more than one interpretation: so I should say that all that this is describing is my perception, and I’m quite prepared for somebody to tell me that my perception, for example of the precise meaning and intention of the motion which was proposed to the House of Commons, is not exactly accurate. The important thing, from the point of view of this sermon, is what it looked like to me, and on that I can be a reliable guide.

So on Wednesday and Thursday, my friends and I in the Villa spent the days against a background where we felt that it was highly likely that within days there would be military action against Syria by British and American forces. Indeed there was evidence of a major military force in the Mediterranean – American warships, British Typhoon jets and so on – all being assembled.

Imagine my surprise when I woke up on Friday morning, switched on my iPad and downloaded the newspaper. I saw on the front page a headline to the effect that the motion in the House of Commons had been defeated – convincingly defeated. The Prime Minister had said, ‘I get it’ and had assured everybody that there was no longer any question that Britain would become involved in warlike activity in Syria.

I have to tell you that I have not recently read the front page of a newspaper and had such a feeling of excitement and surprise as I did when I read the front page of the paper as it appeared on my iPad last Friday morning. I quickly pulled on my dressing gown and went out into the breakfast room, where my friends were already gathering for breakfast.
The friends I was with are Americans, so there was perhaps an added poignancy about the situation. I told them what had happened. The interesting thing was that they were not upset. We all expressed a great feeling of relief and joy that our parliament had not done the conventional thing and supported the Prime Minister’s motion. As the day unfolded, we did make an effort to look at the BBC website, and we saw that there were already people saying that the special relationship with the United States was over, that Britain had forfeited its position in the world, that Mr Cameron had been inept in the way he had prepared the motion, and so on and so forth.

But we did not feel any worse. Neither side, neither the American friends nor I as a Brit. Rightly or wrongly, we felt that something greater was at work. Indeed, we dared to think that perhaps the Holy Spirit was at work here. Everybody acknowledged that what was going on in Syria – what continues to go on – is truly dreadful, that something must be done to stop the suffering and the killing.

But we also really doubted whether more warlike activity was going to produce the peace and security that Syria so badly needs. Can you really change the mind of a brutal leader by launching a cruise missile at him and killing some of his people – probably together with some other people as well, who are not involved? What would the consequences of a major attack by ourselves and the Americans be likely to be? Somehow this message had got through to enough of the MPs in Parliament for them not to accept the proposal, and to vote for peace instead.

In so doing they were definitely doing something unconventional. They were breaking a lot of the conventional rules of so-called good government. If a government threatens against another government, ‘If you do this, then we will do that’, and they do this, then conventional wisdom says that you have to do that in response. But we didn’t. Somehow the MPs perceived a higher force, a greater principle, than just the narrow question of the conventions of the English constitution.

I think you can look at our story from St John’s gospel in much the same way, and I think from it one can gain some real encouragement that what has happened in relation to Syria so far is a glimmer of hope, and it shows the Holy Spirit at work, it shows God at work.

If you read the whole of chapter 5 in St John’s gospel, before the passage which we had as our second lesson, the background is that Jesus healed a sick man at the Pool of Bethesda who had been ill for 38 years, lying by the pool but unable to get into the healing water: and Jesus did it on the Sabbath day. The Jews went after Jesus, saying that he was wrong to heal people on the Sabbath. Jesus answered them, ‘My father is still working, and I also am working’. He was working – just as I think God is working in relation to the rather unconventional position taken by Parliament in relation to Syria.

God is working. The Jews were even more incensed, because they thought that Jesus was blaspheming in referring to God as his own father. It never occurred to them that He was in fact God. Jesus gives an explanation to them. ‘I can do nothing on my own. I seek to do not my own will, but the will of him who sent me,‘ and so on, contrasting the witness of John the Baptist with the witness of Jesus’ heavenly Father at the moment when Jesus was baptised: you will remember, a voice from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved’, (Luke 3:22).

