Jesus and Tony Soprano

June 27, 2013 //

One of my favourite actors unfortunately died this week: James Gandolfini. Gandolfini was an American actor who became very well known for playing the Mafia boss Tony Soprano. Tony was a big man, in a number of senses; physically very large, a bear of a man; but also large in the sense that he was the head of the family, a Mafia family.

And he was troubled. You might say, of course he was troubled: because he was a bad man. He did bad things. But some of the genius of the series – if you haven’t seen it – consisted in the tension between the good and the bad sides of Tony Soprano’s life. On one level, he was the proprietor of a waste disposal company with a fleet of dustbin lorries and a waste disposal plant: nothing to object to there. But on another level, he controlled a number of rackets, some centred around a particularly dubious night-club.

He was the father of a typical well-to-do American family. A lovely Mum and two fine children, a boy and a girl, growing up, the son to follow in his father’s footsteps in the business and daughter studying at Columbia University. They lived in a fine suburban house which wouldn’t look out of place round here. Periodically the family would eat out together, perhaps on a Friday night. Tony was very good to his family, especially to his elderly relatives, despite the fact that they were not exactly angelic in many ways. Even despite his love for his family, sadly Tony wasn’t immune from falling prey to temptation and cheating on his wife.

Tony Soprano was, all in all, a very complicated character – almost a tragic hero, or certainly, an antihero; brilliantly played by James Gandolfini, who was a wonderful character actor.

But perhaps the most extraordinary feature of Tony Soprano, was that he was portrayed as recognising that he had a flawed character, that he was torn in one way or another; and so he consulted a psychiatrist, Dr Melfi.

Some of the most gripping scenes – the most moving scenes – in the series, take place when Tony pours out his troubles on Dr Melfi’s couch. We might say that Tony Soprano ‘had his demons’.

Demons. I’m not quite sure how far we can make modern parallels with the stories in the Bible [Luke 7 and 8] of Jesus’ ‘deeds of power’, of His ‘redeeming deeds’: stilling the storm, dealing with the Gadarene (Gerasene) demoniac, healing the lady who had suffered from haemorrhages and raising Jairus’ daughter. We had the stilling of the storm at Evensong last week, and Jairus’ daughter will be a lesson at Evensong tonight. They are all connected. They all show Jesus’ power.

Where ‘demons’ are concerned, I can’t imagine that a psychiatrist would last long in practice today if her therapeutic methods involved diverting people’s ‘demons’ into large herds of livestock which then became subject to collective fits of madness and destroyed themselves, as the Gadarene swine did.

You might wonder why Jesus was apparently quite content to allow the demons to go into the pigs and for the pigs then to throw themselves into the lake. As a friend said to me this week, it must have been a terrible disaster for the pig farmers involved. In St Mark’s Gospel, where this story is also told, it says that there were 2,000 pigs that died in this way. What a catastrophe for the farmers concerned! I very much doubt that the Roman government paid any compensation. Perhaps the fate of a bunch of pigs was not something that seemed very important, when seen from a Jewish perspective.

Clearly, it is quite difficult for us to understand what was really going on in these episodes from Jesus’ life. Perhaps we might colloquially refer to somebody ‘having demons’ today: we might say somebody ‘has to face his demons’, for example; but we’re not trying to make any kind of scientific statement. Similarly, healing the woman who had been suffering from haemorrhages, and, even more spectacularly, raising Jairus’ daughter from the dead, is really difficult to understand in modern scientific terms.

The whole concept of ‘powers’, forces that people might possess, was an idea that was current in Hellenistic philosophy at the time of Jesus; the power that went out of Jesus when the woman touched the hem of his garment: the evil force, the demoniac possession, in the Gadarene madman, which Jesus was able to bring out of the poor man: these powers were understood perhaps in the same way that we understand ‘super power’ in comic-book heroes: as a sort of X Factor.

‘High o’er the fence leaps Sunny Jim,
Force is the food that raises him’

That was a breakfast cereal advert many years ago. Everyone will remember the ‘Tiger in the tank’ that came with a few gallons of Esso petrol. It’s an attractive idea, that some people have something special, some special power; and I suppose that if some people have special power for good – Superman, for example, Kryptonite – then other people, you could imagine, might have special powers for bad. If Batman had his cape, Lex Luthor had a bad equivalent.

But unless I have missed something, I don’t think that either of my children, who are medics, would agree that any of this is anything other than picturesque fantasy, just stories. At which point I think there is a very important issue. One can make a coherent argument that these stories in the New Testament about Jesus’ deeds of power are simply myths, myths which illustrate the fact that Jesus was God as well as man. Some people would go so far as to say that therefore, because it would appear that the laws of nature could not possibly allow these various deeds of power to have really happened, they didn’t really happen: they are merely figurative, they are just stories, myths to illustrate a point about Jesus.

Indeed some of the Bible commentaries caution you against taking these stories too literally. You would be missing the point, they say, if you try to work out what kind of psychiatry was involved in the healing of the man with a demon, or try to work out what it was that made the Gadarene swine hurtle to their deaths. Better, they say, to look at it as being figurative. So, the expression ‘Gadarene swine’ has indeed become a figure of speech. It’s the idea of a collective madness taking over a group of people, which leads them to their own destruction.

But is it only figurative? If it is, then it could be a reason why some people have rather lost interest in the story of Jesus. Very commonly today people will say to you, ‘I don’t go to church: I don’t really think I could ever make sense of the things that go on there enough – and ultimately, I’m not too bothered.’ Those of us who do believe might find that rather shocking. But I would say that it was understandable. What we say, as Christians, is that you can, to some extent, reason your way to a belief in God, in the sense of there being an ultimate creator, but you can’t really reason your way to a belief in a god that cares for us and is involved in our lives – a god that would be worth praying to.

The reason that we do believe in that God, who is involved with us, who cares for us, is precisely because we believe in Jesus. We believe that God revealed Himself to us in the form of Jesus Christ, and the nature of that revelation is crucial to our belief. If indeed what we know of Jesus is actually a collection of myths, stories, which really have no basis in our modern understanding, then it would be difficult to say that there was any real revelation by God of His true nature in Jesus. If all that Jesus ultimately was, was a collection of picturesque stories, then the person who says, ‘I just don’t know. I don’t think I could ever really know, and therefore I don’t really bother with religion any more,’ is being perfectly rational.

If all we are doing is celebrating a bunch of picturesque stories, (even granted they are stories which illustrate profound points), but if ultimately they are just that, only stories, then, indeed, all we have in God is a blind watchmaker. But if that was the case, I just don’t think we would still be sitting here in church, a couple of thousand years later. I don’t think that Christianity would be, on a worldwide basis, if not in Northern Europe, a rapidly-growing religion, with many millions of people coming to faith each year. It seems to me that we have to accept that the Gospels are not just mythical or figurative – although there may well have been things put in to emphasise points. I think, on the other hand, that we do have to accept that something did happen, and that that ‘something’ is beyond our human understanding, beyond the reach of modern science.

God revealed Himself in the person of Jesus. It seems to me that it is perfectly possible to understand these ‘deeds of power’ as being things which went outside what we regard as the laws of nature and went beyond what we can understand or explain, but that they were there, that they did happen. It’s precisely because of that, that we believe that Jesus was who he said he was. If we really believe that, that is the ultimate elephant in the room. We can’t simply put God away in a cupboard and say, ‘Yes, we know that there was a creator. He put the mechanism together, set it off, and now, we’re working out the inexorable process of evolution – but He’s no longer involved.’

That won’t do. If we believe that Jesus’ coming on earth shows that God is not just an unmoved mover, but is actually personally concerned with us, then I really don’t think that we ought to be unmoved either.

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Taking the Poor Man’s Pet Lamb

By publicsquare

June 16, 2013 //

Sermon for Holy Communion on the Third Sunday after Trinity, 16th June 2013
2 Samuel 11.26 – 12.10,13-15, Galatians 2.15-21, Luke 7.36 – 8.3. Taking the Poor Man’s Pet Lamb.

