Heavenly Dissonance

By publicsquare
July 18, 2023 //
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Sermon preached at St Peter’s, Old Cogan, on 14th May 2023: the Sixth Sunday after Easter

Zechariah 8.1-13
Revelation 21.22 – 22.5

See https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=556703225

‘The third day he rose again from the dead;

He ascended into heaven’…

This bit of the Creed neatly marks where the church is after Easter and before Ascension Day, which is this coming Thursday.

At first, when I was thinking what I was going to say to you at this point, I had a real feeling of cognitive dissonance, if I can call it that, between our Bible readings, with their visions of heaven or the Heavenly City, and what seems to be going on in the world around us today. 

Archbishop Justin made an impassioned speech in the House of Lords the other day, pointing out how a Bill intended to stop people crossing the Channel in little boats contradicts morality and international law as well as being profoundly inhumane; and then I read in the paper that we are going to supply to the Ukrainians cruise missiles called Storm Shadow which cost

 £2 million each. 

So many thoughts were swirling around in my brain. On the one hand there is no price which one can put on preserving freedom and defeating invaders: on the other, it is interesting to know that apparently we in the UK have about 1000 of these missiles, £2,000m, £2 billion-worth, and yet we are told we can’t afford to pay our doctors and nurses and all the other public servants properly. 

They say that, if you met all the public service pay demands at present being put forward, in full, it would cost about the same amount, £2 billion. How to judge which is the right course to take? Missiles to defend Ukraine, or paying our public servants? 

In the face of these terrible dilemmas maybe the thing to do is to clear one’s head by drawing close to the Lord in prayer and coming to the Lord’s house at 3 o’clock on Sunday, as we have, and bringing our worship and prayers.

But isn’t this just escapism? Maybe not. Our Bible readings today have, I think, a heavenly flavour. 

‘On the holy mount stands the city he founded. 

Glorious things are spoken of you, city of God.’ 

‘Glorious things of thee are spoken, Zion city of our God’, as the hymn says.

And we have Zechariah’s prophetic vision of the city of God. 

‘I will return to Jerusalem, and will dwell in the midst of Jerusalem; Jerusalem shall be called the faithful city and the mountain of the Lord of hosts shall be called the holy mountain.’

Or you could stay in heaven itself and follow the vision of John in the Book of Revelation. 

‘I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb. And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb’.

I think these days we tend to rather shy away from talking much about heaven, because we feel that it is very much beyond our comprehension. What would you say, if somebody tackled you as you were coming out of the church today, and said, “It looks like you are a churchgoer, a Christian, can you tell me anything about heaven?” Well certainly if that was me being tackled in that way, I think I’d find it quite challenging. 

One might start to say things like, ‘That it is where God lives’ – and then immediately you’d worry that God lives everywhere, by definition. There isn’t a particular place where he lives. Or perhaps, ‘It’s where people go after they die’.  Again, it’s quite difficult to work out the geography of that. Or just, a place above the skies, out of our sight. Again, mundane considerations might intrude.

When Yuri Gagarin, the first astronaut, returned to earth (and he was a Christian), President Khrushchev asked him whether he had seen anything above the clouds in the realms of space. Did he encounter God? Gagarin said, no, unfortunately he hadn’t seen anything divine up there.

Well maybe you can do better than I can, but I think that in principle it’s quite a tricky question. If we stay with the idea that heaven is where God is at home, say, if that’s not too vague, here in these Bible readings we have two versions; it seems that Zion, where not only God, but God’s chosen people, the Israelites, live, on the one hand is heavenly and on the other hand, earthly.

On the one hand we have the city and temple of Zion; that seems to be an earthly place; and on the other hand we have the vision of heaven in Revelation, where the heavenly city has no temple in it. It’s not a place for God to visit like the temple on Earth, because God is the temple. 

God’s presence gives it its light and makes it glorious. It has the river of the water of life flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street and on either side of the river is the tree of life with its 12 kinds of fruit, reflecting the 12 tribes of Israel, and the leaves of the tree of life for the healing of the nations. Naturally-occurring medicine, like aspirin.

You could miss that word ‘nations’ – it means not just the chosen people, in fact, not the chosen people at all, but all the other people who are cut off from from the Jews, the Israelites: people like us. Both the new Zion on earth and the sort of heaven that we perhaps naturally think of beyond the skies are open to the ‘nations’ as well as to the Israelites. 

Maybe neither of them is literally true, in the sense that you could go there and take pictures, but nevertheless I think there are real things we can see which are very relevant in our lives today.

In Psalm 87:  ‘Very excellent things are spoken of thee, O Zion, the city of God. I, the Lord will record Egypt and Babylon as among them that are my friends. Behold the sons of Philistia, Tyre and Ethiopia.’

These are not just Israel or Judah, and in some instances they even look like enemies of the Israelites. Philistia, Philistines, Egypt – where they were enslaved. Babylon – where they were enslaved, again. Enemies have become friends in the new Zion, in heaven on earth. Strangers in our midst. Refugees. ‘Behold the sons of Philistia, Tyre and Ethiopia.’

Look again at Zechariah’s vision. ‘Old men and old women shall again sit in the streets of Jerusalem.’ It’s been pedestrianised. ‘And the streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing in its streets.’ An idyllic scene; but here’s the thing. Even though it actually seemed impossible to the ‘remnant of this people’ in those days, ‘Should it also seem impossible to me?’ says the Lord of hosts. 

Think of all the politicians, not just on one side, who tell you that something or other which would otherwise improve the lot of the people, isn’t possible, isn’t practical.

For instance, ‘I would love to abolish student fees,’ says Keir Starmer,  ‘but I can’t make a commitment because it may be that practical considerations get in the way’. It seems impossible. 

But the Lord of hosts points out that he is God, and nothing is impossible for him. ‘For before those days there were no wages for people or for animals, nor was there any safety from the foe for those who went out or came in’. It sounds like today. Cost of living crisis. War. Crisis in our public services: not enough money. But look:

‘ There shall be a sowing of peace. The vine shall yield its fruit, the ground shall give its produce and the skies shall give their dew; and I will cause the remnant of this people to possess all these things.’

The chosen people had been taken off to Babylon. ‘By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept.’  The Temple had been destroyed and quite a lot of them had drifted away and married local girls. The ones that were left were called the ‘remnant’ of the chosen people. 

Remember what happened in 1945. Our country was completely broke. But somehow the National Health Service was founded, millions of council houses were built and the welfare state started. 

Zechariah could have been forecasting, prophesying, about that as well as, instead of, what he actually was forecasting about, which was what would happen to the Israelites as they returned after their exile. He was writing in about 530 BC; but what he was saying, that there should be a ‘sowing of peace’, could apply today. 

‘Should it seem impossible to me?’ asks the Lord of hosts. Surely not: God can do anything, and with his help, so can we.