This passage was written before the destruction of Jerusalem in 70AD. It begins, ‘Now in Jerusalem, by the Sheep Gate, there is a pool, called in Hebrew, Bethesda’. That would imply that when John was writing this, Jerusalem was still intact. So it means that this account was written no more than 30 years or so after Jesus‘ death. It is authentic – but what it described was extraordinary. It broke the rules. Jesus did the sort of things that no-one had ever seen before.

But nevertheless He did them. As Jesus said, ‘The works that the Father has given me to complete, the very works that I am doing, testify on my behalf that the Father has sent me’. This is much greater authority than the law of Moses, than the tradition of the Jews.

Well I don’t know whether it’s completely fanciful, but I am hearing echoes in my mind of the situation last week. Unheard of for Parliament in effect to disobey the government of the day in a context where foreign affairs were concerned and there was the imminent prospect of major warlike activity. If the Prime Minister says ‘War’ then the parliamentary convention is that Parliament supports him. But they didn’t; they didn’t, because they perceived something higher.

Maybe not many of them would acknowledge that it was the Holy Spirit at work, but it might explain my reaction, when I saw that newspaper headline, first thing in the morning in Italy; the strange warmth I felt. My heart lurched. Something very special had begun to happen.

Of course God moves in very mysterious ways. The poor Syrians are still fighting. The G20 summit did not produce any agreement between the various great powers. But nevertheless America and Britain are now looking much more carefully at whether the use of force is a complete solution, or whether there might be a better alternative that does not involve more death and destruction.

On the one hand, the law, the law of Moses. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Punishment, the punishment to fit the crime, perhaps. On the other hand, a recognition that two wrongs don’t make a right, that what is needed is not more violence and force.

I believe that what happened last week showed a glimmer of hope. It may not have followed the rules, just as Jesus didn’t follow the rules in Bethesda – but it showed that God is working.

Tags holiday in italy, Holy Spirit, ipad, middle-east, politics, villa saraceno

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The Lord’s Prayer and the evils of Wonga

By publicsquare

July 28, 2013 //

Rowan Williams has said in a BBC radio talk, ‘If somebody said, give me a summary of Christian faith on the back of an envelope, the best thing to do would be to write Our Lord’s Prayer.’ [http://tinyurl.com/pdsoosq]

Jesus told the disciples to pray ‘Our Father’, which reflects the Aramaic word ‘Abba’ or ‘Dad’. Even if it doesn’t justify our thinking of God as our boon companion rather than a figure of infinite mystery and awe, it does imply that Jesus was inviting his followers, which includes us, to join with him in addressing prayers to God. We aren’t praying to Jesus, but with Jesus.

‘Our Father – in heaven’. Actually if you were listening carefully to today’s Gospel reading from St Luke, it didn’t say ‘Our Father in heaven’; it just went straight from ‘Father’ to ‘hallowed be your name’. The location of God as ‘ο εν τοις ουρανοις, Greek for ‘the one in the heavens’, raises the question whether Jesus really did think of God as being a benign old man sitting up above the clouds – which surely no-one can seriously believe these days. The words about heaven come in the other version of the Lord’s Prayer, in St Matthew’s gospel chapter 6, towards the end of the Sermon on the Mount. There are two versions of the Lord’s Prayer, according to St Matthew and according to St Luke.

I think we can accept that the heavens are not literally where God is, in a sense that he is at 65,000 feet or wherever. Plato and Aristotle both used ‘heavens’ as a word for the cosmos, the universe – and other classical authors used it as meaning simply the place where the gods lived. We can say that in a sense God is somewhere altogether other, altogether separate from the material world.

‘Hallowed be your name’. ‘Hallowed’ means ‘sanctified’, made holy or saintly. Remember that the Jews couldn’t say the Lord’s name; it was too holy, too awesome. In a sense also, to say that someone’s name is awesome is to say that that person is awesome. So this is a way to say that we totally respect God.

Christians have debated constantly about ‘your kingdom come’. Does it mean that Jesus was looking forward to the end of the world, to his Second Coming and the Last Judgment, or was he thinking more of ‘that day when your kingdom comes, and justice and mercy will be seen in all the earth’, (beautiful words which we pray in Eucharistic Prayer E in Common Worship)? You may want to pray for heaven on earth, or ‘God be at my end, and at my departing.’ Jesus has given you the words for either.