On Wednesday I went to a very interesting panel discussion in St Paul’s Cathedral, chaired by Stephanie Flanders, the BBC economics correspondent, in a series called ‘The City and the Common Good – what kind of City do we want?’ under the auspices of St Paul’s Institute, which, even if it may not actually have been set up in response to the Occupy protest outside St Paul’s, certainly has raised its profile since.

The title of the session was ‘Good Banks’, and the panel was led by the Archbishop of Canterbury, who gave the keynote presentation. As you can imagine, it was a fascinating evening. Archbishop Justin is a leading member of the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards, so he definitely knows what he is talking about in the banking area as well, of course, as being an archbishop.

Archbishop Justin talked about what it was for a bank to be good. The ultimate objective, Archbishop Justin said, was that a bank should contribute to the common good; and the common good he explained as ‘human flourishing’.

Antony Jenkins of Barclays, another panel member, recalled that, when he was being questioned by the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards, he was ticked off by Archbishop Justin for forgetting that Barclays was originally a Quaker company. Their values were derived from their Quaker, Christian, faith.

Not everyone will automatically agree on what is good and bad. There’s a famous instance in Herodotus’ Histories, written 2,500 years ago in the 5th century BC, [Book III.38.3f], where the Persian king Darius asks some Greeks how much he would need to pay them in order to persuade them to eat their fathers’ corpses when they died. They replied that would never do that, not at any price.

After that, Darius summoned some Indians of a tribe called Callatiae, who regarded it as completely normal to eat their fathers’ corpses, and he asked them how much money it would take to persuade them, instead of eating them, to cremate their fathers’ corpses. They cried out in horror and told him not to say such awful things.

These days we don’t very often go very deeply into what it is that makes something good or bad, what it is that makes us generally agree that something is good or bad: what the quality in the thing which is held out to be good or bad, what quality in that thing will make us decide that it is good or bad morally. I think that we ought to give it more thought.

But if we do think about it, it is that as Christians, just like the founders of Barclays Bank, we derive our justification, our perception that something or other is good or bad, from our Christian faith: from the 10 Commandments, from Jesus’ sayings in the New Testament. Not everyone has this same moral compass.

In our lessons today there are three different illustrations of right and wrong. Jesus meeting the woman who was said to be a ‘sinner’, but who showed him more love than the respectable Pharisee, Simon; St Paul wrestling with whether ultimate goodness depended on following the Jewish Law, and in particular whether in order to be a good Christian you needed to be circumcised (if you were a man).

I want to concentrate on the first one, the terribly sad story of King David and his adultery with Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah. Some of it is rather reminiscent of what I think many of us find shocking in the recent stories about the banks.

David used his power as king. He did what he wanted, he had his way with another man’s wife – because he could. There was no-one to stop him. He contrived to have Bathsheba’s husband killed, by ordering him to undertake what was in effect a suicide mission. Again, he did it not because he was right, or justified, in so doing, but because he could. He had the power, the might, of kingship.

Just so, those banks, those banks who were ‘too big to fail’, and the so-called ‘masters of the universe’ who led them, undertook transactions which involved zero sums: someone wins, and the other party loses. By the amount won, the loser loses a corresponding amount. The profit and the loss balance out: it is a zero sum. Nothing wrong, perhaps.

But the trouble is, that in many cases, what made some banks winners was not the excellence of their work, or their deals’ contribution to the economic well-being of society, but rather the fact that they did it because they could. If, for instance, you sell people an investment based upon the bagging up of hundreds of loans, if you represent to your buyer that this is a good investment, even though you know that in many instances the loans which you have packaged up will never be repaid, and if you sell them on, using your bank’s great reputation as a powerful and reputable operator in the market, you are not trading fairly. You are in effect a bully. You are too big to fail: the other parties are too small to affect you.

You are a bit like King David, perhaps. But where your bank differs from King David is that, in modern times, there has been no prophet to speak truth to power, in the way that the prophet Nathan did to David. The regulator, the FSA, has been ineffective. Perhaps if one compares Nathan’s scrutiny of what David had done with FSA regulation, one could see that, whereas, most likely, a modern regulator will look at whether the rules have been followed, Nathan looked to see whether David had done evil in the sight of God.

I had some dealings with the FSA when I was in legal practice: but I never remember them couching any of their communications with my clients in terms of whether their conduct had been right or good – let alone whether they had done evil in the sight of God.
Nathan brought David to see that he had done wrong by telling him the heartbreaking story of the rich man taking the poor man’s pet lamb. The rich man had no right to do it. He didn’t even pay the poor man – he just took it. He did it because he could.

What redress could the poor man have? He was too poor to sue. It’s the same today; legal aid has been taken away, so a poor person cannot, in practice, go to court to get justice if a big company infringes his rights.

But King David had Nathan the prophet to hold up a mirror to him, to show him the wrong that he had done. David acknowledged his fault, his sin, his crime. He was punished: but ultimately the Lord forgave him. We, in our society, don’t do that. No-one accepts that they have done wrong. No-one prays for forgiveness. Instead, these masters of the universe take their bonuses, or their huge golden parachutes, and ride off into the sunrise, heads held high.

But the little people have to suffer. I was shocked to read, in ‘Lunch with the FT’, yesterday, Sir Mervyn King, the retiring governor of the Bank of England, sketching out possible ways of restoring financial health to Europe. One was, I quote, ‘to continue with mass unemployment in the south, in order to depress wages and prices until they’ve become competitive again’. Do you see the spectre of the pet lamb? Do you think that a poor person in Greece, who can’t get medicine any more when they are ill, has the slightest interest in being ‘competitive’?

Maybe it was the way the piece was written; maybe in fact Sir Mervyn is the most compassionate man, and he would never sacrifice the livelihoods of the poor and impotent for the sake of some economist’s dogma. But the frightening thing is that he could, if he did want to. Where is his Nathan?

Tags Archbishop Justin, banks, FSA, legal aid, masters of the universe, Nathan, pet lamb, too big to fail, zero sum

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Human Flourishing and the Prayer Book

By publicsquare

June 15, 2013 //

Sermon for Evensong after the AGM of the Guildford Branch of the Prayer Book Society, 15th June 2013
Psalm 78: Judges 7: Luke 14:25-end. Human ‘flourishing’: ‘that peace which the world cannot give’

The panel all, in various ways, talked about what it was for a bank to be ‘good’, or what ‘good’ things a bank could do – or what bad things a bank could do. Although they were sitting under the dome of St Paul’s, even the Archbishop of Canterbury didn’t spend very much time on what it was that made things good or bad. He just said that the key objective was to promote ‘human flourishing’.

I think ‘human flourishing’ is one of those almost circular terms dreamed up by philosophers and theologians to get away from terms like ‘rich’ or ‘successful’ or ‘happy’, which might invite objections of one kind or another, if they were put forward as ingredients of ‘goodness’. ‘Flourishing’ has perhaps some connotation of St Irenaeus’ famous saying, that ‘the glory of God is a human being fully alive’. A human being who has realised his or her potential, who is fulfilled in that: not just successful – not necessarily successful at all. Antony Jenkins of Barclays, another panel member, recalled that, when he was being questioned by the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards, he was ticked off by Archbishop Justin for forgetting that Barclays was originally a Quaker company. Their values were derived from their Quaker Christian faith.

It’s just not the case that everyone will automatically agree on what is good and bad. There’s a famous instance in Herodotus’ Histories, written right back in the 5th century BC, [Book III.38.3f], where the Persian king Darius asks some Greeks how much he would need to pay them in order to persuade them to eat their fathers’ corpses when they died. They replied that would never do that, not at any price. After that, Darius summoned some Indians of a tribe called Callatiae, who did eat their fathers’ corpses, and asked them how much money it would take to persuade them to cremate their fathers’ corpses. They, the Callatiae, cried out in horror and told him not to say such awful things. Our perception of what it is to be good or bad has always been heavily influenced by our surroundings and our culture, what it is that we agree on to be a good thing.

