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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The Vineyard of The Lord of Hosts

By publicsquare

March 25, 2013 //

Sermon for Evensong at St Mary’s on Palm Sunday, 24th March 2013
Isaiah 5:1-7; Luke 20:9-19. The vineyard of the Lord of hosts: the wicked husbandmen. The Bishop of Rome. The Archbishop of Canterbury.

Although today is Palm Sunday, I’m not going to talk about donkeys or triumphal processions. I want to pick up on the stories about vineyards which we had in tonight’s Bible readings.

If I look at the various things that have happened in this last, very busy, week, thinking about vineyards, there is a temptation to work in a reference to the Budget, and to the fact that the duty on wine will be going up, whereas the duty on beer will not. Well, I’m not going to try to comment on the wisdom or otherwise of the Chancellor of the Exchequer. The point about the vineyards in our lessons from the Bible today is that they illustrate Jesus’ teaching about following God’s commands.

In the Old Testament lesson in Isaiah, God is using Isaiah as a mouthpiece to chastise his chosen people. They haven’t taken care of his vineyard. In the New Testament, Jesus is talking about the same thing. The tenants, who are absolutely awful – they seem to be more like thieves than tenants, and then eventually they turn out to be murderers – have in effect repudiated their contract with the owner of the vineyard.

They have in effect thrown up the lease. When the owner sends somebody to make contact with them, and give them a chance to come back within the scope of the contract, they have behaved in the most extraordinarily criminal way, violently ejecting the representatives that he has sent to them, and eventually killing his own son.

Of course the story in the New Testament about the ‘wicked husbandmen’, as they used to be called, is not a parable but an allegory. Jesus meant his disciples to understand that in the story the wicked husbandmen stood for the leaders of the Jews, the Pharisees and the Sadducees. Jesus asks a question, ‘What then will the owner of the vineyard do to them?’ – do to those wicked husbandmen, to those wicked tenants?

The answer is, of course, that the landlord will dispossess them. He will re-enter on the land and turf them out. So the allegory means that the Jews will no longer be God’s chosen people, but instead, the other people, to whom the gospel message is going, will be brought in instead.

I think like all figures of speech, you can stretch its parallels in real life too far. Jesus wasn’t saying that all Jews were always no good; he wasn’t saying that all Gentiles were perfect.
He was simply making the point that, where the favoured people appeared to have rejected the God who had originally favoured them, then they shouldn’t be too surprised if they lost their privileged status in the eyes of the Lord.

But the other thing about these two stories about vineyards is that, at their heart, is a question about looking after and protecting the vineyard and its crops. That reminded me very much of the two sermons which I have heard this week, one from Pope Francis, the other from Archbishop Justin.

The two largest Christian denominations in the world, the Roman Catholics and the Anglicans, both had a new leader installed this week. I suppose technically you could say that Archbishop Justin was legally installed in February, but this was his formal enthronement.
Both the Archbishop and the Pope spoke in their sermons about looking after God’s creation. Pope Francis was preaching about Joseph, the husband of Mary, who was in effect Jesus’ stepfather. In the Latin of the old Catholic Church, Joseph was described as the ‘custos’ , the custodian, the guardian, the protector: the protector of Mary, of Jesus, and of the Church.

Pope Francis said this. ‘The vocation of being a “protector” …. means respecting each of God’s creatures, respecting the environment in which we live. It means protecting people, showing loving concern for each and every person, especially children, the elderly, those in need … It means caring for one another in our families; husbands and wives first protect each other and then, as parents, they care for their children, and children themselves, in time, protect their parents. It means building sincere friendships in which we protect one another in trust, respect, and goodness.’

You can see the husbandmen, the tenants of the vineyard, as being protectors, being custodians of that vineyard. If the new Pope was preaching about God’s call to us to be protectors, to be good husbandmen, Archbishop Justin preached about the qualities that we need in order to do that.

The choir had sung Psalm 8,

Out of the mouth of very babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength, because of thine enemies: that thou mightest still the enemy and the avenger.
For I will consider thy heavens, even the works of thy fingers: the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained.
What is man, that thou art mindful of him: and the son of man, that thou visitest him?
….
Thou makest him to have dominion of the works of thy hands: and thou hast put all things in subjection under his feet.’

Thou makest him to have dominion of the works of thy hands: and thou hast put all things in subjection under his feet. You make us, the sons of men, the husbandmen of your vineyard.

And the readings, at Archbishop Justin’s service, started with the beautiful story of Ruth and Naomi and Boaz. Ruth, the stranger, the Moabite, the refugee, went into the fields to pick up bits of grain which had been left by the harvesters. Boaz the landowner, (plainly not of the UKIP persuasion), told his workers to leave some purposely for her, and indeed to deliberately cut some grain stalks and leave them on the ground for Ruth to pick up as gleanings. He protected Ruth, the stranger in their midst: he was a generous man: and of course the story has a very happy ending. The Book of Ruth is one of the sweetest books in the Bible. It’s only a few pages long. You might want to read it again before you go to bed tonight.