Daily bread is a very apt thing to pray for today, when so many people are physically hungry. There may well be other metaphysical connotations – maybe the prayer for daily bread is looking forward to the Eucharist, to the sharing in a memorial of Jesus’ Last Supper. But today we do need to pray for the relief of hunger in the world – and on our doorstep.

What about ‘sins’? Leaving aside for a minute whether Jesus said ‘debts’ or ‘trespasses’ instead of ‘sins’, are we bargaining with God here? Are we asking Him to forgive us, provided that we forgive others? Or are we saying that we do forgive – honestly we do! We can be confident in asking God to forgive us.

This prayer is so full of good things. In St Matthew, Jesus even thoughtfully puts some doubters’ minds to rest with his introduction: no need for wordy and elaborate prayers, because ‘your Father knows what you need before you ask him’ (Matt. 6:8). Why then should we bother to pray at all? Surely God can’t notice our puny little intercessions? Jesus says that He does. It is worth praying. There’s no possible way to prove this – and anyway we can’t boss God around. This, prayer, is prayer, not magic. It isn’t a question of saying the right words and cooking up a spell in order to bless or curse someone, like the witches in Macbeth. But those of us who do pray, do believe, do believe that, very often, our prayers are answered.

When we have prayed, what are we going to do? First, let’s say three cheers for Archbishop Justin! Yes, three cheers, not only because he has spoken out against the pay-day lenders like Wonga, who charge astonishing rates of interest – over 5,000 per cent – to the poorest people in this country, but also three cheers for him being honest and straightforward in response to John Humphrys on the Today programme, when it was pointed out that the Church of England pension fund had invested a very small amount of money in a hedge fund which had been one of the major investors in Wonga.

Actually, the amount invested by the Church of England in the hedge fund was just £75,000, out of a total invested by the C of E of £5.5 billion. But even this tiny amount was a mistake, and Archbishop Justin openly admitted it. It was so refreshing.

Wonga, its urbane spokesmen say, only lends very small amounts for very short periods, so in effect, the percentage charged is meaningless. They are, after all, lending to people who can give them no security for repayment. What is the harm in that?

Wonga could argue that an interest rate is like an insurance premium: the greater the risk of default, the higher the interest rate. It seems to me that any interest rate over 100% has gone beyond the function of an interest rate as a sort of insurance premium, because in fact, if you’re charging 100% interest, you are saying in effect that it isn’t a question of risk, but it is a certainty, that there will be a default. 5,000% interest presumably means that Wonga is charging 50 times more than it needs to charge, if all it is trying to do is to cover the possibility of a bad debt. 50 times more.

The banks are just as bad, in a different way. Wonga lends at an extortionate price. The banks often don’t lend at all. In both cases, you can see that the interest rate mechanism, the market price mechanism, doesn’t work. Banks have become so defensive and so averse to risk that they won’t lend at any price. Wonga, on the other hand, will lend, but at a price which bears no relation to risk and ruthlessly exploits the weakness of its borrowers.

Both are wrong. The banks who won’t lend to young people looking for their first house or to people setting up small businesses are quite plainly not doing what they are supposed to do. A functional economy needs banks as a source of capital, and that capital has to be really available, has to be used.

Equally, there should be protection for the weaker members against ruthless market players like Wonga, whose loans will tend to make borrowers even worse off than they were to start off with.

What principles is Archbishop Justin relying on? ‘A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another’ (John 13:34). Or from the sentences of scripture before Communion in the Prayer Book, on pages 243 and 244, ‘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?’ Or how about, ‘He that hath pity upon the poor lendeth unto the Lord. And look; what he layeth out, it shall be paid him again.’ Love God, and love your neighbour: the two great commandments of Jesus (Matt.22:40). They mean that we mustn’t simply use the market as the sole index of distribution or risk or fairness – or indeed, of value.