However, these days we don’t very often go very deeply into what it is that makes something good or bad, what it is that makes us generally agree that something is good or bad: what the quality in the thing which is held out to be good or bad, what quality in that thing will make us decide that it is good or bad morally. But if we do think about it, it is that as Christians, just like the founders of Barclays Bank, we derive our justification, our perception that something or other is good or bad, from our Christian faith: from the 10 Commandments, from Jesus’ sayings in the New Testament.

There is of course a spectrum of opinion within Christianity concerning whether you can simply refer to what the Bible says, as being the Word of God, the literal Word of God, as being decisive in all moral questions, or whether you have to understand the Bible in the light of experience and scholarship.

For instance if we take another current moral conundrum, what to do about Syria, it seems fairly clear that, certainly in the Old Testament, in our Psalm and in our lesson from Job today, the use of force was regarded as being a perfectly legitimate way of settling differences between nations.

It seems odd, in the light of this, that the 10 Commandments quite clearly include the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’. What has happened is that over time, scholars such as St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas have developed the doctrine of the ‘just war’. You not only need what’s in the Bible, but also scholarly interpretation in the light of experience.

Now we are here to worship at the time of our meeting, as members of the Prayer Book Society. We are celebrating and supporting the use of the Book of Common Prayer. How is it that the orders of service and words for worship which were composed by Cranmer, evolved in the century beginning after 1549 and turned into this little book, the Book of Common Prayer – how is it that these are still valid for use today, in the face of these contemporary moral issues?

What are we doing in worship? We are coming to God in prayer, to ask forgiveness for our sins, to thank God for the blessings which we have received, to praise God – just a minute: we are coming ‘ … to render thanks for the great benefits that we have received at his hands, to set forth his most worthy praise, to hear his most holy Word, and to ask those things which are requisite and necessary, as well for the body as the soul.’ I think that those words, in the Prayer Book, really can’t be bettered as a neat and comprehensive statement of what we are doing in our services of daily prayer.

In this little Evensong service, expressed in the most beautiful words, we are bringing ourselves before God in the best way we know how. Cranmer’s words are full of meaning; they give us the widest scope in prayer. If we say or sing Mattins and Evensong each day, if we use the psalms and the lessons prescribed in the Prayer Book, we will read the whole Bible from end to end, and we will have before us each day powerful examples, in the Prayer Book, of Jesus’ teaching and the meaning of the divine revelation.

Look at Mary’s song, Magnificat, which is all about Jesus’ almost revolutionary message. ‘He hath regarded the lowliness of his handmaiden … He hath put down the mighty from their seat: and hath exalted the humble and meek. He hath filled the hungry with good things: and the rich he hath sent empty away.’

What a strong message for the G8 Summit on Monday and Tuesday! Who is this message for? In the Magnificat, ‘He remembering his mercy hath holpen his servant Israel’, but in Nunc Dimittis also, ‘Thy salvation which thou hast prepared before the face of all people, to be a light to lighten the Gentiles, and to be the glory of thy people Israel.’
Christianity is for everyone.

Back to those moral questions, for the good bank and for those who want to stop the killing in Syria, or who want the G8 nations to deal with world hunger and poverty. Where does goodness come from? What is the standard that we can rely on? As Christians, it comes from revelation, from the revelation that is the story of Jesus’ life and death and resurrection.

‘I believe in God, the Father Almighty …’ Again, it’s there in the Prayer Book. That is the mystery in which we believe. That is what Christian morality is rooted in. God is not just an unmoved mover, the great creator, but He has revealed Himself personally to us in Jesus.

We can’t stay silent in the face of that great and wonderful truth. So we pray. We pray in the Prayer Book, in the way that Jesus taught us: ‘Our Father, which art in heaven, …’ In the Lord’s Prayer we glorify God; we pray for His kingdom; we pray for our physical needs – ‘Give us this day our daily bread,’ we pray for forgiveness for our sins and we pray for grace to forgive people who do things against us. We pray not to be put to the test, and we pray to be good – ‘deliver us from evil’.

In the set prayers, the collects, the state prayers for the Queen and for the Royal Family, the prayer for the clergy and people, all wrapped up together in the great prayer of St Chrysostom, the Prayer Book encompasses and puts into words all the other things that we will want to lay before God. These prayers are very inclusive. Anyone can say these prayers, and mean them. You don’t have to believe in particular types of theology in order to use the Prayer Book. An evangelical, charismatic, waving their arms about and chanting worship songs, can still use these words just as effectively as a learned chaplain in an Oxford college or a canon in one of the great cathedrals. This is truly common prayer.

It is liturgy. It is the ‘work of the people’, which is what liturgy, λειτουργία, means in Greek. The Prayer Book is still a practical guide, a powerful tool which gives us the best words to bring ourselves before God. ‘Give us that peace which the world cannot give’. That peace – that flourishing, even, as Archbishop Justin would put it.

Tags Aquinas, Archbishop Justin, Archbishop of Canterbury, Augustine, Barclays, BBC, Book of Common Prayer, G8, good banks, Job, Stephanie Flanders, Syria

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Good Job, Jim

By publicsquare

May 13, 2013 //

Lord Young of Graffham, the 81-year old former cabinet minister under Margaret Thatcher, who is now the Prime Minister’s adviser on ‘enterprise’, was on the BBC Radio 4 ‘Today’ programme today saying that 95% of the companies in Britain are small enterprises employing a couple of people or fewer. ‘If they all hired one more person, our unemployment problem would be solved’, he said.

The trouble is, what sort of employment is it? The Conservatives such as Lord Young want to ‘reduce red tape’ allegedly affecting small businesses, so as to encourage more people to start up small companies. Revealingly, Lord Young also said recently that a time of economic recession (the existence of which he conveniently denies) ‘low wage levels … made larger financial returns easier to achieve’ for the owners of businesses (The Guardian, 11 May 2013).

The difference, seen from an ordinary employee’s viewpoint, between a big company and a little start-up, is in the likely security and longevity, in the overall quality, of employment offered. Rolls-Royce in Derby (and worldwide), whom I recently visited, offer 100 local youngsters apprenticeships, and 100 graduates graduate training programmes, in their Academy each year. Once their training is complete, these people can expect long-term, pensionable employment with full employment protection under the law.

In a start-up following the Lord Young model, young people will be employed for short term contracts on the minimum wage, contracting out, where possible, of the protection offered by law – for example under the Working Time Directive, limiting employees’ hours of work. They will have minimal job security – this is the obverse of the much-vaunted ‘flexibility of employment’ which the current government makes such a virtue.

The Thatcherist programme continues. Having destroyed much of our manufacturing industry, the Thatcherists now work to ensure that the gap in quality of life between the rentiers, the bosses, and the employees is not just a question of rewards – although that gap has widened hugely since Thatcher came to power – but also involves huge disparity in job security and the ability to achieve a stable place in society.

Is there any evidence that cheap labour automatically makes for successful business? I suggest not. Good products and investment in people and technology would seem to be much more productive. Rolls-Royce in the UK, or, for example, Mercedes-Benz in Germany, are good examples. Government should make policy to help such companies to grow and prosper, rather than adding to the number of vulnerable, rootless and exploited short-term workers without proper skills, training or reward.