Archbishop Justin’s gospel reading was the story of Jesus walking on the water, calling Peter to come out of the boat and walk on the water towards him. When Peter got frightened and began to sink, Jesus reached out and saved him. The lesson that Archbishop Justin drew from that was that, in order to be good protectors, good custodians, of God’s world, in order to look after His vineyard properly, we needed courage, and courage would be liberated by putting our trust, our faith, in Jesus.

For as long as Peter had faith, he was brave enough to get out of the boat and walk on the water. When he noticed the wind and became afraid, he started to sink. Archbishop Justin related that need for faith and courage to the history of this country.

He said, ‘For more than 1,000 years this country has, to one degree or another, sought to recognise that Jesus is the Son of God. Sometimes we have done better, sometimes worse. When we do better’ – he means, when we have faith – ‘we make space for our own courage to be liberated, for God to act among us and for human beings to flourish. Slaves were freed, Factory Acts passed, and the NHS and social care established through Christ-liberated courage.’

And he went on to say, ‘The present challenges of environment and economy, of human development and global poverty, can only be faced with extraordinary courage.’

Who am I to improve on the wise words of the Bishop of Rome and the Archbishop of Canterbury? God calls us to look after his vineyard: we need to protect it. In order to protect it, we need courage. That courage comes from faith, faith in Jesus Christ.

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Solid Joys and Lasting Treasure

By publicsquare

March 17, 2013 //

Sermon for Holy Communion at 8 and 10 on the Fifth Sunday of Lent, 17th March 2013
Philippians 3:4-14, John 12:1-8 Solid Joys and Lasting Treasure

My Grandpa’s birthday was May 12th. It’s many years, unfortunately, since he died, but I still remember when his birthday was. The reason is, that Grandpa was a great one for writing letters; in fact he used to type them, on an old black typewriter, because he had arthritis in his hands and he found it difficult to do handwriting.

So we children used to get, quite often, rather formal-looking letters, all neatly typed out, about this and that. Grandpa used to live only four doors away down the same street, so we saw him a lot, but he still liked to write to us.

At the end of every letter he would sign off, ‘Lots of love from Grandpa’, and then he would put a PS; he would always put the same PS. He would say, ‘Only so-and-so many days till May 12th.’ And the idea was that he was hoping that you would give him a present – which of course we always did! So Grandpa used to really enjoy his birthday.

Now my birthday is actually going to be this Wednesday – March 20th, if you want to put it in your diary for future reference. If you ask me after the service, I’ll be able to let you have my suggested present list. I’m really looking forward to it.

But I’m pretty confident that, even if you gave me a magnificent four-channel radio control model helicopter to add to my collection, naturally at considerable cost to yourself, nobody would actually tackle you and say, ‘Why have you wasted all that money on dreadful old Hugh? You should have given him a Book Token and spent the rest on a donation to Oxfam.’

Jesus wasn’t so lucky. Mary from Bethany gave him an extremely special spa product with some very exotic ingredients, while He was relaxing, having preached the Sermon on the Mount and raised Lazarus from the dead. You can imagine Jesus ‘resting his eyes for ten minutes’ after all that, and being woken up gently by Mary, massaging his feet with some special secret potion from an exclusive spa.

But then the beautiful moment was spoiled by Judas Iscariot carping on about how expensive the spa treatment had been, and how it would have been much better for Mary to have spent her money on helping poor people. Indeed, the cost of the treatment that she had bought and used on Jesus was the same as a year’s salary for an average bod.

That’s quite staggering, really. If we say that the minimum wage today would work out at about £15,000 a year, whatever she was using, in present-day terms, was at least £15,000-worth. She just splashed it on. (You’ll remember the old advert starring the boxer, Henry Cooper, for an aftershave called Brut. Henry would take the little green bottle in one of his massive hands and liberally sprinkle himself with it. The slogan was, ‘Splash it on!’)

Splash it on. Just like Mary did. The only difference was that Brut didn’t cost very much, and you could afford to splash it on. Nevertheless I rather like the thought that Jesus wouldn’t listen to Judas’ criticism of Mary from Bethany. So much of the time Jesus is doing the right thing, being very good, helping people, curing their illnesses: and in Lazarus’ case, raising them up from the dead.

But one is a bit tempted to say that, although He was very good, very virtuous – he was a bit serious. And then we get this lovely story about Mary of Bethany and her special ointment which she poured on Jesus’ feet as a special present. Mary was Lazarus’ brother, and she was extremely grateful, because He had raised poor Lazarus from the dead. And Jesus enjoyed it.

It’s very easy for us to say that now, but it must have been absolutely stupendous, beyond imagining. Her poor brother had been dead – in a tomb – for four days, and Jesus came along and said, ‘He’s only asleep’, and woke him up. Mary, his sister, must have been completely overwhelmed, and so grateful to Jesus. So she went out and bought something which was really far too expensive, as a present, to thank Him. Judas came along and said, ‘That’s a criminal waste of money. If you had £15,000 to spare, you should have spent it on relieving poverty, not on a frivolous gift for Jesus, however nice He is.’