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God in your Pocket

By publicsquare
July 18, 2023 //
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Sermon for Evensong at All Saints, Penarth, on the 6th Sunday after Trinity, 16th July 2023

2 Samuel 7:18-29

Luke 19:41 – 20:8

See https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=556283310 

When I was little, my folks, especially my Dad, were very fond of a TV show which I think went out on Sunday nights, called the Dave Allen Show. It featured an Irish comedian called Dave Allen. I remember the way the shows always ended. Dave Allen would be sitting on top of a high stool, nursing a glass of Irish whiskey and, somewhat improbably, smoking a cigarette. He would say some warm words of farewell to his audience, and as the applause died down, he would sign off with the same greeting every week: – “May your God go with you”. 

I’ve always found that rather intriguing. It seemed to me that Dave Allen had this picture of everyone having their own private God in their pocket, almost like some kind of super talisman or a piece of ‘Kryptonite’, if you prefer a Superman analogy. Maybe he just wanted to acknowledge the fact that, in his audience of millions, there would be people who had many different beliefs, followed different religions – which is perhaps another way of saying that they followed different gods.

And certainly, when we look at the story of King David making his prayer to God, after he had asked the prophet Nathan to consult God about whether he should make a house for God, now that he himself as a king had a nice house made of cedar wood, in that context, in those days, it looks as though when David was thanking him, for all that he had done for him and the people of Israel, that he was their God, and not a god for anyone else. Indeed it did look as though your religious belief then was all about finding a god who was stronger than your enemy’s god or even your neighbour’s god.

The people of Israel had come in to the promised land out of Egypt; and they had quite a lot of fighting to do against the indigenous people whom they displaced. I don’t want to get involved in discussing Zionism on this occasion, but I did want to point out that people have seemed to have understood what it is to be a God, or to be God, in a fairly local, parochial, sort of way. So they worshipped the one true God partly, we could say, in a Dave Allen sort of way. He was their God, and it was the foundation of their success, or at least of the survival of Israel.

The prophet Nathan told King David that he had consulted God and God did not want David to make a house for him, but David did bring the Ark, the Ark of the Covenant, to Jerusalem, to his capital city, so there was a sense in which God was local; the Israelites’ God, supporting them against the other people and their gods. But God told Nathan that up to that time he had never lived in a house, but rather had lived in a tent or a tabernacle. 

There was a sense in which God and the king were tied up with each other. God wasn’t based anywhere, but He was with the king. It’s a very persistent idea, the idea of the divine right of kings, even in our history. So by having the Ark of the Covenant in his capital, David, in one sense, had God behind him, or possibly, in the Dave Allen sense, somewhere even closer.

But we might feel that’s not quite right, I think. Because surely God is much bigger than that. If he is all powerful, all knowing, the creator – and he may not be ‘he’ or just ‘he’ alone; for instance he could be he, she, they – or all of them. And indeed when David makes his prayer – which was our Old Testament lesson – you can see that he understands how much bigger God is than anything else. 

‘Therefore you are great, O Lord God; for there is no one like you, and there is no God besides you, according to all that we have heard with our ears’. 

But at the same time David also thinks that God is in his pocket too:

‘Who is like your people, like Israel? Is there another nation on earth whose God went to redeem it as a people, and to make a name for himself, doing great and awesome things for them, by driving out before his people nations and their gods?’

My God is mightier than you other people’s gods.

Then along came Solomon and built the first temple. So although God had told Nathan that he didn’t need a house, nevertheless eventually he got one. That temple lasted 400-odd years from 957BC till 587 when the Israelites were captured by the Babylonians and taken into exile. ‘By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept.’ And the temple was destroyed. Fortunately, 70-odd years later, Cyrus, the Persian king, liberated them from the Babylonians and let them go back and rebuild the temple. It was finished in 515BC. It was God’s house, the place where the Ark of the Covenant was kept; where worship took place and sacrifices were made.

We come back to it 500 years later, when we read in our New Testament lesson from Saint Luke’s gospel, which is a passage taken just after the Palm Sunday story, and Jesus prophesies the overthrow and destruction of Jerusalem. He went on to throw out the moneychangers and people doing business of one kind or another within the bounds of the temple. “My house shall be a house of prayer; but you have made it a den of robbers”. It was an accurate prophecy because the Romans destroyed the temple in 70AD.

The beginning and end of the story of the Temple, the House of God, and the two different ways of thinking of God, living in a house or being over all houses, not confined, were mentioned in one of the first great Christian sermons, when St Stephen went through the history of the people of Israel and their God in the Book of Acts chapter 7. He said, 

‘Yet the Most High does not dwell in houses made by human hands; as the prophet says,
 “Heaven is my throne,
   and the earth is my footstool.
What kind of house will you build for me, says the Lord,
   or what is the place of my rest? 

Did not my hand make all these things?”’ 

He’s quoting Nathan, from our Old Testament lesson.

So where does God live? Is he defined by time and place? Today I don’t think we worry much about asking that question. It seems pretty obvious to us, I think, that the divine can’t be limited in time and space. By definition, someone who is all powerful, all knowing, eternal. But still, I don’t know whether we spend enough time – or any time really – thinking about who it is that we are praying to. Is it God who lives in a house, or is it that God who is characterised by those ‘omni’ words; omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent?

I don’t think people will necessarily fight you, these days, about whether God is a partisan God – whether our God is stronger than your God – as opposed to tackling you about whether he exists at all. If that happens, if you encounter Richard Dawkins, or one of his acolytes in the new atheists, then it might be tempting to say that your belief is divinely sanctioned; you, as a Christian, sense His real presence. 

But how do you know? How do you know it’s God? It’s the question Jesus was asked. ‘Tell us by what authority you are doing these things. Who is it who gave you this authority?’ Jesus gave quite a tricky answer.  

But we wouldn’t hesitate, surely, knowing what we do. We would say he got his authority from heaven. Then the question is the question Jesus asked. If you think that I get all this stuff from heaven, why don’t you take any notice? 

Fortunately that’s not where we came in. Instead we are back with Dave Allen. Where is our God? Does our God go with us? I pray – I believe – that He does. The Lord is here. His Spirit is with us. Everywhere.

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Gone up with a Merry Noise

By publicsquare
July 7, 2023 //
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A sermon preached at Evensong at All Saints Church, Penarth, on the seventh Sunday of Easter, 21st May 2023

Readings: see https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=555734170

’God is gone up with a merry noise: and the Lord with the sound of the trump’. Do you recognise that line? I try not to preach on texts which have not been read as one of the lessons or haven’t been sung by the choir as one of the psalms, canticles or motets. You haven’t had those words, ‘God is gone up with a merry noise’, in tonight’s lessons or in the psalm. And sad to say, you won’t get them.

I think they are among the most jolly words in the whole of the Bible. God is gone up with a merry noise. It always gives me a somewhat irreverent picture of a little boy letting off a balloon which makes its way towards the ceiling accompanied by a ripe raspberry as the air comes out.

The Church in Wales has adopted a translation of Psalm 47 which says, ‘God is gone up with a shout of triumph, and the Lord with the sound of trumpets’. Just so’s you know, the ‘merry noise’ version, ‘God is gone up with a merry noise’, comes in Miles Coverdale’s translation of Psalm 47 in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer.

Apparently the trumpet, or the ‘trump’, was in fact an ancient shofar, which is literally a ram’s horn. When you look at the American Episcopal Church’s Book of Common Prayer, they say ‘God has gone up with a shout, the Lord with the sound of the ram’s horn.’