Tags enterprise, job security, Lord Young of Graffham, low pay, Margaret Thatcher, Mercedes-Benz, red tape, Rolls-Royce, start-ups

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Visions of Heaven

By publicsquare

May 6, 2013 //

Sermon for Holy Communion on the Sixth Sunday of Easter, 5th May 2013
Rev. 21:10,22 – 22:5

What does heaven look like? This is the last Sunday in the Easter season, when, in the church, we are thinking about the 40 days after Easter, when the resurrected Jesus made his various appearances, for example to the people on the way to Emmaus and to the disciples on various occasions, for example to Doubting Thomas. On Thursday there will be Ascension Day: if you don’t get up in time for the service on Box Hill at 6:30am, there will be a service here at 8 in the evening. On Ascension Day we remember the extraordinary story of Jesus’ ascension, the story from the first chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, the apostles talking to Jesus, and then

As they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. (Acts 1:9)

Where was he going? In Acts, two men clothed in white, two angels, presumably, appear, and say that he has gone to ‘heaven’, heaven, which is not really very helpful, because it begs the question where heaven is. I suppose that, in ancient times, at the time of Jesus himself, it was perfectly possible, even for educated people, to believe that heaven was a place above the clouds, just out of sight – but nevertheless in a definite physical location, ‘up there’ or ‘out there’ somewhere.

Ever since the time of the Montgolfier brothers and their early balloons, and certainly since the beginnings of aviation, we have discovered that, whatever it is that is above the clouds, it doesn’t correspond with the vision of the New Jerusalem.

I don’t want, today, to get involved in the various arguments that in some sense science and religious belief are opposed to each other, or contradict each other. But it is certainly true that some people have noticed that there is much less room today for a picture of God, or of the divine, which is limited to those things which we don’t know or which we don’t understand. That would lead to a God who shrank all the time, and maybe disappeared altogether as science grew more and more capable.

In the old days, when they didn’t know what was above the clouds or out in space, it wasn’t unreasonable to think that perhaps they were the places where God was, that they were, in effect, heaven. But then, as I’ve mentioned before in the last few weeks, this year is the 50th anniversary of the publication of the book ‘Honest to God’ by Bishop John Robinson in 1963, which was perhaps the first time outside schools of theology or philosophy that people heard – and they heard it from a Church of England bishop – that God isn’t ‘up there’ or ‘out there’, that heaven isn’t a realm above the skies in some way.

One of the reasons for this is precisely that if you try physically to locate God somewhere, you take away all those attributes beginning with ‘omni-‘ in the way we describe God. Omniscient, knowing everything: omnipresent, present everywhere. Not present only above the skies.

One of the difficulties that we face when we are contemplating the divine is that God is beyond contemplation, that he is more than we can understand. But nevertheless, in the Bible, in the Old Testament in the prophets, and in the New Testament certainly in Revelation, the people who wrote those bits are trying very hard to share the visions they have had – and their visions, they believe, were revealed to them by God – which have given them glimpses of God.

So the vision of St John the Divine in the book of Revelation includes this wonderful picture of the holy city Jerusalem ‘coming down out of heaven from God.’ In Acts, the two angels say that Jesus will come back again, the same way that he has gone, up into heaven. So John the Divine has a vision of the Holy City, heaven on earth, coming down from heaven, from God.

But then, interestingly, the physical attributes of the city evaporate. It had no temple, no light or darkness: because the way you see, in the Holy City, is not a physical way. It doesn’t seem to have any buildings, but it does seem to have people in it.

Nothing unclean will enter it, nor anyone who practises abomination or falsehood …

Well, those are clearly references to the Jewish Law. Obviously you can take those words as literally as you like. Some people would say that if the Jewish Law, in Leviticus for example, identifies something as an abomination or falsehood, then clearly this passage in Revelation is suggesting that people who do those things will not end up in heaven.

Alternatively, as I think I would prefer to do, you can take this as an attempt to perceive the imperceptible, to perceive the divine with human eyes, and to say that in heaven, in the realm of God, there is by definition nothing that is faulty, nothing that is false or untrue. That goes rather wider than narrow considerations of particular laws and particular customs or moral principles which may have been grounded in the needs of the society at a particular time and place.

Similarly, the idea that only those who ‘are written in the Lamb’s book of life’ can enter heaven is a concept which has exercised the church over the years. John Calvin took this as evidence of predestination, that only those whom God had chosen in advance would go to heaven, would be saved.

That caused quite some controversy, because if people are either saved or not, irrespective of what they may do or what they may believe, then you could argue that there’s no real point in behaving well. We believe now, following Arminius, that this is too narrow, that God’s saving grace is open to everyone who believes and trusts in Jesus.

Then there’s the river of the water of life, the tree of life, with its twelve kinds of fruit, one fruit for each month, and its special leaves which ‘are for the healing of the nations’, presumably the idea being that they provide natural remedies. Let’s remember that the most common drug in the world, aspirin, was originally made from the bark of a tree.

But this isn’t biochemistry or physics; it is revelation. It is one man’s attempt to describe what is beyond description. The river of the water of life is a metaphor for something which is life-giving. If you don’t water your flowers, they die. So the water must in some sense be life-giving. Having fruit which is appropriate to each season is good. Now of course, with air freight and supermarkets, we can have seasonal fruit all the year round, but it doesn’t contradict the principle that we rely on God’s creation for nourishment at all times.

Now in the Old Testament, the Israelites never did anything important without prayer, and without a prophet consulting God – and God either supporting them or not supporting them in what they were doing. God was a present reality. If they obeyed him, God would support them. He would support them in a military way, overturning the captivity in Egypt, parting the waters and bringing them into the Promised Land. But Moses, the great prophet and the great leader, wasn’t allowed to go into the Promised Land because his people Israel had been so fractious and disobedient.

When the United Nations are deliberating whether to intervene in Syria, you can be pretty sure they won’t bring into their deliberations any consideration of God or what God would want in those circumstances. Which do you think would be a better way, the ancient Israelite way, consulting a prophet – or do you think that the modern way, a debate in the United Nations, would be likely to give a better outcome?

If George W. Bush and Tony Blair had tried to discern what God’s will would be, before they decided to invade Iraq, I wonder if the outcome would have been different. Perhaps they did spend time in prayer on it. It’s just that we haven’t heard about it. I wonder.

What would be good for our world leaders, would be good for us too. The message which we can take from these lessons as we approach Ascension, is to remember that the Lord is here. His Spirit is with us. He’s not an elephant in the room – but we’re not alone. Therefore let us not forget, or even ignore, Him, but, in our prayers and in all the decisions in our lives, let us allow the Lord to be a real presence.

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Tabitha

By publicsquare

April 21, 2013 //

Sermon for Mattins at St Mary’s on the Third Sunday after Easter, 21st April 2013
Acts 9:36-43 – Tabitha

If you had asked me who Tabitha was, when I was little, I think I might have told you about Tabitha Twitchit, the cat in Beatrix Potter who was the mother of Tom Kitten and his sisters Mittens and Moppet, and who made clothes for the kittens.

Now in the lesson just now we heard about Tabitha in the Bible, whose name meant Dorcas, or ‘gazelle’, a woman ‘full of good works and almsdeeds which she did’. She had died: and the widows who were in attendance, weeping, showed the apostle Peter ‘the coats and garments which Dorcas made, while she was with them.’ Like Tabitha Twitchit, Tabitha Dorcas was good at sewing.

But Dorcas was altogether more important than that. She is one of the few people in the Bible – or anywhere – to have been raised from the dead. The widow of Nain’s son; Lazarus, Jesus himself of course – and Jairus’ daughter. What Jesus said to Jairus’ daughter, whose name we are not told, was ‘talitha cumi’, ‘which is, being interpreted, Damsel, …. , arise.’

Damsel, arise. Talitha cumi. Dorcas, get up. Ταβιθα, αναστηθι, in Greek. There does seem to be some similarity between the two stories. Does it mean they are only stories?
St Paul said, if there were no resurrection, then our Christianity is pointless (1 Cor. 15:14).

But that’s not what I want to concentrate on this morning. We believe in God: we believe that Jesus was God in human form, the Son of God. Why would there be any limit to what God could do?

No, what I want to focus on is Tabitha, Dorcas. The Acts of the Apostles describes her as a ‘disciple’ – μαθήτρια, which means a learned woman, or a female student. It is the feminine version of the word used for the Twelve, the disciples. Their two key names are ‘disciple’ – a student – and ‘apostle’ – someone sent out, an ambassador. Today is celebrated in many churches as Vocation Sunday – and I want to look at this one person, Dorcas’, calling.