But Jesus said, in effect, ‘Back off, Judas. It’s all right.’ And He was clearly pleased with Mary’s gift. I think that makes Jesus all the more like us, all the more human. Mary’s present was a really super present. Jesus said that there was a place for an extravagant present, even if it meant that the money which you’d spent on an extravagant present didn’t go to a worthy cause.

Compare that with what St Paul says in his letter to the Philippians. ‘My richest gain I count but loss’, as we’re about to sing in Isaac Watts’ hymn, ‘When I survey the wondrous cross’. St Paul himself says, ‘For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish’ (3:8). Rubbish – actually the King James Version has a more Anglo-Saxon word for it. Nothing that we would call valuable means a thing to St Paul. So even Mary’s generous gift, all fifteen thousand pounds’ worth, really didn’t amount to much after all, if you compare it with the present, with the gift, that Jesus has given to us.

That’s the point. Especially now in Lent, when we are reflecting, weighing up our lives, the Bible challenges us to have a new value system. In another hymn, John Newton, who got rich as the captain of a slave ship before he saw the light, wrote,

‘Solid joys and lasting treasure
None but Zion’s children know’.

It’s very tempting to ignore this. Who wouldn’t want to be in a lovely spa and just splash it on? Who wouldn’t hanker after a Ferrari, or a Rolls?

Jesus understood this. He wasn’t as fiercely uncompromising as St Paul. He did enjoy his spa treatment from Mary, and he said, there was nothing wrong in enjoying it. He was happy to thank Mary for her generosity.

But – eventually even a Rolls will get old, and the Ferrari won’t seem so cool for ever. Even if you bath in gold leaf, eventually it will wash off. What really will last is a present which will stand us in good stead for ever. That is salvation, the knowledge that we are not just living futile lives, at the mercy of random couplings of atoms, but that God, the ultimate Creator and sustainer of our world, cares for us. ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who trusts in him may not be destroyed, but have eternal life’ [John 3:16 – my translation]. Nothing is more important, nothing is worth more, than this.

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Rose Sunday looks forward to the dawning of the Sun of Righteousness – as Homer put it, ‘rosy-fingered dawn’ – on Easter morning.

By publicsquare

March 10, 2013 //

Sermon for Mattins at The Chapel of Ease, Westhumble, on the Fourth Sunday of Lent, 10th March 2013

2 Corinthians 5:19 – ‘God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them…’

Today is the fourth Sunday of Lent, sometimes known as Rose Sunday or Refreshment Sunday. More recently it has become Mothering Sunday. The good news is that Refreshment Sunday is a break in the austerity of Lent; a nice time to make a fuss of one’s mother, and to see the children giving Mum a nice day, perhaps a lie in with some tea in bed, or some nice flowers, just something to show that we treasure our mothers.

Unfortunately, however, if we think of motherhood as central to the family, family relations are not in very good shape in the world today. There are too many people whose marriage has broken down, perhaps because a partner has left with somebody else.

There are too many cases of child abuse. We are wrestling, in the church at large, with many problems of human sexuality. Our friends in the Catholic Church are reeling from scandals, most recently involving Cardinal O’Brien. It does seem inappropriate just blithely to celebrate motherhood and the family without engaging with some of the challenges which family life has to face today.

There is something very shocking about cases like Jimmy Saville and Cardinal O’Brien. It is very shocking if public figures, people who set themselves up as examples, or who preach morality, turn out not to be worthy of their fame or respect. Jimmy Saville is supposed to have perpetrated over 200 sex crimes, and although we don’t know what Cardinal O’Brien is supposed to have done in any detail, he admits that he did not do what he preached.

Last week we had the story in St John’s gospel of the woman ‘taken in adultery’. If you just think of the basic scenario: somehow she had been caught in bed with someone who was not her husband; and if you stop at that point, that is a serious matter. If we lament the fact that so many marriages fail, and that so many children and families suffer unhappiness, pain and poverty as a result, we have to pause and say that the woman – and of course the man with her – were doing what causes all that. They were not doing what they should have been doing.

Although it may be rather unfashionable to talk in these terms, it seems to me that all these things – abuse of children, adultery, being a sexual predator, abusing a position of authority, are all species of sin. What makes these things sinful, as opposed to being just bad or criminal or immoral, is that they drive a wedge between us and God. The word for ‘sin’ in Greek is ´αμαρτια, which means literally, ‘missing the mark’. You will remember the famous passage in St Paul’s letter to the Romans, chapter 7, where Paul expresses his frustration and anger at his sinful nature.

He says, ‘For I know that nothing good lodges in me – in my unspiritual nature, I mean – for though the will to do good is there, the deed is not. The good which I want to do, I fail to do. But what I do is the wrong, which is against my will. And if what I do is against my will, clearly it is no longer I who am the agent, but sin which has its lodging in me.’ [Romans 7:18-20, NEB]

To a greater or lesser extent we do sinful things because of human frailty. We do sinful things, even despite knowing what the right thing to do is. When you see all the evil that is around us, it is very daunting. What does it mean? Are we submerging under a tide of immorality and godlessness?

