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.

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.