You will recall how important it was for St Paul to be accepted as a an apostle. He became the apostle to the Gentiles, to the non-Jews. Now here we have Dorcas, described as a ‘disciple’. This marks her out as very important among the early Christians. Before the Twelve became apostles, before Jesus sent them out to preach the gospel, they were disciples, students, of Jesus, the Teacher, the Rabbi.

When Mary Magdalene encountered the risen Jesus at the tomb, she called Jesus ‘Rabboni’, the most respectful word for a rabbi, a teacher, when she realised that she had mistaken him for the gardener. She too was a disciple, μαθήτρια.

So just as St Paul mentions, for example at the beginning of some of his letters, that he is ‘called to be an apostle’, Dorcas is described, before anything is said about her good works, as ‘a disciple’. She has one of the key qualifications for being one of the early leaders of the church; she is a disciple.

When I was reading about Dorcas, it reminded me about the continuing wrangle in our church about women bishops. True enough, the Bible doesn’t say that Dorcas was a bishop, an επίσκοπος, an overseer. But is does say that she was a disciple. I feel that being a disciple then was probably even more exalted than being a bishop – and Dorcas was especially exalted, she was uniquely ‘exalted’, in that she was raised from the dead!

But my train of thought wasn’t about whether there is Biblical authority for there being women bishops – although I do think that Dorcas shows that there is – but rather I thought again about the fact that there is still a deadlock about it today.

As you will remember, at the last General Synod of the church in November last, the motion to allow the church to ordain women as bishops was very narrowly defeated, by four votes in the house of laity. Three of the four representatives in that house from our, Guildford, diocese, voted against, and so did two of our clergy representatives, (one of them being our Archdeacon, who is now going to be Bishop of Blackburn).

There was a lot of upset, sadness and anger as a result within the church – but outside, the most common reaction was that the Church of England had showed itself to be completely out of touch. It was not our best day.

But when the various post-mortems started, those who voted against were saying not that they opposed women becoming bishops, but that they did not feel there was ‘proper provision’ for people who did not accept that there should be women bishops.

As you will remember, when women were first ordained as priests, the church adopted a system of ‘flying bishops’ to give spiritual oversight to parishes which passed a resolution that they would not accept women as priests. There are three or four parishes out of the 160 in our diocese which fall into this category, and there is a flying bishop appointed – the technical term is that he is their ‘Provisional Episcopal Visitor’.

There have been various proposals about how to look after parishes that will not accept women bishops. First there was a suggested ‘Measure’, with a capital ‘M’, which would be part of Canon – church – Law. Then this was replaced by a suggested Code of Practice, which would be more like the Highway Code: not law in itself, but the idea is that if one follows it, it will avoid breaking the law.

The problem is, that there doesn’t seem to be any likelihood that the various groups who are opposed to women bishops will agree that any one system would give them the protection they are looking for.

The other problem, which is related to this, is that if you go too far in making provision for people who, for whatever reason, refuse to acknowledge the authority of a woman bishop, you will to some extent make that woman bishop less than, or certainly not equal to, a male bishop. Not surprisingly, that’s not acceptable either.

Our bishop, Bishop Christopher, has been taking part in various meetings of bishops aimed at trying to come up with proposals to put to the next meeting of General Synod in July, so that the impasse can be removed.

He has said that the bishops have decided not just simply to put the same proposals, which were rejected in November, to the vote again. It is thought that they would not get through – and there might even be more votes against than last time.

However, there is a silence about what proposals they are going to put forward. No one seems to be minded to compromise, and indeed some groups appear to have hardened their position.

There is apparently a school of thought, following the Bishop of Gloucester, that there is so little chance of agreement, given the current membership of the Synod, that the only thing to do is to wait until new Synod elections have taken place in three years’ time, and new people will be there to consider the whole thing afresh.

I think, from what I have read, that this wait-for-three years idea is really based on the assumption that the majority in the church, who support women bishops, will get themselves elected in bigger numbers, so that the opponents will be overwhelmingly defeated, and there will be no need to have any provisions for dissenters – you will either have to accept women bishops or, ultimately, leave the church. But then again, the antis might organise their supporters too, and come back in greater force.

I have recently discussed all this with a leading Forward in Faith minister (FiF are against women even as priests, let alone bishops) and with various people, lay and ordained, who can’t see why we shouldn’t have women bishops – and who think that the church is losing out, for as long as it doesn’t happen.

My own perspective is that the Church of England is a ‘broad church’ with a fine tradition of accommodating a wide variety of views on all sorts of important things. We range from High Churchmen, who are practically indistinguishable from Roman Catholics, who sometimes use Roman Catholic service books and pray for the Pope as Vicar of Christ on earth; we range from them to Low Churchmen, who don’t wear any vestments, who may not use the prescribed forms of services either, but incline to Pentecostal worship, speaking in tongues and so on: and we include all shades in between.

We accept that all these varieties are Anglicans. We turn a blind eye to the fact that Canon Law actually lays down the services to be used, the vestments to be worn, and the doctrine which is supposed to be authoritative – you can find it in the 39 Articles in your Prayer Books, beginning at page 611. There are an awful lot of churches that don’t go along with these requirements – and no-one tries to kick them out as a result.

It has given me the idea, (which you might think is an odd one coming from a lawyer), that perhaps it is not a good idea to try to draw up legalistic solutions to the women bishops question. Codes of practice, Measures in Canon Law and so on, will never command unanimity. But should that stop the whole process?

I wonder whether in fact a better way would not be simply to recognise that not all Anglicans agree, even on quite fundamental matters – but that we all worship the same God and proclaim the same Lord Jesus Christ. So we should simply get on with ordaining bishops. Some would be men, and some, women.

Perhaps we would have to do it on the basis that all the language we use now is really gender-neutral. Just as in a legal contract it usually says that words connoting the masculine also include the feminine, so we could either actually change the relevant words in the consecration service and in Canon Law, or adopt a definition clause similar to one in a contract.

Then what if a particular parish doesn’t accept the bishop’s authority, if that bishop happens to be female? I would suggest that a parish in that situation should do what a number of parishes already do, even in this diocese, and would just carry on regardless.

If they need a bishop, they can ask one to come and give them ‘episcopal oversight’, for example to ordain new priests. There is a good historical precedent for this in the beginnings of Methodism, when John Wesley (who with his brother Charles, remained Anglican priests until they died) found that there were many congregations in the new colonies in America who had no priest – but that the Church of England would not send bishops to ordain people.

So the Wesleys, who were not bishops, ordained ministers for these congregations. Although in the end it was a factor in such congregations becoming Methodist rather than Anglican, there was no difference – there is no difference – between Anglicans and Methodists doctrinally, and the Wesleys weren’t kicked out of the Anglican Church.

Today’s Americans have arguably done it again – they have ordained women as bishops, and indeed the ‘Presiding Bishop’, as they call it, their leading bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori, is female. But although there have been rumblings, the Episcopal Church has not been chucked out of the Anglican Communion.

This would seem to me to be very true to the practice of the early church. First Jesus himself, and then St Paul, set up the gospel message over against the religion of the Pharisees and scribes. Jesus said, according to St Matthew, (5:17) ‘Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am come not to destroy, but to fulfil.’

But He went on to preach the Sermon on the Mount, which went far further than the old legalistic approach. A Christian goes the extra mile, turns the other cheek: that is much more important than the letter of the law. Could we not adopt a similar approach to consecrating women as bishops?

I would suggest that if we did look at it in a less legalistic way, then we should not draft precise codes of conduct or detailed provisions. We would simply acknowledge that in this area, as in others, some congregations would not entirely conform: but the hierarchy would turn a blind eye.