Let’s read again what St Paul says in his second letter to the Corinthians. ‘God …. hath reconciled us to himself by Jesus Christ, and hath given to us the ministry of reconciliation; To wit, that God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them…’ [v. 18-19]

‘Not imputing their trespasses unto them.’ No longer blaming them. Contrast with that the story of the Old Testament, say in Jeremiah, for example. The prophets of the Old Testament had to battle with constant tension between God and his chosen people.

Jeremiah says, ‘Hast thou utterly rejected Judah? hath thy soul lothed Zion? why hast thou smitten us, and there is no healing for us? we looked for peace, and there is no good; and for the time of healing, and behold trouble! We acknowledge, O Lord, our wickedness, and the iniquity of our fathers: for we have sinned against thee.’ [Jeremiah 14:19-20]

That’s a very different message from the one that we find in St Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians. St Paul is all about reconciliation. The interesting thing is that the word in Greek that is translated as ‘reconciliation’ (καταλλαγη) originally meant ‘exchange’, almost ‘a trade’, substituting one thing for another. It is also the word used to translate ‘atonement’, as in the Jewish festival of Atonement.

We say that Jesus’ sacrifice, his death, ‘atoned’, made ‘atonement’ for, our sin, made up for it, paid the price for it, in some way. He ‘redeemed’ us, he paid a ransom for us. I have always found it tough to think in terms of a blood sacrifice, that Jesus’ death on the cross was in some way a blood sacrifice. This passage in 2 Corinthians shows us another way of understanding the idea of atonement. Jesus’ sacrifice, Jesus’ death, reconciles us with God.

Richard Hooker, the great Reformation theologian, said, about this passage, ‘Let it be counted folly or frenzy or whatsoever, it is our wisdom and our comfort. We care for no knowledge in the world but this, that man has sinned and God has suffered; that God has made himself the sin of men and that men are made the righteousness of God.’ Richard Hooker, A Discourse of Justification, http://tinyurl.com/dxfvxzq

It’s a sort of a swap, an exchange: reconciliation. Eugene Peterson, in his translation of the Bible called ‘The Message’, which is perhaps a commentary and a translation rolled into one, expresses this passage in 2 Corinthians as follows. ‘All this comes from God who settled the relationship between us and him, and then called us to settle our relationships with each other. God put the world square with himself through the Messiah, giving the world a fresh start by offering forgiveness of sins.’

This is the clue to the Christian revolution, that God is not vengeful, he is loving. God knows that we are imperfect, and that we do bad things. The woman taken in adultery didn’t intend to hurt anybody, but was just prey to an animal passion. Even St Paul, doing the things that he hated, was still subject to the influence of sin.

We should remember this when we are confronted by people who have done truly dreadful things – the killers of little Jamie Bulger came into the news again this week, for example; and of course we can think again of Jimmy Saville and others who seem to have allowed their baser instincts to get the better of them.

Jesus said to the woman, ‘Has no-one condemned you? She answered, ‘No-one, sir.’ Jesus said, ‘Nor do I condemn you’. Jesus’ message is, to put it another way, we should hate the sin, but have compassion for the sinner. This is a message of forgiveness, of redemption, the very opposite of hopelessness and bleakness. It is a happy message. It is a message for Refreshment Sunday: Mothering Sunday. There is light at the end of the tunnel. There is a rosy glow. Rose Sunday looks forward to the dawning of the Sun of Righteousness – as Homer put it, ‘rosy-fingered dawn’ – on Easter morning.

Tags adultery, cardinal O'Brien, forgiveness, jimmy saville, Lent, Mothering Sunday, reconciliation, refreshment Sunday, richard hooker, rosy-fingered dawn, Sin

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Woe to him who builds his house by unrighteousness …. who makes his neighbours work for nothing, and does not give them their wages

By publicsquare

February 25, 2013 //

Sermon for Evensong on the Second Sunday of Lent, 24th February 2013
Jeremiah 22:13 – Woe to him who builds his house by unrighteousness …. who makes his neighbours work for nothing, and does not give them their wages.

A friend of mine asked me the other day whether I have any difficulty thinking up things to preach sermons about. I explained to him that I usually use as a starting point for my sermons the Bible lessons which we read at the service. Those lessons are from a ‘lectionary’ published by an ecumenical group of liturgists representing all the English-speaking churches in the world. It is called the Revised Common Lectionary and was most recently published in 1992.

It’s quite exciting that, in the English-speaking churches round the world, Catholic and Protestant, if they use the common lectionary – and most of them do – wherever you go, you will find people using the same Bible readings each Sunday. The general idea is to read through the whole of the Bible, over a period, relating the readings to the Christian year.

So today there are lessons laid down for a ‘principal service’, in the morning, which is a piece from Genesis, Psalm 27, an epistle reading from Philippians chapter 3, and finally a gospel, Luke chapter 13. The ‘second service’, which, in Lectionary terms, is what Evensong is, has the lessons from Jeremiah and Luke which we have heard tonight, and our Psalm, 135.