But since the time of Margaret Thatcher, all British governments seem to have agreed that the ultimate measure of value, of worth, in our society, is the market, is what people will pay for things. That is what has led us to Wonga. The rich have got massively richer, without any care for the poor. The people who are paid enormous salaries and bonuses refer to their ‘market value’. They are worth, they say, what somebody is prepared to pay. No other criteria are worth bothering with. Just the market: just money.

The poor people don’t have the skills or anything else to make themselves expensive in the marketplace. Governments have made it difficult for them to stand up for themselves and to organise, because most of the powers of the trades unions have been taken away.

And so there are many people in our society today – and they are here on our doorstep in Cobham and Stoke as well – who don’t have enough to eat. The politicians shrug their shoulders. They say, ‘there is no alternative’ to austerity. They talk about government debt being unsustainable – ‘There is no more money’, they say. Never mind that in ‘quantitative easing’, they are manufacturing more money, and that our level of national debt is less than half what it was in 1945.

Against this, up pops Archbishop Justin, challenging the system of pay-day loans, and against this, up popped Archbishop John in York, challenging the fact that the minimum wage is not enough to live on, and suggesting that the government should force everyone to pay the ‘living wage’, which is a couple of pounds more per hour.

I won’t go into the detailed economics of these propositions, but suffice to say that the two Archbishops are not looking at the market as their index of value.

Just think: there was nothing in it; no money to be made, by the Good Samaritan. But nevertheless I am sure that the value of what the Good Samaritan did easily outweighs any price in money. So what Archbishop Justin is saying is that he wants to take on the pay-day lenders and put them out of business by offering, from the Christian churches,
something better and fairer.

He wants to build on the credit union network, and offer church premises as places from which credit unions can operate; and I think he wants church people, who have the right skills, to come forward and help to operate credit unions. Here, locally, we do have a credit union, called Surrey Save – http://www.surreysave.co.uk/ . It’s excellent to hear that it will be one of the first tenants in the new Hub in Cobham, where the Library is going to be. Also on the premises will be Oasis Childcare Centre; and of course the Food Bank will be just opposite, in the Methodist Church.

So if you agree with me that, as Christians here in Cobham, we need to follow Archbishop Justin’s – and indeed Jesus’ – injunctions, to care for our neighbours in need, then please do consider seriously letting Godfrey or me know whether you would be willing to help with the Food Bank or with the credit union. They are going to be major focuses of Christian activity here in this village. St Paul says: ‘We are free to do anything’, you say. Yes, but does everything help the building of the community? (1 Cor. 10:23 – NEB). Archbishop Justin has got it dead right.

Tags banks, credit union, food bank, interest rate, Justin Welby, Lord's Prayer, money, Wonga

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Christian Business as Usual

By publicsquare

July 22, 2013 //

Sermon for Evensong at St Mary’s on the Eighth Sunday after Trinity, 21st July 2013
Genesis 41:1-16, 25-37; 1 Corinthians 4:8-13

In this ‘Ordinary Time’ in the church’s year, when we’re not remembering anything particular in Jesus’ life, like Christmas or Easter, what is on the Christian agenda for us here in Stoke D’Abernon?

The big news specifically affecting St Mary’s in the last week has been the grant of planning permission for the projected new hall. It will be a great place to have a Sunday School; a great place to welcome people to have a cup of coffee – not necessarily just after services, but perhaps in the mornings during the week as well, when the mums are dropping their children off at Parkside: a great place to hold public meetings, so that the church can be involved in the life of village society around it.

A great place, to put it simply, for the church’s mission. We know that there are a lot of people who are very happy to see St Mary’s as part of the local landscape – a beautiful part of the landscape – but it never occurs to them to come inside, or to come to any of the services.

If we are to share the good news of Christ, we have to do something to bring people in, to get them really to consider the message of Christianity, and not just to dismiss it out of hand as being old-fashioned or irrelevant in today’s world.