We often use Psalm 47 when we’re celebrating Ascension Day, which as you know was on Thursday, as if that psalm reflected Jesus’ ascension into heaven, but I’m not sure that this wonderful line really is about God physically ascending. The expression to ‘go up’ in the Old Testament is usually used in the context of an army setting out to attack another army. David prayed to the Lord, ‘Shall I go up, and fight the Philistines?’ (2 Samuel 5:19).

And anyway, being raised up, being hoisted up in the sense that Jesus was raised up on the cross, was a sign of something disgraceful, not a mark of triumph. You will remember the story of the plague of serpents afflicting the Israelites in the wilderness, in the book of Numbers, and Moses being instructed by God to make a brass serpent, putting it on the pole and holding it up in the middle of the camp.

People who looked up at the serpent were healed. It was all referred to in St John’s Gospel chapter 3, showing how Jesus had turned the thing on its head:

And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up; that whoever believes may in Him have eternal life. [John 3:14-15]

So ‘God is gone up with a shout of triumph’ (and not with a merry noise). It isn’t so memorable – or funny – and it isn’t a reference to Jesus’ Ascension, but it does fit with the rest of the psalm, which is a celebration of God’s power.

Clap your hands together, all you people.

Oh sing unto God, for the Lord is high and

he is the great king on all the Earth.

That’s the message we get from the letter to the Ephesians, which may not actually be by St Paul, but rather it may have been written by someone who was writing almost as a tribute to St Paul.

Quite a lot of the letter to the Ephesians actually looks a lot like the letter to the Colossians, which is accepted by scholars as having been written by St Paul. Neither letter actually mentions the story of Jesus’ Ascension. If you do a bit of reading around as your homework, and have a look at Acts chapters 18 and 19, and a quick canter through Colossians, I think it becomes clearer what the point of the message in Colossians and Ephesians is, that they are about the greatness of God and the glory of God in the church: the glory of the one who, in that wonderful phrase, ‘fills all in all’.

The Colossians needed Paul to reassure them that the one true God, the one revealed in the person of Jesus, was all you needed, all in all. You didn’t need other mini-gods to do other jobs, for example.

It is rather doubtful whether Saint Paul himself actually wrote the letter to the Ephesians. At the beginning of the passage we had as our second lesson the writer writes, “I have heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love towards all the saints”. In Acts chapters 18 and 19 we have read that St Paul spent two years in Ephesus, so I don’t think he would necessarily talk about his having ‘heard about’ the faith of the Christian community, as though he’d never met them, because he had been living among them and was deeply involved with them for two whole years. But nevertheless, whoever did write Ephesians said some important things.

The context is that, at the time of Jesus or just after Jesus, in the classical world, among the Greeks and Romans there were many gods being worshipped. We heard last week about when the Apostle Peter made his speech on the Areopagus, on Ares’, Mars’, Mount, when he gave that great sermon about the Athenians worshipping many gods, but that they had been particularly smart because they had left a space for worshipping the unknown God – and that was the one that Peter decided to praise.

In that context, of lots of gods, lots of competing gods, and a basic sort of theology, that my God can beat your God, the emperor Constantine had the cross painted on his soldiers’ shields before the battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312, and his army won. That led to Christianity becoming the official religion of the Roman Empire, becoming a world religion. But being some kind of battle-winning superman wasn’t – and isn’t – what Christians really believe about Jesus.

The one true God, the one revealed in the person of Jesus, isn’t just a powerful specialist, but He is all you need; He is ‘all in all.’ That line, ‘[God] has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things’ in Ephesians reminds us about Psalm 110, Dixit Dominus: ‘The Lord said unto my Lord: Sit thou on my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool.’ God, and God in human form, Jesus, is supreme. Nothing came before or is in any way above Him, above God.

And so although the lesson that we have from Ephesians at first sight looks just to be a hymn of praise – and in one sense, it certainly is – it’s a particularly good one containing some really important theological truths. Somebody has commented that in the Greek, Paul’s prayer is the longest unbroken sentence in the whole of the Bible.

The prayer is a prayer for wisdom, that wisdom should be granted to the Ephesians, so that they will appreciate that although Jesus is no longer there, his body, the church, is all in all, that is, all they need. They don’t need any other gods. That’s a pretty good message for us too. Let us pray that, in being the body of Christ, here at All Saints, we are fulfilled, we are, and we represent, the one who is all in all. Our church will be just like David’s prophecy:

Is not my house like this with God?
   For he has made with me an everlasting covenant,
   ordered in all things and secure.
Will he not cause to prosper
   all my help and my desire?

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Can you ‘Stop the Boats’, Minister?

By publicsquare
June 4, 2023 //
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Minister Robert Jenrick was interviewed this morning (4th June 2023) by Laura Kuenssberg. The Conservative government wants to deter ‘illegal’ immigration, defined as people arriving without visas on boats crossing the Channel. The Home Office says the cost of carrying out their proposed policy, in the ‘Illegal Migration’ [sic] Bill, of detaining and deporting these ‘migrants’ will be between £3bn and £6bn per year.

Some Assumptions

Let’s assume that the current backlog of asylum applications is c.150,000 and average time waiting for decision is 2 years.

Let’s assume that each asylum seeker is put up in a hotel, pending decision on granting asylum or deportation, for one year at an overall cost, including legal and admin charges, of £100 per day. ⅔ of asylum seekers have been and will continue to be granted asylum. So say these 100,000 were processed more efficiently – say by allowing them to claim asylum while en route – you could save £10,000,000 per year.

Do we really want to break international law?

But the government definition of ‘illegal’ migration conflicts with the definitions in the Refugee Convention 1950 of asylum seekers and the lack of any obligation in the Convention to seek asylum in any particular country (say, ‘the first safe country they enter’; this is not a Convention requirement), so it is highly likely that there will be successful legal challenges to the operation of the proposed Bill.

The figures don’t add up – immigration is good for the economy

The government’s declared intention to reduce net migration ‘because of the pressure on public services’ is economically illiterate, because immigrants contribute on average 10% more in taxes than indigenous people (according to the Refugee Council and Resolution Foundation), so the real problem is that public services have been run down and are not sufficient for the needs of the population as a whole. Austerity, not immigration, is to blame for deficiencies in public services.

Other things we could spend £6bn on

TUC has estimated that it would cost £2bn to give all public service workers including NHS and train staff the pay rises currently being sought.

The Storm Shadow missiles being supplied by our government to the Ukraine cost £2m each. The UK has a stock of 1,000 missiles – cost £2bn.

Would it not be better to make it easier for asylum seekers, as defined in the Refugee Convention, to gain asylum and start to become taxpayers here, thereby saving all or most of the £3-6bn cost of implementing the Illegal Migration Bill, and to spend the saving on rebuilding our public services and continuing to provide support for the Ukraine?

Hugh Bryant

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The Lion of Judah

By publicsquare
April 17, 2023 //
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A Sermon for Evensong at All Saints, Penarth, on the First Sunday of Easter, 16th April 2023

Lessons: https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=548333336 

Daniel 6:1-23; Mark 15:46 – 16:8

This is the first Sunday in the 50 days from Easter to Whitsunday, Pentecost. So where are we now, one week on from Easter Sunday? Well, leaving aside for a minute the story of Daniel in the lions’ den, in our Bible readings, in the Lectionary, we are at the very end of Saint Mark’s gospel. 