So we’ve joined in with English-speaking Christians all over the world in using those Bible readings. I find that quite compelling, and so I usually base my sermon on one or other of the Bible readings for the day. There is of course the alternative that my preaching should be related first and foremost to our life today, relating to it the teaching of Jesus Christ. Rather than taking those teachings first, in the form of Bible readings, instead I could look at what’s been happening, and then try to discern what the will of God in relation to those events would be.

That’s sometimes known as ‘preaching from the newspaper’, as opposed to preaching from the lectionary. When I did read the lessons for today, I decided indeed to preach from the newspaper. I came across these words in Jeremiah, ‘Woe to him who builds his house by unrighteousness …. who makes his neighbours work for nothing, and does not give them their wages’, and I was tempted not to give you a detailed exposition of the writings of the prophet Jeremiah, and history of the people of Israel, and in particular of the exile in Babylon, the fall of Jerusalem in the late C6 BC, which is the background to our OT lesson today.

Instead I thought that it was very striking that the prophet was writing about a bad king – in this case, King Zedekiah of Judah, and this passage is really a prophecy directed at the whole house of David, saying what a good ruler should do. What struck me about this passage was the way in which it reminded me of a number of the debates which I have listened to recently, concerning what the government should be doing today, here in the UK. For example, on Question Time there was a lively debate between Canon Giles Fraser and the MP Dianne Abbott on the one side, and Michael Heseltine the Conservative grandee on the other. They were arguing about the government’s austerity programme, and in particular whether the burden of the various government cuts is falling disproportionately on poor people.

When I read the lesson in Jeremiah, I immediately thought about the government programme to try to get people back to work, where apparently, young people are being compelled to work in menial jobs for no pay in order, so the government says, to gain ‘work experience’.

Now I’m not going to debate the rights and wrongs of the government workfare programme, although ‘a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay’ has always struck me as a good start in this area. The point I’d like to make is that, in all the debates in which this came up, for example on Question Time, even when Giles Fraser was there, nobody mentioned God.

I should say that this was perhaps even more strange, because the programme was being broadcast from St Paul’s Cathedral. There were a couple of delightful things – one was in the credits, where the ‘set designer’ was listed as Sir Christopher Wren, and the other was when Michael Heseltine’s mobile phone rang, and it was his wife, no doubt wondering when he was going to be home for his tea. But there they were, in God’s house, and no-one mentioned God.

Nobody said, ‘What would Jesus do?’ And that was a big contrast, so far as I was concerned, to some of the other things that I encountered this week. I’ve had rather a cultural week. I started off by going to the Young Vic (which you might smile about!) to see a wonderful play called ‘Feast’ about the Yoruba people from Nigeria, and their diaspora from Nigeria to the UK, to Cuba, to Venezuela and to Brazil, which of course had a lot to do with the slave trade.

Wherever they went, the Yorubas took their distinctive culture with them, including their old gods, the Orishas, even though Nigerians are mostly Christians and Moslems nowadays. The Orishas are the emissaries – I suppose they are a bit like angels – of one supreme god. It is true that Yoruba people, even today, see the Orishas at work in all sorts of everyday circumstances. One Orisha is a an Orisha of motherhood and child-bearing, another one of beauty and love, another one is a warrior, and ‘Esu is a trickster and a shape-shifter. He is the Orisha of crossroads, the threshold, chaos and fertility, the divine middle-man’ [Programme for Feast, 2013, London, The Young Vic, p11].

So everywhere that a Yoruba goes, even today – and I was accompanied by a dear friend from St Andrew’s who is a Yoruba – she was saying that they still know about these ancient angels. They are aware of God’s presence all the time.

Then on Friday I went to the Coliseum to see the very wonderful production of Charpentier’s ‘Medea’, a 17th century opera based on the ancient Greek myth of Medea the witch, daughter of gods, who married Jason, Jason of the Argonauts. Jason was unfaithful to her. She ended up killing their children. A real tragedy, from Euripides.

Again it was very noticeable that whatever happened in the play, all the actors would refer to God – or in the Greek context, the gods. ‘Did something represent the will of the gods?’, they always asked themselves.

Earlier in the week we had our first sessions of the Lent course. This year we are looking at the Beatitudes, the ‘Blessed are they’ sayings of Jesus at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount. [Matt.5 and Luke 6]. In the first session we were looking at the saying, ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit’. We were reflecting, among other things, on the way in which, when these sayings are repeated in St Luke’s gospel, there is no mention of the ‘in spirit’ bit, but it’s simply, ‘Blessed are you who are poor’.

So back to Jeremiah and to the warning to the kings of the house of David. Woe to him who builds his house by unrighteousness …. who makes his neighbours work for nothing, and does not give them their wages, who says, I will build myself a spacious house, with large upper rooms…’ This is uncomfortably close to home. A footballer’s house, perhaps.

And what do we think about the masses of people who are out of work, who are being forced to work for nothing in menial jobs? Whatever we do think, do you think we should at least consult our Bibles? Think of the parable of the workers in the vineyard in St Matthew’s gospel chapter 20. Even though the vineyard owner paid a flat rate of a day’s pay, a denarius, irrespective whether the worker worked for one hour or eight hours, there was no question of working for nothing.