That step – the step, from seeing the church as a pretty building, to actually coming in and starting to become part of the people of Christ – is a big step. At St Andrew’s PCC meeting earlier this week, I was very interested to read, in a report on the children’s and young people’s activities, this:

‘… being part of the local community, then encouraging families to be part of the church
community as well, has great potential. Many comments from parents and carers at Messy Church and Baby Talk suggest that that they are unaware of what is going on [in the church] and that they thought Church was a bit dated/ old fashioned! Making church relevant and enjoyable in today’s hectic and time-demanding life styles is a key focus …’

When you are a Christian, there’s nothing more important than your faith, your church, in your life. It comes into everything you do. God at the ground of your being, or God as the ground of your being, to use Paul Tillich’s expression as quoted in Bishop John Robinson’s famous book ‘Honest to God’. [Robinson, J. 1963, Honest to God, London, SCM Press: chapter 3] Once you properly understand the position, it’s no longer possible to say that you can take it or leave it when it comes to church. But first you have to come in, and hear the message.

You can see how belief in Jesus radically affects people, and has affected people from the earliest days, when you look, for example, at what St Paul says in the passage from his first letter to the Corinthians, which was our second lesson this evening. He describes the Corinthians as being like kings, whereas he and the original apostles were nothing like that, being very humble and very weak when compared with the new princes of the church in Corinth.

When Pope Francis came in, he didn’t use his limo; he just got on the bus – and indeed on his visit to Rio de Janeiro this week, he won’t use the armoured Popemobile. ‘So the last shall be first, and the first last’, (Matt. 20:16) just as Jesus said.

So anyone who wants to be a prince in the church has to think very carefully what that really means. ‘We are fools for the sake of Christ, but you are wise in Christ’, is what St Paul says to the Corinthians, rather mysteriously. Does it mean that what Christians say doesn’t make sense?

Is what the church says ‘foolish’? That’s what some people say about the Church of England’s position on women bishops. That was another thing that happened in the church locally in this last week. There was a big meeting in Holy Trinity, Guildford, at which there was a report back from the lay representatives on the General Synod about what had happened since the proposed legislation, to allow the consecration of women as bishops, was defeated by a margin of six votes – three of whom had come from the Guildford Diocese – in November last.

The problem is supposed to be about making provision for people in the Church of England who are said to have ‘theological objections’ to women as bishops. They are sometimes referred to as ‘traditionalists’. You might have a nagging worry about this. What if this is one of those situations where on the one hand you have trendy morality without any real principles behind it, and on the other, Christians standing up for the traditional views which they believe the church is teaching them, dictated by the Word of God? What are these ‘traditional’ views?

The ‘conservative evangelicals’ believe that the Bible is literally the word of God – that in effect God dictated it to the various human authors, such as Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and St Paul – and according to these conservative evangelicals, as there are references in the Bible, for example in St Paul’s first letter to Timothy, which say that women are subordinate to men and ‘not allowed to teach’ (1 Timothy 2:12), that means that women cannot ever be suitable for ministry – let alone for consecration as bishops.

I wonder if these people believe, for instance, that Methuselah (Genesis 5:21) was, really, over 900 years old. That’s what their stance implies, among other things. I certainly believe that the Bible can reflect the word of God, but that it was written in the context of a particular time and place: it reflected the customs and beliefs of its time. The Jewish society of first and second-century Palestine was male-dominated. Sexist references in the Bible reflect this, rather than any ‘word of God’, surely.

According to the other group of antis, the ‘conservative Anglo-Catholics’, the problem is one of ‘sacramental assurance’. If (perhaps for the reasons advanced by the conservative evangelicals), there is any doubt about whether a woman can be validly ordained, then if she administers the sacraments, especially Holy Communion, they will not be ‘valid’ – or indeed, if these catholics believe, as Roman Catholics do, that the bread and wine in Holy Communion somehow actually become the body and blood of Christ, then any doubt about the priest being properly ordained will interfere with this ‘transubstantiation’.