I hope you get the idea. Sometimes a sermon isn’t a ready-made prescription: do this and your passage to heaven is secure. Sometimes the preacher has to challenge their flock, to ask you to work out how you would put the gospel message into practice in your lives. This is one of those. Let me – let Bishop Christopher – know what you think.

Tags apostle, Disciple, Dorcas, Forward in Faith, General Synod, Jesus, Lazarus, Nain, Paul, Peter, student, Tabitha, Taliban, Women bishops

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The raising of Lazarus. Fifty years of ‘Honest to God’

By publicsquare

April 14, 2013 //

Sermon for Evensong on the Second Sunday after Easter, 14th April 2013, at St Mary’s – John 11:17-44

In the Church Times this week, there was a letter [12th April 2013, p14, letter from Antony Alexander] which said, ‘Many an ordinary would-be believer has difficulty understanding why Jesus should be exempt from the natural laws that govern humanity – such as would prevent a body confirmed dead by expert witnesses … from not only coming back to life, but getting up and walking around within two or three days. Within the real world of humanity such an occurrence would be deemed incredible. An alternative interpretation is that the resurrection was something that took place within the hearts and minds of Jesus’ disciples – even as it has enlightened countless Christians since. …. Their beloved Leader had been crucified and was no more. They then began to realise, however, that the reality of Christ was spiritual, and that He was still with them in spirit as much as He had ever been.’

Last week I preached about the effect of Jesus’ resurrection, the effect of the revelation that Jesus’ death was not futile but that, by being resurrected, He had proved that He was God on earth. I drew a comparison between the moral opinions of the various newspapers in relation to the Philpott case, and whether the Welfare State was in some way to blame for it, and Jesus’ teaching about how we should deal with needy people and how we should deal with bad people.

I was making a case that, because of the resurrection, we could rely on Jesus’ teaching; that the resurrection changed everything. That revelation to us demonstrated that God is with us and that He cares for us. In today’s lesson from St John’s gospel we have the story of the raising of Lazarus, a story which prepares the way for the story of Jesus’ own resurrection.

Martha originally misunderstood what Jesus told her, when He said, ‘Your brother will rise again’, because she already believed, from Jesus’ teaching, that there would be a general resurrection, at the end of time. But Jesus said that’s not what he means, but that the resurrection is embodied in Him. He is looking forward to His own resurrection – ‘I am the resurrection and the life.’

He promised a miracle. As the letter in the Church Times goes on to say, ‘Another common Christian response is that God can do anything, and doesn’t need to take any notice of the natural laws governing the beings that He created.’ This is a real puzzle. Are we saying that God is above the natural laws that govern everything else in creation, so that miracles are possible, or are we saying that there is no reason why we should believe in miracles like the resurrection of Lazarus or indeed the resurrection of Jesus Himself, as being literal, bodily, resurrections? Are they just myths, spiritual stories?

You will recall the passage in St Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, chapter 15: ‘Someone will ask, How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?’ St Paul says, ‘So it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. … It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body.’ [1 Cor. 15:35f]

In March it was the 50th anniversary of the publication of the famous book by the then Bishop of Woolwich, John Robinson, called ‘Honest to God’. It might surprise us now that a theology book should become a national best-seller, but that’s exactly what happened in 1963. Here was an Anglican bishop saying quite clearly that God wasn’t – or God isn’t – a kind of supernatural presence, able to do things which in normal nature are impossible. Indeed, John Robinson’s argument was that God isn’t ‘up there in the clouds, or in the heaven,’ or ‘out there’, somehow outside our world, our cosmos, creating it and sustaining it, but instead, God is fundamentally inside everything; He is at the ‘ground of our being’, that the ultimate essence inside everything is what God is.

That would mean that John Robinson would tend to agree with the letter to the Church Times, and possibly with St Paul, that the resurrection was not a physical resurrection, but was a spiritual one.

Against that, you could put this evening’s lesson, about the raising of Lazarus. The evangelist, the author of the gospel, emphasises the physical nature of the story. Lazarus had been dead for four days, and indeed the remains stank; Jesus spoke to the dead body, called him to come out of the tomb, and he did, still wrapped up in his grave-clothes. It was literally a question of Lazarus, physically, bodily, coming back to life.

Then in the next chapter we read [John 12:2] that Lazarus was present at the supper for Jesus at Bethany, at which Mary poured out costly ointment on Jesus’ feet and wiped them with her hair.

There’s no suggestion that Lazarus is a ghost, or anything other than alive in the normal way. And it is tempting to think that, if the resurrections, of Lazarus and of Jesus Himself, were figurative, were not concrete, physical events, then Christianity would not have lasted as long as it has.

This is all about Truth. What is true? We might tend to say, as I did last week, that the truth which we can rely on is our knowledge of God, which largely comes from the Bible, perhaps tempered with the collective wisdom built up in the church over the years. But if John Robinson was right, the believer looking to find God will also do well to look inside himself, to find a quiet place in which to reflect not upwards to the heavens, not in any particular direction, but inside ourselves, to the ‘ground of our being’.

That in turn would mean that the truth is all about us as well as inside us. But it might be difficult for a believer to discern what is a sign of God, to distinguish that from what is just his own feeling. Again St Paul has something to offer. He talks of people being ‘in Christ’: for example in Galatians 1:22, ‘the churches of Judaea that are in Christ’. This expression can also be understood the other way round, so it is ‘Christ in you’.

It is the same idea that Jesus himself puts over in St John’s gospel, chapter 15. ‘Believe me that I am in the Father, and the Father in me.’ [v11]

If Christ is in you, He is in a sense ‘at the ground of your being’. But John Robinson, and the theologians who influenced him, such as Paul Tillich, would say that God was not to be found anywhere in particular, ‘at the ground,’ but that He is the ground, the essence of our being.

Fifty years after ‘Honest to God’, perhaps we are less willing to challenge orthodox ways of understanding the mystery of God. But if we give up on wrestling with the real nature of truth, we are back in the featureless desert, where there are no clear paths to lead towards the good and away from the evil.

There is no guarantee that we will ever be absolutely sure that we have fully understood God – but, just as we can be sure that He often does answer our prayers, so we can be sure that He has revealed Himself to us, in the Bible and of course face to face to His disciples. In the story of Doubting Thomas, in St John chapter 20 [esp. v 29], Jesus has a message which speaks directly to us, who have come 2,000 years later. He said, ‘Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.’

I am sure that none of us, not even the most learned theologians, can fully comprehend the nature of God. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t keep trying, that we shouldn’t try to be alert, to be ready to see God at work in places where we might least expect Him to be. As Jesus Himself said, ‘Watch therefore, for ye know not what hour your Lord will come’ [Matt. 24:42].

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Margaret Thatcher and her Successors have changed the British Way of Life for the worse

By publicsquare

April 8, 2013 //

Maybe a good time to revisit my thoughts from a while ago. I do hope that people start to realise the damage she did.

hughdbryant

There are several key features of Thatcherism. They include the following.

Doctrinaire adherence to monetarist economic theory:
A belief that ‘public’ is bad, and ‘private’ is good:
A belief that ‘there is no such thing as society’:
Military adventurism.

Monetarism

When the Conservative Party led by Margaret Thatcher won the 1979 election, it followed a time of economic crisis – a loan from the International Monetary Fund in 1976, devaluation of the pound and interest rates around 15%. The ‘winter of discontent’ of 1978/9 saw the worst industrial unrest in Britain since the General Strike of 1926.

Thatcher decided that a particular economic theory, ‘monetarism’, propounded by Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and Alan Walters, was the only possible solution. It was ‘supply side’ regulation. If the amount of money was reduced, prices (and inflation) would drop. She said that ‘There is no alternative’ (‘TINA’). The economy was regulated according to…

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Mick Philpott and the Prison Chaplain

By publicsquare

April 7, 2013 //

Sermon for Evensong on the First Sunday after Easter, 7th April 2013
Isaiah 53:1-6, 9-12; Luke 24:13-35 –

This has been a rather challenging Easter time – and I don’t just mean that there is heightened tension in Korea, or that the weather has been totally dreadful so that thousands of lambs have been lost in snowdrifts, although of course those are dreadful things that have happened round this Easter – I was thinking instead about the terrible case of the Philpotts, convicted of killing six of their children.