My point is this: that in this time of Lent we should look again at our lives, in the light of the gospel. We say, ‘The Lord is here. His spirit is with us’: and then we forget about him. I’m sure that at least some of you are going to tackle me on the door afterwards and explain how important it is that young people should get work experience, and that it doesn’t matter that they work for nothing, provided, of course, all the usual safeguards are in place.

You may be right. My point is not that: my point is, that in all the discussions about the rights and wrongs of it, nobody mentions God, nobody mentions what Jesus would do. Remember what the epistle of James says, in chapter 5. ‘Come now, you rich people, weep and wail for the miseries that are coming to you. … Listen! The wages of the labourers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of The Lord of hosts’.

The Bible is absolutely clear: it’s not a good thing not to pay people for their work. Funny that nobody mentions it.

Tags angels, Charpentier, Cuba, Dianne Abbott, Euripides, exploitation, Giles Fraser, Medea, Michael Heseltine, Nigeria, Orishas, Sir Christopher Wren, Venezuela, Workfare, Yoruba

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Glory and the Riley Elf

February 10, 2013 //

Sermon for Evensong on the Sunday called Quinquagesima, or the next Sunday before Lent, 10th February 2013
Exodus 3:1-6, John 12:27-36 – ‘Father, glorify your name.’ The Riley Elf.

Do you remember the Riley Elf? Or the Wolseley Hornet? Those little cars? Well, sometimes people used to say they were just ‘glorified Minis’. They were posh versions of the Mini.

Is that what we mean by ‘glorified’ – or, ‘glory’? Is it just a sort of embellishing process? What is glory?

I’ve always found the passage in St John’s gospel that we had as our lesson really rather difficult to understand. Indeed, it’s quite a theme in St John’s gospel, glory. What is this glory?

St Paul talks about a woman’s hair being her ‘glory’ (1 Cor. 11:15), and we talk about people ‘glorying’ in some good fortune or other. 12th August is known as the ‘Glorious 12th’. The glory there seems to consist in mass slaughter of grouse. We sometimes say that it is a glorious day, when we mean that it is sunny and fine.

But none of this really seems to help us when we examine what Jesus was mulling over here, after his entry into Jerusalem on a donkey. He is thinking about the fact that he is going to be ‘lifted up’, as he says, and as the gospel put it, ‘He said this to indicate the kind of death that he was to die’, being lifted up on the cross. Just as in the other gospels they have the scene in the garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus is praying to his Father, ‘Take this cup away from me’ (Matt. 26:36-46, Mark 14:32-42, Luke 22:40-46), here similarly he is thinking whether to ask to be saved from his impending fate.

On a human level, he’s afraid of what’s in front of him. So his instinct is to ask to be saved. But he knows that it is his destiny, that the purpose of his life on earth is to go through this terrible suffering. Just before this passage, he explains how death can be more fruitful, ultimately, than life. ‘A grain of wheat remains a solitary grain unless it falls into the ground and dies; but if it dies, it bears a rich harvest’ (John 12:24, NEB).

So Jesus says this rather peculiar phrase, ‘Father, glorify your name.’ And a voice comes out from heaven saying, ‘I have glorified it, and I will do it again.’ (John 12:28) Just like the voice from the burning bush to Moses in our Old Testament lesson from Exodus, here the voice from heaven, which was heard by those standing round, is miraculous evidence that God is present, and that Jesus isn’t just a man. One of the modern translations of the Bible, the Contemporary English Version published by the Bible Society, translates this section this way: “‘I must not ask my father to keep me from this time of suffering. In fact I came into the world to suffer. So Father, bring glory to yourself’. A voice from heaven then said, ‘I have already brought glory to myself, and I will do it again.'”

‘Glorify your name’: ‘bring glory to yourself’. The Greek word behind this passage (δόξα, δόξαζω) is interesting. It has been translated literally as ‘glory, I glorify’, but it started out as a word meaning, ‘I have an opinion about’, maybe ‘a good opinion’, something ‘seems to me’, then, something ‘seems good to me’. That goes on to mean something is a ‘good spectacle’, a sight to see: and it’s a very big word in Christianity.

In the Nicene Creed which we say at Holy Communion, we mention glory twice. Jesus ‘shall come again with glory to judge both the quick and the dead.’ And we believe in the ‘Holy Ghost, The Lord and giver of life, …. who …. is worshipped and glorified’. We have great hymns, ‘Thine be the glory’; ‘Angels from the realms of glory’: the Gloria itself, ‘Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost.’ Good repute, good opinion. Difficult to translate – what on earth does ‘Glorify your name’ mean here?

I think the Contemporary English Version translation is probably right. Bring glory to yourself. On one level it seems an absurd request. God is omnipotent. God can do whatever He wants. He doesn’t need to demonstrate how powerful He is. He doesn’t need to curry favour. He is God.

But still, Jesus says, ‘Bring glory to yourself’. The more I consider this, the more I think about it, it dawns on me that of course this is a mystery, a holy mystery. Jesus is weighing up two alternatives. Calling on his father to save him, or the alternative, ‘Father, glorify your name’, which must mean, ‘Do something which will redound to your credit.’ In other words, let Jesus go through with the Passion, with suffering and death.