But before we start looking at that, you might wonder why our first lesson was the wonderful story of Daniel in the lions’ den, and you will, no doubt, be relying on me to pull out a suitable lion story.

Many people see lions in their mind’s eye as just bigger versions of ginger tomcats, and just as lovable. Just like the lion you can see on YouTube in a lovely little documentary which was made in the 1960s (https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLx1gRyewAnQZhBqiNNP-u9V9sUsi36ebK), about a couple of likely lads living in swinging London; in Chelsea, who acquired a lion cub from Harrod’s pet department. In those days the ‘well-known Knightsbridge corner store’ even had a pet department, where you could buy a lion cub. 

And they christened him Christian, Christian the Lion, which was rather nice, and took him home to their flat. Once he’d settled in, they put him on a lead and took him for walks up and down the King’s Road, perhaps stopping to exchange the time of day with Mick Jagger as he stepped out of his elegant house on Cheyne Walk.

Christian the Lion stopped being a lovable cub and got rather too big to go out safely without the risk of his taking a leaf out of Hilaire Belloc’s book. 

I am sure you will remember Hilaire Belloc’s ‘Cautionary Tale’ of Jim, who ran away from his nurse and was eaten by a lion. Shall I read it to you?

There was a Boy whose name was Jim; 

His Friends were very good to him. 

They gave him Tea, and Cakes, and Jam, 

And slices of delicious Ham, 

And Chocolate with pink inside, 

And little Tricycles to ride,

And read him Stories through and through, 

And even took him to the Zoo- 

But there it was the dreadful Fate 

Befell him, which I now relate.

You know – at least you ought to know, 

For I have often told you so- 

That Children never are allowed

To leave their Nurses in a Crowd;

Now this was Jim’s especial Foible, 

He ran away when he was able, 

And on this inauspicious day

He slipped his hand and ran away! 

He hadn’t gone a yard when – Bang! 

With open Jaws, a Lion sprang, 

And hungrily began to eat

The Boy: beginning at his feet.

Now just imagine how it feels 

When first your toes and then your heels, 

And then by gradual degrees, 

Your shins and ankles, calves and knees, 

Are slowly eaten, bit by bit.

No wonder Jim detested it!

No wonder that he shouted “HI!‟

The honest keeper heard his cry, 

Though very fat he almost ran

To help the little gentleman. 

“Ponto!” he ordered as he came

(For Ponto was the Lion’s name), 

“Ponto!” he cried, with angry Frown. 

“Let go, Sir! Down, Sir! Put it down!”

The Lion made a sudden Stop, 

He let the Dainty Morsel drop, 

And slunk reluctant to his cage, 

Snarling with Disappointed Rage. 

But when he bent him over Jim 

The Honest Keeper’s eyes were dim. 

The Lion having reached his head, 

The Miserable Boy was dead.

When Nurse informed his parents, they 

Were more Concerned than I can say:- 

His Mother, as she dried her eyes, 

Said, “Well- it gives me no surprise, 

He would not do as he was told!” 

His Father, who was self- controlled, 

Bade all the children round 

attend To James’ miserable end, 

And always keep a hold of Nurse 

For fear of finding something worse.

Hilaire Belloc (1907) Cautionary Tales, 

included in Cautionary Verses, Omnibus Edition, (1993) London, Jonathan Cape

Thinking of Daniel’s escape from the den of lions, the story  of Jim is a very good illustration of the fact that lions are not nice pussy cats; although in distinct contrast the story about Christian the lion does have a happy ending – perhaps I should issue a spoiler alert at this point. 

The two chaps gave Christian to Joy Adamson of ‘Born Free’ fame for her to introduce the lion to the wild in Africa. A couple of years later they went to Kenya, and perhaps showing that touching faith in leonine good nature, which they had originally exhibited when they adopted Christian, they went for a walk in the bush in the hope of seeing lions, and, incredibly, a large male lion did appear, and he came bounding towards them. I think any normal people would have turned tail and fled; but not these two. They stood there, and this mighty king of the jungle leaped up and put his paws around their necks, licking them and embracing them. He was Christian, he remembered them, and he loved them.

Well, in the middle of all these nice lion stories, we mustn’t forget where we came in, which is, after all, one of the nicest lion stories, the one about Daniel in the den of lions. King Darius is tricked by jealous courtiers into having to condemn Daniel to what was normally a bloody fate, by being locked up in a den of lions overnight. 

The great king Darius was terribly distressed. Should he uphold the law which he had made, his interdict, or should he spare Daniel who had become his most trusted administrator? And he decided he had to uphold the rule of law, the immutable law of the Medes and the Persians. 

Poor Daniel had to be condemned. It was pretty ironic that Daniel had been condemned for worshipping the one true God, but the king figured that the only way Daniel could be saved was by praying to that same God, and indeed so he was, protected by an angel from being eaten by the lions.

But why do we remember Daniel at Easter? I think because, here again, after shutting somebody up in a place of death they rolled away the stone blocking the entrance and the dead man came out alive. 

What about Jesus’ empty tomb? What happened to Daniel was nothing like as mysterious. Certainly if all you have to go on is Saint Mark’s gospel and this original so-called short ending, what happened is that the three ladies, the two Marys and Salome, found that the stone sealing the tomb had been rolled away and a young man in white was  sitting inside, who told them that Jesus had been raised and that he was not there. 

The young man was presumably an angel too; he had been promoted from lion-taming duties by this time, and he told the ladies to go and tell the disciples and Peter that Jesus was going ahead of them to Galilee where they would see him. And they fled in terror, and in fact told no one. The last words were, “…and they said nothing to anyone; for they were afraid”. 

The original Greek words have intrigued scholars ever since. Literally it does not say, “for they were afraid”. It says, “they were afraid, for…” Or “they were afraid, because…”. It looks as though something is missing; but is that something all the material that’s in the other gospels, for instance about the two men in white and Mary hearing a familiar voice, thinking it was the gardener and and then recognising her teacher, and so on? Perhaps not. Then Mark would have made a gospel which really spoke to people like us, people who haven’t experienced the miracle of resurrection with their own eyes. 

It is generally accepted that Mark is the earliest gospel, so this is the one which most closely reflects what the earliest Christians said about what happened on Easter morning. There is a lot more to come, when we do look at the other gospel accounts, in the weeks to come. 

But I expect you’re not really sitting down and reading great tomes about it just now. One week on from a really happy Easter Sunday, as we come back to church today, it has still got a gently vague, happy buzz to it. 

The Lord is risen; he is risen indeed! We’ve just sung ‘Jerusalem the Golden’, but perhaps in this Easter season we will also sing ‘Ye Choirs of new Jerusalem’, which has this splendid verse: 

How Judah’s Lion burst his chains,

and crushed the serpent’s head;

and brought with him, from death’s domains,

the long-imprisoned dead.