Rather extraordinarily, the Chancellor of the Exchequer has tried to link their depravity to the fact that they were receiving social security benefits. The judgement in the Philpott case came a few days after the government brought in sweeping changes in the Welfare State, which were widely criticised by the churches generally – if anyone would like to know more about what the churches have said about the government’s reforms to the Welfare State, please ask me after the service and I will make sure you get a copy of the report prepared for the Free Churches, which was endorsed by 42 Anglican bishops including our Bishop Ian.

Among other things, it points out that most of the social security budget goes on paying old age pensions, and only about ten per cent goes on unemployment benefit. Most unemployed people are unemployed for less than a year; and more benefit is paid to those who are in work, but whose pay is too low to allow them to afford to pay rent and eat.

But perhaps the most challenging thing that I came across in the last few days was a headline on Twitter, ‘Spare a thought for the prison chaplain who has to minister to Mick Philpott.’

Well, I had all that in my head, but then I realised that in my sermon I should not forget that we are still in the time of Easter and we are, in our church life, focussing on Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. The Bible lessons tonight are from Isaiah, where you might have heard in your head the aria in Handel’s Messiah, ‘He was despised and rejected’, the prophecy that the Messiah would not be a triumphant king but would be a suffering servant who would suffer and take upon himself the sins of the world; and the other story, of the two disciples walking to Emmaus encountering Jesus, not realising who He was, even though He was explaining to them what the Hebrew Bible had said about the Messiah, for example indeed in passages like the ‘He was despised’ passage in Isaiah, and then when they sat down to eat together, ‘He took bread, he gave thanks, he broke it and he gave it to them’, and then ‘their eyes were opened’ and they knew who he was. The memory of the Last Supper came to them vividly.

So should I talk to you about the greatest thing, the heart of the Gospel of Christ, His resurrection, or should I take it for granted that, yes, you believe in the Resurrection, and get on straightway to how it should affect us in the way we behave as Christians, how we treat people who are as bad as Mick Philpott?

I can imagine that, if for some reason somebody who doesn’t normally go to church – perhaps who doesn’t believe very much – if somebody like that has joined us for tonight’s service, when I pose that question, they will think that we are rather odd people. The Resurrection is clearly a piece of picturesque nonsense, they will say. Nobody could possibly believe in it, and anyway, this was 2,000 years ago. Nobody’s ever seen anything like it since.

But on the other hand, real life questions about how we look after people who are less fortunate in society and how we deal with people who seem to reject the whole basis of society itself, who seem to reject the idea of having any care for people other than themselves, are live issues which everyone in society should be concerned about.

Well, if you take that view, whatever else you do, you should come to the open meeting which will be held at Church Gate House, St Andrew’s, on Tuesday night, by our MP, Dominic Raab, when he invites us, his constituents, to question him and make representations to him so that he can represent us better in Parliament.

It would be interesting to know whether he sympathises with the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s view, that in some way, being on benefits made Mick Philpott more likely to commit manslaughter of his children. Perhaps our MP has a different view. It will be very interesting to learn what he feels, and perhaps to ask him to take some messages back to Westminster.

But what about those two disciples on the Emmaus road? They were very sad. They had heard all Jesus’ teaching. They had learned from Him that we should love our neighbours as ourselves: so if our neighbour is out of work, sick or disabled or needy in some other way, Jesus’ teaching seems clear. We should treat that neighbour as we ourselves expect to be treated.

Cleopas and the other disciple would remember the Sermon on the Mount. If somebody strikes you, turn the other cheek. ‘Blessed are the merciful’. And they would remember Jesus’ teaching, ‘Judge not, lest ye yourselves be judged’.

So when confronted with an evil person like Philpott, according to Jesus’ teachings, they would have hated the sin but tried to love the sinner, they should have tried to forgive the sinner; they would have faced the same challenge as the prison chaplain is no doubt facing now.

But the problem for Cleopas and the other disciple (perhaps it was Mrs Cleopas), was that they had heard all Jesus’ wonderful teachings and they had begun really to believe that He was the Messiah, the chosen one of God: that He was going to bring in the kingdom of God, so that all His teaching about love and forgiveness would make sense.

If it had been today, they would believe that Mick Philpott would listen to the chaplain, would be repentant in time, would pray for forgiveness and would become a reformed character. But they were afraid that none of that was going to happen; in effect they were like the newspapers today, thrashing about: some saying very intemperate things going one way, and others equally trenchantly preaching the other way, in relation to such things as social welfare and criminal justice.

Nobody has said why their particular view is to be preferred. It is assumed that, if you read the Telegraph, or the Daily Mail, you will have a particular view; you will sympathise with what those papers – and perhaps George Osborne also – have said. If you read the Guardian, you will have an altogether contrary opinion, but equally, you will feel very strongly that it is the right thing.

But none of the newspapers has pointed to any reason why their particular view was right or wrong. That was how the poor disciples, Cleopas and the other one, felt after Easter. All the bright promise of Jesus’ preaching and teaching, the great crowds which He had drawn to Him, the baptisms, the healings of the sick, the various other miracles, even raising Lazarus and the widow of Nain’s son from the dead – they had all come to a crashing halt at the hands of the Sanhedrin, the Jewish leadership and the Roman administration.

Pontius Pilate wanted to avoid any possibility of civil unrest, and therefore he had countenanced the patently unjust killing of Jesus on the cross. Poor Jesus had therefore died, in the most horrific way – and that’s as much as Cleopas and the other one knew. The whole brave enterprise had ended in calamity.

It made it look as though everything that Jesus had been promoting and preaching about was, after all, just His opinion. It had looked right at the time; it may have sounded fine coming from Jesus’ mouth – but however eloquent He was, in the ultimate analysis Jesus was just another human being, and therefore He could be brought to a halt, he could be controlled by authority, by the brute force of the Roman soldiers.

He could be – and in fact He had been – killed.

When He met Mr and Mrs Cleopas, what Jesus did was to go through what the Hebrew Bible said about the Messiah, to remind the Cleopas’ what they were looking for, what the Messiah would be like: that He wouldn’t be a triumphant warrior, but he would be more like a suffering servant.

But He didn’t get through to them. The Bible says that their eyes remained closed to Him. They didn’t rumble who He was. It was just as I was saying earlier, that they knew that the Messiah was supposed to do certain things and was supposed to be certain things: but they couldn’t see how it could apply to Jesus, in the light of what had happened on the cross.

In the ultimate analysis, after a brave show Jesus had just been killed, extinguished. He couldn’t do any more good. Then when Jesus broke bread as He had done in the Last Supper, all of a sudden the light went on in their brains, their eyes were opened, and they realised that He had come back to life, and there He was, alive with them.

So the prophecies in the Bible were not empty ideas, not just pretty stories. Jesus was the real thing. The Cleopas’ realised that indeed, the Kingdom of God had started.

So let’s look again at what everybody thinks about these various events, that have happened in the last week. But let’s look at these events in a different light. It isn’t the case that there is no touchstone, no standard against which to judge what the right thing is to do.

There is a standard: the standard of the kingdom of God. So when you are confronted by Mick Philpott, the question is not what the journalists in the Telegraph or in the Daily Mail or in the Guardian think are the right principles to be followed.

Instead the principle should be, ‘What would Jesus do?’ because, the Lord is here. The Lord is with us. He is risen indeed.

‘Behold, I tell unto you a mystery’. That mystery is that Jesus was raised from the dead. The sacrifice was not in vain. Even though it was 2,000 years ago, it still means that everything has changed. The judge said that Mick Philpott ‘had no moral compass’. Frankly that could also be said about some of the newspapers. Jesus rose again from the dead. That is the most important thing in our lives – even today. It has given a ‘moral compass’ to all Christians. That moral compass includes the commandments of love and forgiveness that Jesus preached. Or to put it another way, we could just ask, ‘What would Jesus do?’