It doesn’t seem right. But so much about Jesus contains apparent paradoxes. The Servant King. Washing the disciples’ feet. Showing humility, never glorying in his position. ‘All who exalt themselves will be humbled; those who humble themselves will be exalted'(Matt. 23:12). So there’s a paradoxical meaning to ‘glory’ in St John’s gospel. When Jesus talks about being glorified – ‘The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified’, he says – what he means is not that the Son of Man, that he, is going to preside in triumph.

There is a paradox about the way in which he entered Jerusalem, on a donkey. It’s meant to make you think about the way in which Roman generals, after a successful campaign, would lead their armies back to Rome and enjoy a triumph: games, processions, jollifications, huge celebrations. At their heart was a kind of worship for the successful leader. Jesus wasn’t intending anything like that. His triumphal procession, on the donkey, was nothing like a Roman general’s triumph. Jesus earns his glory, his good reputation, by showing ultimate humility, by submitting to the whole process of his passion: the torture at the hands of the Romans and the Jews culminating in his agonising death on the cross.

Some triumph! But it is meant to be a triumph. It is meant to be a glory. As St John writes, later on in his gospel, ‘The book has been written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing, you may have life in his name’ (John 20:31). ‘Glory’ really has a connotation of the divine nature. Jesus is not only a man, but also he is divine, the Son of God. ‘Coming to glory’ has that meaning. The realm of glory is the realm of the divine.

We may not now think of the realm of glory as being up in the clouds, somewhere beyond the clouds, but the idea is still a perfectly good way of understanding something which is strictly beyond our understanding. So when Jesus says that ‘the hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified’, he really means it is time for the Son of Man, for him, to put on his divine nature. And that means that Jesus’ glory comes not only from his glorious resurrection, but also from his suffering and his passion. That is glorious too.

We are on the edge of what we can understand. It’s not really surprising that the words we are using don’t necessarily convey the full weight of meaning which this mighty truth requires. Let’s go back to the Riley Elf. A glorified Mini. Nothing of the divine there. That’s something that should bring us up short. We talk quite easily in church about something being glorious, God being glorious, ‘Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost’, and so on. It’s a word which just slips down and does not really mean anything to us as we say it. Just like the Mini turning into a Riley Elf, are we saying that Jesus in our lives is almost like a shining ornament in the corner, very nice to look at, but it doesn’t do anything?

Or are we saying that the lustre, the glory, the special shine, that we see on Jesus, is because he is the Son of God? And because he is, that we will have to change our lives in response? I think so. ‘Who is the king of glory: even the Lord of hosts, he is the King of glory.’ (Psalm 24).

Tags Christianity, christology, Evensong, Exodus 3, John 12, Lent, Mini, Quinquagesima, Riley Elf, Wolseley Hornet

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Supererogatory Goods

By publicsquare

January 27, 2013 //

Sermon for Education Sunday, the Fourth Sunday of Epiphany, 27th January 2013
Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10, 1 Corinthians 12:12-31, Luke 4:14-21 – Supererogatory Goods

For over 100 years the churches in England have recognised the ninth Sunday before Easter, which is what today is, as ‘Education Sunday’. It’s a Sunday in which we celebrate the work of all the various educational establishments, and of course in particular, the teaching that comes from our church, either directly here in church, in Bible study or sermons, and in our church schools. Here in Cobham we have St Andrew’s School, who are coming to lead our service at 10 o’clock.

The lessons, that we have set for today, have been chosen with Education Sunday in mind. In Nehemiah and in our gospel reading from St Luke, we have a picture of someone in the synagogue taking down the scroll on which the Hebrew Bible was written, unfurling it and reading from it. Both in the Old Testament lesson from Nehemiah and in the gospel, after the Bible has been read, then there’s a session of teaching.

Indeed on one level, on Education Sunday, we can just celebrate the fact that there are teachers, and that education is a great good. We can reflect that it is a very good thing that the churches are very deeply involved in the whole process of educating children and young people.

Indeed it would be perfectly sensible to have services once a year on Education Sunday that just simply give thanks to God for the fact that God has given all the various talents, all the various complementary skills which St Paul picturesquely describes in our lesson from his first letter to the Corinthians, about the different parts of the body and the fact that each of the bits and each of the body’s faculties – the hand, the foot, the hearing, the sense of smell – have their real purpose in the way in which they relate to each other in the one body. It’s an allegory for the church. The church depends on people with all sorts of different skills and aptitudes and gifts to give. Among those talents there surely is the talent of teaching.

It is, however, worth pausing at this point just to review certain things about the educational landscape as it confronts our children, and ourselves as parents, today. There is some controversy about so-called ‘faith schools’. The argument, the controversy, is whether there should be a stripe running through the whole of a church school, a colour of Christianity. Wouldn’t it be better, some people say, if schools were all completely secular – even so, perhaps children could be taught about religion, or the various religions, as an academic subject, but not as a rule of life. They argue, what about children who come from unbelieving homes, or homes where people actually believe in a different religion?