The lion. The Lion of Judah. We haven’t even mentioned C.S. Lewis, and Aslan, the lion who stands for Jesus in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The Lord is risen. He is risen indeed. 

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Toy Soldiers

By publicsquare
March 13, 2023 //
0

Sermon for Evensong on the third Sunday of Lent, 12 March 2023, at Saint Peter’s, Old Cogan

https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=545542568‘

Put on the whole armour of God…; the breastplate of righteousness…; the shield of faith…; the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit.’

My favourite toy shop – yes, my favourite toy shop – isn’t Hamleys in Regent Street but it’s in Zürich and in a number of other places in Switzerland under the name Franz Carl Weber. It’s a very old shop; it’s been going since 1881. It is a truly wonderful toy shop. 

The top floor is very well stocked with model railways at one end and dolls at the other end, so there is no sexist hierarchy. Then on the floors going down, are pedal cars and bikes, dressing up clothes, board games and construction toys: there is Lego and Playmobil but, alas, no more Meccano. There’s absolutely everything for kids in there and indeed there is quite a lot for their grandpas to enjoy as well. 

But there is one small category of stuff that Franz Carl Weber does not stock. I wonder if you can imagine what it is. Well, the answer is that Franz Carl Weber, the best toy shop in the world, I think, does not stock anything to do with war or weapons. There isn’t even a spud gun to be had in there. No toy soldiers; no World of Warfare games, no Airfix kits of warplanes; nothing to do with war or weapons. 

I’ll come back to the toy shop without any toy soldiers in a minute. But I just want to look at something else we haven’t got at the moment, which is any hymns today. Sometimes that’s quite a good thing; because it’s rather like listening to the radio – you know, ‘the pictures are much better on the radio’ than on the TV – because they are in your head. That goes for other things that you can hear in your mind’s ear, if I can put it that way. So what would be our hymn?  I would suggest the one that immediately springs to mind is a great one of Charles Wesley’s, 

Soldiers of Christ arise, 

and put your armour on. 

Strong in the strength which God supplies 

through his eternal Son. 

…

Stand then in his great might, 

with all his strength endued, 

but take to arm you for the fight 

the panoply of God.

The panoply, the complete kit of weapons, the suit of armour; for this is a hymn based on our reading from Saint Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. And it’s a rousing hymn: that I certainly remember being very popular with us when I was at school.

And in one sense, what’s not to like? Either about our lesson, or about Charles Wesley’s poetic rendering of it? Stand up to evil; be armour-plated in your resistance, use the best weapons you have, to stand up for the good guys. It’s pretty topical, in the context of the Ukraine. There’s lots in the newspapers, on the TV and on the radio, comparing the weapons used by the Russians with those supplied to the Ukrainians by the Western nations. 

There’s something quite celebratory about the respective descriptions of the Russian and western tanks that we and some of the other European nations – and, indeed, the United States – will be sending – in fact I think that we are already sending, for the Ukrainians to use. 

There has been quite a lot of learned discussion about the relative merits of the Western weapons as against the weapons used by the Russian invaders. I am sure that most 15-year-old boys would be able to give you a detailed rundown of the respective specifications of the Russian T90 as against the Challenger 2 or the Leopard 2 tanks, or the Abrams.

You know, I used to rather like playing with toy soldiers and those Britain’s model field guns which shot out a sliver of lead as a shell. My friend John DeVille, when we were eight or nine, had the most marvellous model 18 inch ‘naval howitzer’ which reproduced all the main things that a real field gun did. You could lay the barrel at the right elevation and tracking; the shells were little masterpieces of brass with a spring inside them and the lead projectile which you put in the breach and then fired, then ejecting the casing. The whole thing was about eight or 9 inches long and it went with our toy soldiers, which were predominantly lead or die-cast, painted in enamel and colourful in their fine uniforms. 

But there was a problem. The problem was, what to do if there was a battle. Then you would actually shoot your wonderful naval howitzer or model 25-pounder at the army which you had lined up against them. But I didn’t want to break any of my soldiers and I didn’t want to damage the opposition’s half-track truck that I was very proud of. So this was a war without casualties. 

And after a bit it began to dawn on me that there is no such thing, that those beautiful soldiers would get smashed up. Some of them would lose arms and legs – and heads. Some of them would not get up again. 

And I want to suggest to you, in all humility, that St Paul may have been a bit up the pole here, in this famous passage from his letter to the Ephesians. In celebrating weapons of war, even when they are used in a good cause, he is missing what Jesus himself said. ‘Love your enemies. Turn the other cheek.’ 

Oh, but surely, you will say, Saint Paul is being a realist. The way of love is just not practical, and you do need the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation and the sword of the spirit; and indeed you may say that this is exactly in line with the Old Testament as well. 

Look at our lesson from the book of Joshua, where God says to Joshua, 

‘There shall not any man be able to stand before thee all the days of thy life: …Be strong and of a good courage: ..Only be thou strong and very courageous, … that thou mayest prosper whithersoever thou goest.’

And you will remember that this led on, once the Israelites had crossed over the Jordan, to their encounter with the Amalekites where, rather surprisingly, God took them to task for having shown mercy to the people whom they defeated. 

But the thing that perhaps St Paul didn’t really get, but which Franz Carl Weber, when he set up his toy shop in 1881, did understand, is the point about my not wanting any of my toy soldiers to be broken. Mr Weber realised that you can’t have a war without breaking soldiers; that the use of weapons does not bring about victory, but it is, rather, a sign of failure. 

Paul paints a picture which looks like a Roman centurion in his armour, and perhaps, as he was the ‘ambassador in chains’ imprisoned in Rome when he wrote the letter, he might have seen a victorious general coming back from a campaign and being granted what was called a triumph, leading the people whom he had conquered, their kings and generals, in chains through the streets of Rome. His centurions would be in their best uniform.

But war never really leads to triumph. Away from the soldiers marching in their dress uniforms there are the broken ones, maimed and dead on the battlefield. And at this time, when we are now confronting again the feeling that we have to wage war, in order to defend civilisation against the attack of the Russians, we don’t know what victory should really look like. 

And at this time of Lent we have to realise that the conflict that Jesus entered into, in trying to bring about his kingdom of love, ended on the battlefield. Jesus was one of the fallen. 

But the other message of Lent points to the triumph, the real triumph, of Easter. Be of good cheer and I will support you. Do the right thing and I will support you, is God’s message to Joshua. The prophet Isaiah, (or perhaps more correctly the first of the three prophets writing under the name), had a vision of the kingdom in which they would ‘beat their swords into ploughshares, and they would not learn war any more.’ 

Then, on God’s holy mountain, the sword of truth will have more truth than sword; the breastplate of faith, more faith than breastplate, and the helmet of salvation, more salvation than helmet. Let it be so! Let us pray for peace and love in place of war. With that peace and love, we can have the ‘sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life’ which comes at Easter.