Article 26 of the 39 Articles of Religion, which you can find at p. 622 of your little Prayer Books, is titled ‘Of the Unworthiness of the Ministers, which hinders not the effect of the Sacrament’. It explicitly states that it doesn’t matter if the priest is a bad man, a sinner, when he gives Holy Communion – it is still Holy Communion. I would infer that, even if women are supposed to be lacking in some way, it must be far less objectionable than if they were bad, or sinners. So one can infer from Article 26 that even in the sixteenth century Archbishop Cranmer, the great theologian who wrote most of the Book of Common Prayer, would not have had much time for the objection based on ‘sacramental assurance’ – that women can’t administer valid sacraments. Even if the priest is bad, the sacrament is good. All priests in the C of E affirm that they subscribe to the 39 Articles, even today.

These anti-women schools of thought are subscribed to by a tiny minority in the Church of England. The ‘antis’ actually oppose women as priests as much as they oppose women as bishops – and they insist that their reasons are just those abstruse theological points about the literal meaning of the Bible or ‘sacramental assurance’ – rather than what it looks like, which is simple misogyny.

The difficulty for the General Synod, the governing body of the Church of England, is that if it makes a formal provision for these objectors, so that they can remain in the C of E but do not have to accept the authority of a woman bishop, this would mean that there would in effect be two sorts of bishop, one, male bishops, whose authority would be acknowledged by everyone, and the other, female bishops, whose authority would be acknowledged by most but not all their flock. In other words, female bishops would be inferior to male ones.

Clearly most members in the C of E at large would not want this. Most of us want there to be women bishops on the same terms as male ones. But because a two-thirds majority is required in the General Synod – which was achieved in the houses of bishops and of clergy, whereas in the house of laity, the vote was six short, and absent a new election to the Synod, the measure might fail again. The objectors say they only voted against because they didn’t think there was sufficient protection for the anti-women people – which conveniently doesn’t mention that, almost as a matter of logic, there could never be any formal ‘protection’ which didn’t diminish the authority of women as bishops, so in effect they were sticking out for something which could never happen.

Which brings me back to the question of the church’s mission. I think that most normal, ordinary people will not understand these so-called theological objections to women bishops, and may well think that what it really boils down to is that the C of E is still back in the Dark Ages, and that we are just misogynists.

Remember what our children’s worker at St Andrew’s wrote in her report:

‘Many comments from parents and carers at Messy Church and Baby Talk suggest that that they are unaware of what is going on [in the church] and that they thought Church was a bit dated/ old fashioned!’

What would Jesus have thought? All that stuff about ‘sacramental assurance’ certainly has a ring of the Pharisaical about it – and we know what he thought about that. ‘Whited sepulchres’, he called those Pharisees (Matt. 23:27). Frankly, until we stop the nonsense about women bishops, we have little chance of making people today see how Christianity could change their lives. If you care about it, write to our General Synod representatives. I can tell you who they are. [See http://www.cofeguildford.org.uk/diocesan-life/general-synod/ ]

Perhaps in closing I could mention another, more positive, thing which the church locally has been involved in recently, which I hope you will hear much more about soon. This is the Food Bank which Churches Together in Cobham, Oxshott and Stoke D’Abernon is setting up. Financial help has already been promised from a variety of sources – including the PCC here at St Mary’s – and the next appeal will be for people to come forward and help in person with the collection and distribution of food to needy people. We will need at least six people each week to staff the distribution centre, which will be open at the Methodist chapel, behind the library, once a week for a couple of hours.

The actual food to be collected will be mainly non-perishables – we hope people will take advantage of ‘buy one, get one free’ offers in the supermarket as well as simply buying a bit more than they personally need – so it will be rather like Harvest Festival, but every week. If anyone would like to know more about the Food Bank, please talk to me.

When you read some of St Paul’s letters, just like the passage which was our lesson tonight, you get a feeling that the early churches were in need of careful leadership and direction. They got things wrong. St Paul tried to put them back on the right track. The right track – but how can we find it? Not by discriminating against half the human race, for sure. The Good Samaritan would surely have driven his Range Rover – his superior camel – off to Waitrose (after he’d dropped off the poor chap who’d been mugged, at Woodlands Park), and laid in some BOGOF offers for the Food Bank. I hope we all will.

Tags Christian mission, Church of England, food banks, Women bishops

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