Obviously there are standard answers to that, given by the church, that in fact there is no undue bias towards churchgoers in allocating places in church schools, that there is always provision made for those who declare themselves to be either unbelievers or believers in a different faith, in the form of separate assemblies or just being able to skip going to Christian worship and attending lessons where Christianity is taught.

Anyway, the churches have a good story to tell about their openness and their inclusiveness in the church schools, and the controversy, if there is really one, is all about the fact that church schools on the whole are very good schools, and obviously more people want their children to attend them than they actually have places for. So although the church has set them up and sustains them in many important ways, non-believers resent this and demand that they should have equal access for their children.

That brings me on to the second dimension in our lessons today, in particular in the gospel. What should a good school teach? I don’t want to get into sterile discussions about the various politicians’ ideas about what the so-called ‘core curriculum’ should contain. I’m more interested today in what Jesus was doing when he was teaching in the synagogue in Nazareth as indeed, according to the gospel, he regularly did, all over the place. Was he doing the sort of job that Ezra and the Levites were doing in the story from Nehemiah?

What Ezra was reading, and then going on to teach about, was ‘the book of the law of Moses’, the Pentateuch, the first five books in the Old Testament. At the heart of the Jewish law are the Ten Commandments. You will remember all the various Ten Commandments, and you could, if you were one of these non-believing parents, point out that, in a school today, you could certainly teach, in a General Studies lesson, say, the benefits to society as a whole if everyone followed the Ten Commandments.

You would say, as an unbeliever, that the benefits of most of the Ten Commandments would inure, quite irrespective of whether they were the commandments of God as opposed to being just good common sense, necessary for peace and harmony in society.

Obviously the first commandment, ‘Thou shalt worship The Lord thy God,’ doesn’t fit with that; and moreover, if you introduce the Ten Commandments with the story of how Moses came by them, it’s quite clear that the particular context of the Ten Commandments is a context of divine revelation, but it is possible to get most of the moral benefits without needing to know anything about God.

But there are little hints of what’s different, when the teaching is actually about the divine. In Nehemiah, there’s this intriguing last thing that Ezra preaches, that people should eat, drink and be merry: but that they should send a share of their food to people who haven’t got any: those ‘for whom nothing is prepared,’ as the passage says. And that that should be something done on the Lord’s day: ‘send portions to those for whom nothing is prepared, because this day is holy to our Lord’. So that suggests that the reason for sending the food parcels to the poor people is because it’s something associated with God: you do it on the Sabbath, on the Lord’s day.

Similarly in St Luke’s gospel Jesus takes as his text the passage from Isaiah chapter 61 which actually describes the coming Messiah, the chosen one of God. Again, the point about that is that Christian teaching is not just about what is good to do – although of course there is strong Christian teaching about it – but at its heart is the question where that teaching comes from, and who Jesus was, in order to do that teaching.

You can see the people of Nazareth resisted stoutly the idea that Jesus was anything special – but that is the difference. A secular set of ethics would come up with something very like the Ten Commandments (albeit minus the first one). Essentially such secular ethics would be based on the so-called ‘golden rule’, do as you would be done by; do to your neighbour, and so on; but where the teaching really comes from God, in the mouth of a prophet like Ezra, and in the mouth of Jesus himself, as in St Luke’s gospel, the difference is that the teaching is not only to do as you would be done by, in the various specifics laid down in the Ten Commandments, but it is also to pursue so-called supererogatory goods, things which go beyond what you are obliged to do. So this is sending food parcels to people who are hungry in the Old Testament, and in Jesus’ teaching, the commandments in the Sermon on the Mount, turning the other cheek, going the extra mile: these are all supererogatory goods, doing more than you strictly have to do in order simply to keep the fabric of society together.

They are the mark of a very special kind of teacher. As Jesus himself says, Isaiah’s prophecy, in Isaiah chapter 61, setting out what the Messiah, the chosen one of God, would look like, now is fulfilled. Jesus is the Messiah. He is the son of God. He is divine.

That brings me back to what we should be doing with church schools. If all we’re doing – and that’s not to belittle it – if all that we’re doing is teach children things that they could learn anywhere, church school or not, then it’s almost as though Jesus had never come. But if on the other hand, the important thing about a church school is that it’s run by people who recognise the difference between what Ezra was doing, what the OT prophets were doing, what Moses was doing when he collected the tablets with the Ten Commandments: who recognise what the difference is between them and Jesus himself, teaching in the synagogue and actually saying that the world has changed, that Isaiah’s prophecy has been fulfilled and the Ten Commandments are no longer the whole story. Jesus’ teaching is a whole big command of love, which enjoins people to do supererogatory goods, doing more than they are asked to do, going the extra mile.

And they are doing that, because it is God who is asking them. Isn’t that just the most important thing that you could possibly teach about, in your church school? I think it is, and I’m sure that Andrew Tulloch, the headmaster, and his teachers, at our church school, are very well aware of that, and they never forget it. Long may it continue.

Tags 1 corinthians 12, Christianity, church, Church schools, Education Sunday, hebrew bible, human-rights, religion, St Andrew's School Cobham, testament lesson

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