That’s how the chaplain will be starting with Mick Philpott. That’s how we should start, every day.

Tags austerity, chaplain, Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph, Dominic Raab, Easter, Emmaus, Evensong, George Osborne, Handel, Isaiah, manslaughter, Messiah, Mick Philpott, Resurrection, social security, The Guardian, welfare

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Maundy

By publicsquare

March 28, 2013 //

Sermon for Holy Communion at St Andrew’s on Maundy Thursday, 28th March 2013
John 13:1-17, 31-35 – I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.

Maundy Thursday. ‘Maundy’ is supposed to be derived from the Latin word ‘mandatum’, meaning ‘commandment’. I have to say, that seems to be in the good tradition of calling Bordeaux wine ‘claret’, and other non-obvious pieces of English etymology and pronunciation: Mr Cholmondely-Warner comes to mind!

Be that as it may, the idea is that the name of the day is meant to commemorate Jesus’ great commandment, ‘I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, that you also love each other’ [My translation]. The mandate, the Maundy, came as the disciples sat down with Jesus to eat their Passover meal, so beginning the three great days of Easter, the Triduum in Latin, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and then Easter Sunday.

This is all very familiar. If you read the account in St John’s gospel carefully, you will see that it is packed full of things which emphasise who Jesus was: that he was the son of God, and the nature of his leadership, his kingship: that he was the servant king, the suffering servant. If you compare the story of the Last Supper in St John’s gospel with the account which appears in the other gospels, you might worry that St John’s account may not be reliable, because he has got the date of the Last Supper wrong. John has it on the eve of the Passover, whereas the Synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke, put it during the festival. Prof. Sir Colin Humphreys of Cambridge has resolved the apparent discrepancy by showing that the Synoptics used the old Jewish calendar, whereas John used the lunar calendar which we now use. It was the same day: the supper took place, he calculated, on 1st April, 33AD. However it was a Wednesday. So St John’s gospel is no less truthful or historical than the Synoptics, than Matthew, Mark and Luke.

In a minute, Renos is going to offer to wash your feet. It will be a symbolic re-enactment of what St John said Jesus did, before the Last Supper. It’s a story that only appears in St John’s gospel, and it’s clearly something which is rich in symbolic importance.

We’re told that, if you went to a posh dinner, in Biblical times, your host would have one of his slaves wash your feet when you arrived. So Jesus was doing something that a leader would never normally do. It emphasised his humility, and also the counter-cyclical nature of Jesus’ kingship. ‘The first shall be last, and the last shall be first’ (Matt. 19, 20; Mark 10).

The whole business of water, and of washing, has symbolic importance. St Peter, characteristically, gets the wrong end of the stick: he doesn’t want to have Jesus, his leader, his king, washing his feet, because it’s infra dig.; but when he realises what it’s all about, he wants Jesus to bath him from top to toe.

That’s all about baptism, ritual cleanliness, purification, rites of purification which go back to the law of Moses (Numbers 19, Luke 2:22). If you sit down with a Bible commentary you will find many more things in this passage which illustrate the point that Jesus is the son of God.

Last week I was talking to somebody in our congregation, and I asked them whether they would be coming along to have their feet washed tonight. They said, ‘I don’t really go for this feet-washing business. It must be a bit of a trial for Renos, having to cope with all those smelly socks and bunions and things.’ Perhaps my friend was thinking along the same lines as Jesus when he was coping with St Peter being rather over-the-top. Jesus’ point was that, once you had had the ritual bath, the purification – which, for Christians, is being baptised – that’s enough. It is a sign that you are a believer, that you are one of the saved. You don’t need to keep on having ritual baths.

Indeed, Jesus also taught that it was not what was on the outside of a person, it wasn’t whether they were physically dirty, that defiled them, but what was inside, their unworthy thoughts and evil deeds (Mark 7:1). So what is the point of it?

On Tuesday, some of us attended our Spiritual Cinema and saw the film ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’. We romped through the last bit of Jesus’ life to a soundtrack of 70s rock music in a Holy Land populated by flower children of the late 60s and early 70s, with 15 inch bell-bottom trousers and an awful lot of hair. That too, in the same way as the Bible story, was a sort of commemoration. It was supposed to be a dramatic presentation of Jesus’ teaching and passion.

A few years ago, in the same way, this time actually here in church, we watched the Mel Gibson film, altogether darker and more horrifying, called ‘The Passion of the Christ’. It was not in any way intended to be entertainment: it was nothing like as upbeat as Jesus Christ Superstar’, but it was a truly horrific quasi-documentary showing exactly what happened to poor Jesus.

What was it like, really to have been there? Were Jesus and his disciples like a terrorist cell, a group of zealots setting out to revolutionise the world, meeting in secret and planning revolutionary rallies, at which Jesus, the superstar orator, whipped up the crowd’s enthusiasm against the government of the day?

That was certainly the way that Pontius Pilate saw it. Everyone says that his main motivation in caving in to the mob’s demands for Jesus to be crucified, was a desire to avoid civil unrest, to avoid terrorism.

One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. Maybe Jesus was the greatest freedom fighter of them all. But is that it? A horror story; a rock opera; the gospel, a history of a movement. None of that would explain why we’re here tonight.

That brings me back to what we are doing. We’re not acting out a play. ‘Commemorating’ is rather an inadequate way to describe it. It implies that we are digging something out of our memory – but it isn’t anything that we have experienced. Even if we imagine ourselves back into the world of The Passion of the Christ – and that’s why the film is so good, because it really helps you to imagine what it was like – we are still missing something.

The Passion is not just a story of injustice and brutality ending in a man’s death. It was far more than that, because of who Jesus was. It was, in a sense, God’s death. The human race had killed their creator. Just as the Jews called the sack of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple the ‘abomination of desolation’ in the book of Daniel – and Jesus quoted the passage (Matt. 24, Mark 13) as an indication of the end of the world – so here, there is a sense in which Jesus’ passion and death show the triumph of sin, of the utter and complete alienation of the human race from God.

That is stupendous. It is too much for any of us to take in. It doesn’t matter how much you’ve studied. But what we can do, in the face of this cataclysmic event, is to come to God in worship. Because He hasn’t been cut off from us. He isn’t permanently estranged, He isn’t denied to us. We know that on Easter Sunday we will commemorate – we will celebrate – the resurrection. As St Paul put it in his letter to the Romans, nothing can ‘separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord’ (Romans 8:31-39). So when we commemorate His suffering, we are not just recalling a historic event – although it certainly was that. We are doing something sacramental – an ‘outward and visible sign of an inner and spiritual grace’ (The Book of Common Prayer, a Catechism). The foot washing led to the Last Supper. We commemorate the Last Supper by sharing the bread and wine in Holy Communion. It isn’t just an empty show. It does something, it works in us. God works in us. In the words of the Prayer Book, the sacrament is the sign of ‘grace given unto us, ordained by Christ himself, as a means whereby we receive the same, and a pledge to assure us thereof.’

It’s a sign that God has given us His grace, His free gift. What is the free gift? It is salvation. It is the knowledge that God cares for us. And the way we put ourselves in line to receive the free gift is to come to God in worship.

This is worship. This foot-washing is worship. It is coming into the presence of God. How can we be sure that we are fit to come to him? Are we pure enough? Are we? It’s doubtful. But Jesus has given us an instruction, a commandment. If we keep His commandments, we will not be separated from Him. That commandment is his Great Commandment of Love. Let us be washed, as a sign that we accept His commandment, that we believe.

So it is important, and it is significant, that we have our feet washed tonight. It means something. It is the beginning, the preparation, for a sacrament. We are approaching the divine. God is with us. So let us love one another.

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