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A New Ministry – a Sermon on the Occasion of the Grant of Permission to Officiate in the Church in Wales, Penarth Ministry Area

By publicsquare
February 20, 2023 //
0

Sermon for Evensong on the Sunday before Lent, Quinquagesima, 19th February 2023

2 Kings 2:1-12

[Matthew 17:1-23]

https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=543147410 (Authorised Version)

This story begins, it says, ‘just before Elijah was taken up to heaven in a whirlwind’. Taken up to heaven in a whirlwind, as you are. As you do. Or maybe not. Something is going on which is rather different from something which flashes up on Apple News on your phone. Maybe it’s a bit like some of the Apple News things which point you to an article which is hidden behind a paywall. So however tantalising it is, you never get to find out what the story was, at least not from Apple News.

But one suspects that it’s not just a question of getting the story from the right medium. If Elijah is supposed to have been snatched up to heaven in a whirlwind, it doesn’t matter whether Apple News or the Guardian or the Mirror or even the Times reported it, it’s something quite different from our normal experience. I think we would tend to say that it was a story, a legend, and even that perhaps it wasn’t literally true. But maybe it was a story with a message.

It was about Elijah. Elijah is said to be the second most important prophet in the history of the Israelites, after Moses. And just like Moses, there aren’t any books actually written by Elijah but there are lots of stories about what he did, in the Bible. I recommend that you have a look at the 1st book of Kings to read about all the doings of Elijah.

There are things that you will immediately notice about him. First of all, he is a prophet – and we will come back to that in a minute. Second, that he is in competition. Wherever he goes he bumps into more prophets, and not only that, but also as a prophet, passing on the word of God, he finds himself in competition, not only with other prophets, but with other gods. Competing with other gods.

The Israelites had been commanded to love the one true God, and they sort-of did, but some of them hedged their bets by also worshipping the Baals and making the Golden Calf and worshipping that. In the books of Kings you will see that each king is rated by whether or not he had stayed true to the one true God or whether he had followed the Baals and chased after idols.

Now usually, when you are listening to a sermon, you can rely on the preacher doing a quick review of what the Bible readings are, and maybe telling you a little bit more about them, and then trying to relate them to our lives today. What would Jesus do? Would we have made the same mistakes? Would we have touched the forbidden fruit, and if not, why not?

But here? Prophets? Going up to heaven in a whirlwind? I’m not at all sure it’s something we can really relate to.

Let’s look at it again – after the striking beginning, ‘Once upon a time, before the whirlwind came’, Elisha asks Elijah for an extra helping of his prophetic mojo, and Elijah says that he will only get it if he gets sight of him as he goes up to heaven. Then comes this tantalising bit of the story – I don’t know whether you would agree with me – but for a while, we don’t know whether Elisha did actually manage to see Elijah going up in the whirlwind, because it looks a bit as though the chariot and horses blocked the view. Let me read it again for you.

And it came to pass, as they still went on, and talked, that, behold, there appeared a chariot of fire, and horses of fire, and parted them both asunder; and Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven.
And Elisha saw it, and he cried, My father, my father, the chariot of Israel, and the horsemen thereof. And he saw him no more …

What do you think? Did he get a clear look at him?

Well fortunately, the author, the chronicler, the writer of the books of Kings, puts you out of your misery a few lines further on, because it says that he has definitely taken over Elijah’s powers. But what were these powers? What was special about Elijah? He was a prophet. We have said that. But what sort of prophet?

I don’t think we have today any prophets like Elijah or Moses. If we talk about prophets, today we talk about people who claim to be able to forecast the future. Suppose we say that so-and-so has prophesied that Manchester United would win the Cup, for example – or if Jimmy was giving this sermon, of course you’d have to substitute Arsenal, and then – well then, the illustration wouldn’t work.

But you know, seriously, a prophet will tell you, or will claim to tell you, what’s going to happen next. But that’s not the sort of prophet that Elijah was. Elijah didn’t just foretell the future.

What he did was to become, or to pass on, the voice of God. The words of God, the idea of God. Elijah didn’t just foretell the future: but arguably he didn’t even do that.

What he did do was to tackle the people of Israel and try to put them back on to the straight and narrow, back on the road to salvation. So instead of acting essentially like a warm-up man at a TV studio and rousing the masses to celebrate in unison, singing anthems together like a football crowd, as the prophets of Baal did, instead of doing that, Elijah, and Moses before him, were not afraid of tackling Israel head-on and telling them what they were doing wrong.

So what about the message for us today? In Elijah’s time, the prophets were in direct touch with God, and then more recently the priests were the only ones allowed in the holy of holies in the Temple, able to withstand the fire of God. And then in the 16th century along came John Calvin with the idea of the ‘priesthood of all believers’. For him, you didn’t need priests in order to be with God. Take it to the Lord in prayer. Anyone can do it.

I think that maybe as a Reader I’m in that tradition, in the sense that I’m not a priest: not ordained, I haven’t got a dog collar. I’ve studied theology, and I’m not shy about trying to share my faith, to give you ideas about the Kingdom and perhaps occasionally to take a leaf out of the book of the prophets, by steering you gently away from doing things which I don’t think Jesus would approve of.

If Elijah and Elisha, as prophets, were the mouthpieces of God to the Israelites, today our preachers, even humble Readers like me, have to try to bring you the word of God in the Bible and in our theology and tradition. The great preacher Charles Spurgeon had a sign on his pulpit which said, ‘We would see Jesus in you’. We want to see Jesus.

I hope that I can rise to that calling. Here, today, I need to be properly cautious and humble in the face of the Almighty. I don’t know how that whirlwind worked. I sort-of suspect a Doctor Who-style mechanism isn’t really doing it justice, and then again I remember that Nikita Krushchev asked Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, who was a Christian, to tell him whether he found anybody above the clouds, and Gagarin said, no, he hadn’t seen a man with a white beard and a golden throne anywhere in the stratosphere.

But nevertheless it is a great vision, a great movie, a great prophecy. Elijah caught up in a whirlwind, and his apprentice, his successor, Elisha the young prophet, believing that he is only going to be able to carry on the mission with the necessary strength if he doesn’t blink and doesn’t miss Elijah going on up, and then, in just the same way things happen in our lives, things get in the way, a chariot and horses comes thundering in and blocks the view.

What it means for me, as your new Reader, is that I have to try to see clearly, not have my vision blocked. I have to be close to the Lord, and to pass on His word: not only that, but also I have to be willing to call things out, if I think I can hear Jesus muttering in the background.

I hope that you will pray for me: indeed that you will pray with me, as we embark on the spiritual journey through Lent. This Wednesday is Ash Wednesday. Let’s pray and reflect together in these days in the wilderness, in the wilderness in so many ways today, and let us try, together, to follow Jesus’ commands of love.

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New Year 2023

By publicsquare
January 1, 2023 //
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Sermon for New Year’s Day 2023 at St Dochdwys, Llandough

The Naming and Circumcision of Jesus

May God be in my mouth, and in my speaking. Amen.

Before I say anything else, let us give thanks to God for the work of Emeritus Pope Benedict, and pray for our Catholic friends, brothers and sisters in Christ, as they mourn his passing. And although the ball may be the wrong shape, we mourn the passing also of the great footballer Pelé. May both these great figures rest in peace and rise in glory.

Numbers 6.22-27

Psalm 8

Galatians 4.4-7

Luke 2.15-21

https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=538997803

It’s a bit of an upside-down sermon this morning. Indeed if you’re still waking up after last night, you might have thought that our service was back to front. Our first lesson was the blessing. It is the most beautiful blessing, which is called the Aaronic blessing. It was passed on to Aaron by Moses. But a blessing usually comes at the end of the service. It probably will still come at the end as well – Jimmy may well say it today. This is it, from the Old Testament lesson:

May the Lord bless you and keep you;

may the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you; may the Lord lift up his countenance upon you, and give you peace.

Don’t get up. It’s not the end of the service yet! Because the last bit of it in the lesson from Numbers, just after the blessing, says this:

‘So they shall put my name on the Israelites, and I will bless them’.

It is about the people of God being given their name, Israel, which means literally in Hebrew, people who have wrestled with God. That went back to Jacob, wrestling with the angel. So Jacob became Israel and the whole of the old Testament had a theme running through it, of the relationship between the chosen people of God, the Israelites, and God himself. It was like all the best love affairs, pretty bumpy. People who really do love each other have rows and they do fall out. That was certainly true of the Israelites and their God. They worshipped the Baals and the Golden Calf – and God punished them. (See Exodus 32 and 1 Kings 12).

This story of the Israelites getting their name is at the beginning of their story, and it’s appropriate on 1st January to think of our religious beginnings and where they might lead. Now today we are focusing on the other end of the Bible, on baby Jesus – I was going to say, on Jesus’ ‘christening’ – but that sort of thing worked differently in those days. Instead the baby would be named, and if he was a male baby, circumcised as part of the Jewish tradition. The angel had told Mary that his name would be Jesus. That name means, God saves us, God is our salvation. So we have moved from wrestling with God, Israel, to salvation through God, Jesus.

The mighty God who spoke through the burning bush to Moses, the God who was capable of tremendous wrath and destruction, has now come, with all that power, to be concentrated into a tiny baby. That is the miracle of Christmas. We are perhaps none the wiser about exactly what God looks like, apart from just being a baby. In the blessing, with God lifting up the light of his countenance upon us, we get the feeling that there is someone up there, beaming down with a beautiful smile. But we can’t actually see that God: No one could. But people could see Jesus and they did see him. He certainly lifted up the light of his countenance on everyone he met.

Although we can’t see Him, what is our relationship with God? In St Paul’s letter to the Galatians, God puts us alongside that little baby, so that we are children, children of God, calling God ‘Abba’, which is more like ‘Daddy’ rather than ‘Father’ in the Aramaic we are told. Saint Paul goes on to suggest that, as children, we are heirs; we inherit the blessings of God.

But there is a missing bit. We need to go back a bit to the Old Testament and look again at the people of Israel, the people wrestling with God. The heart of their relationship was what was known as God’s covenant with Israel. What is a covenant? As a lawyer, I can tell you that a covenant is an agreement or a contract. The two parties agree together and they agree to do things one for the other. That’s it. It’s very simple.

The covenant between God and Israel was indeed very simple. The Israelites agreed to worship God as the one true God, no other gods, and in return God promised to bless them and keep them, as the blessing says. And it’s a very useful idea, this covenant.

What can we say at this service, at the beginning of 2023? We have to cope with all these challenges and difficulties in the world ahead of us:

– the war in Ukraine,

– the cost of living crisis here at home,

– the energy crisis, where we are all worrying because we can’t afford to pay three or four times what we used to pay for our houses to be heated,

– and the pay crisis, all the strikes which the public servants, and in particular the nurses and ambulance crews, are involved in, because their pay has fallen back so much that many are now forced to go to food banks, which seems to me to be a very unfair development after all their bravery and sacrifice brought us all out clapping on our doorsteps while the Covid pandemic was on.

I hope that you will not think that this falls outside the bounds of what a preacher is supposed to cover, but it does seem to me that we were, and we are, very happy to rely on these dedicated public servants, and now we must provide them with a decent living. And, most importantly, there are theological reasons for supporting the workers’ fight for better pay and conditions of work.

Frankly our government of millionaires in London needs to think again, quickly, about this. We were all made equal in God’s image: not so rich and so poor, all in the same country – the sixth richest country in the world. Remember Jesus’ story known as Dives and Lazarus, the Rich Man and Lazarus, in Luke 16:19-31. Jesus surely didn’t approve of such a huge gap between the rich and the poor.

So as we embark on 2023, as we see our world facing all these challenges, what do we, as the people of God, the people in the church, do about it?

Quite a lot of Christians do something every New Year, which seems to me to be a great way of preparing themselves to tackle these challenges; and that is, they renew their covenant with God.

It’s an idea which started with John Wesley and the early Methodists. For Methodists the first service in a new year is still known as Covenant Sunday. The ‘people called Methodists’, as they used to call themselves, have recited the same or very similar words every year since 1780 to make their covenant, their agreement, with the Lord. I’ll give you a quick preview, and then we will say the whole of this covenant prayer together later on in this service. So this is just to introduce you to it if you haven’t heard it before. What the Methodists pray goes like this.

We are no longer our own, but thine.

Put us to what thou wilt, rank us with whom thou wilt.

Put us to doing, put us to suffering.

Let us be employed for thee or laid aside for thee,

exalted for thee or brought low for thee.

Let us be full, let us be empty.

Let us have all things, let us have nothing.

We freely and heartily yield all things to thy pleasure and disposal.

And now, O glorious and blessed God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit,

thou art ours, and we are thine.

So be it.

And the covenant which we have made on earth,

let it be ratified in heaven.

Amen.

‘Put us to doing, put us to suffering;

let us be employed for thee or laid side for thee ….

And now, O glorious and blessed God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit,

thou art ours, and we are thine.

So be it.

And the covenant which we have made on earth,

let it be ratified in heaven.’

Those are John Wesley’s words from 1780. They’ve been repeated every year since. That’s it. We have to do what the Lord commands us to do, just as Jesus commanded his disciples; you know, not having two cloaks, letting other people go before us, so the last shall become first: loving our enemies, not turning our backs on poor people like Dives did, on people like nurses, and instead doing things that may not necessarily be that good for us as individuals but which reflect God’s love, and which Jesus told us to do.

‘Let us be full, let us be empty.

Let us have all things, let us have nothing.’

This is the agreement which we are invited to make, and which should be our guiding principle in the year to come. We have moved from Israel, wrestling with God, to Jesus, God is our salvation.

So let’s agree on that. Let’s make that covenant. Let’s do what we have to do in order to keep our side of the bargain. It’s not just a question of words. But if we do, if we do do more than just talk: then, the blessing will come; and now, here, it will be in the right place, at the end of the service, but it will be more than that: it will be a continuing blessing. The Lord will bless you and keep you. The Lord will make his face to shine upon you, so that it will, truly, be a happy New Year.

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Blessing the Lord

By publicsquare
December 22, 2022 //
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A distinguished evangelical whom I know expresses unease if, following the liturgy, he has to invite the faithful to ‘bless the Lord’. It offends his sense of the divine heirarchy: all right to invite the Lord to bless us, but not the other way round. Blessing can only be conferred by the greater upon the lesser. As a humble Reader, I know this to be true. I am not supposed to bless the congregation, but to pray, with them, that we may all be blessed.

But. I think that there is an English usage, albeit perhaps archaic, which swaps subject and object. ‘I’ll learn you!’ is an example. It means, colloquially, ‘I’ll teach you’.

I think that this curious idiom occurs in God-talk as well. In the Common Worship version of the Magnificat, Luke 1:54 is expressed as

He has come to the aid of his servant Israel,
to remember his promise of mercy,…

‘To’ remember here is problematical. It implies not that He is remembering – not as the NRSV suggests in cross-references to Genesis 8:1 and Psalm 98:3, or indeed as the AV and BCP translate the Greek ‘μνησθηναι ελέους, καθώς ελαλησεν προς τους πατέρας ήμων´, ‘He remembering his mercy …’, but rather that the use of ‘to’ implies that He causes Israel to remember, almost as if he had said, ‘I’ll learn them …’

If I am right in this, then I see nothing to worry my evangelical friend if he has to ‘bless the Lord’. It means, ‘May the Lord bless us’. Of course it is always possible that the sublime language of the BCP and AV is also a better translation than the sometimes stumbling prose of Common Worship or its cousin the NRSV ‘Anglicised Edition’ [sic]. But that is above the pay grade of humble Readers, I am told. May we always count our blessings.

Hugh Bryant

Reader in the Church in Wales

Advent

22nd December 2022

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Confectionary

By publicsquare
November 20, 2022 //
0

Sermon for Evensong on 20th November 2022 at All Saints, Penarth: Christ the King

1 Samuel 8:4-20: John 18:33-37: Psalm 72. See https://tinyurl.com/ydmp6t26

This Sunday the church celebrates ‘Christ the King’.

Kings. God save the King! King’s Counsel: King Charles III – and now today, in the church, we are celebrating Christ the King. Actually, the church has only had a feast of Christ the King since 1925, when Pope Pius XI first made it a festival in the Roman Catholic Church; and in 1969, Pope Paul VI determined that the right time for the festival would be the last Sunday before Advent, at the end of the church year.

Now, never mind whether you are a Catholic or an Anglican or a Methodist or a Baptist, you will probably be using the same readings from the Bible this weekend for the various services in your church, and thinking about Christ the King. We Anglicans have something else, earlier than the feast of Christ the King, to celebrate at the same time. I’ll come back to it.

You might think that I was going to pick up on what Samuel has said in our Old Testament lesson about the the disadvantages of kings, of absolute monarchy. If you were reading it in the King James version, you would see that Samuel warns the Israelites that if they make somebody a king, among other bad things, he will “take your daughters to be confectionaries”. In the rather more down-to-earth version which we have been using, the confectionaries have become “perfumers”, but either way you wouldn’t want your daughter to become perfumers or confectionaries to the King. That sort of king has a distinct whiff of slavery about him.

Now today, I think if you read some of the newspapers, the ones that have a rather bigger section about the royal family than my beloved Guardian, there are quite often articles which speculate on what in the old days the Queen, and now the King, might be thinking about the various things that the government is getting up to. And perhaps people might start to think that a wise king would be preferable to yet another Prime Minister. But then we remember that we have a constitutional monarchy. For us the King is just a figurehead, even if he is an inspiring one.

But it’s interesting to look back at the argument about the pros and cons of being a king that was going on between Samuel and the elders of Israel. They said, ‘Give us a king to govern us’. And then there is this fascinating sentence, “Samuel prayed to the Lord, and the Lord said to Samuel, ‘Listen to the voice of the people and all that they say to you. For they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them.’’’ It’s God speaking – and He says that the people have rejected the idea that He, God, should be their ruler, their king.

The way that they thought about God in those days was that He was much more like a kind of Marvel comic superhero than what we think God is. Having the Lord on your side in those days was a huge advantage, for instance in a battle, and they didn’t seem to be worried about the thought that He might be much bigger than just a superhuman supporting one side against the other. So a king could even be God. God could be a king. It gives a historical background to the idea of the ‘divine right of kings’ – that the first King Charles claimed, for instance.

So it wouldn’t have seemed strange to the Israelites to hear that God had said that they had rejected him, God, from being their king over them. But it’s strange to us. We would think of God as being bigger than any king.

Now when Jesus is being questioned by Pontius Pilate, it’s perhaps a rather different kind of strangeness which we notice. Surely it is pretty strange to ask somebody whether they are a king. I think it’d be pretty hard to miss, certainly in normal circumstances. I mean, I am not assuming that people who were kings went around with crowns on their heads so you’d be able to recognise them as royals, but even so you would have thought that it would have been pretty obvious to Pontius Pilate whether Jesus was a king or not.

Indeed, Jesus does query this. ‘Was that a question that occurred to you or has somebody else suggested it?’ And Pilate, who always seems to me to be a pretty common-sense sort of person, says that he doesn’t really get it. He says, ‘Your own nation, the Jews and chief priests, have handed you over to me. It looks a bit of an unlikely thing to do to a king. So what have you done?’

Jesus replies that he’s not a temporal ruler, a ruler in this world, a political figure, in which case he says he would certainly have been able to call upon his followers to fight off the Jews, and keep him from being handed over to them. In the normal course of things if he was at risk of being seized by the Jews in some ignominious way, it wouldn’t sit very easily with the idea that he was, or might have been, the king of the Jews.

So you’ve got two angles on being a king. One in the Old Testament, and the other one from the time of Christ; but in neither case does the idea of what it was to be a king at that time really square with what we understand about kings.

In the Old Testament, a king could also be a God, or even God himself. Bear in mind that the Jews were unique in worshipping just one God, whereas most of the others, like the Egyptians or the Babylonians, worshipped lots of different gods. The Jews worshipped Yahweh as their God, just the one God.

We have learned that when a new king was consecrated in Egypt or Babylon, the priest would declare an oracle from one of the national gods over the new king, and what he would say was, ‘You are my son, I am your father.’ That’s the god speaking through the priest. So in Babylon and Egypt, they believed that being a king was even being the son of a god.

That is the same formula that the prophet Nathan used when he consecrated David as the king of the Jews. If you look at 2 Samuel 7:14, through the prophet Nathan, God says about King David, ‘I will be a father to him and he shall be a son to me’. So King David is expressed to be a son of God.

So that’s the background to what on the face of things is rather an odd conversation between Pontius Pilate and Jesus. Pontius Pilate, who is just a normal bloke in this, doesn’t understand that in the Jewish tradition, to be the king means much more than just being an earthly ruler.

In a sense, Pontius Pilate stands for all of us. He saw this remarkable man, who had no crown, no entourage, no motorcade, no trappings of majesty about him – rather the reverse – but nevertheless, he was being accused of holding himself out as being the king of the Jews.

What made it so serious was that to the Jews it would have meant Jesus was holding himself out as being the son of God. Since they didn’t recognise him, they thought that it was blasphemy. Everybody got it wrong. It’s another illustration of the way that Jesus was a king, but a king in an entirely different sense.

Think of the idea of the Servant King in Isaiah 52:13 – 53:12, picked up in St Mark’s gospel 10:45 where Jesus says that ‘the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve’, for example, and what Jesus said about the first becoming the last and the last becoming first (Matt. 20:16).

The more I think about this, the more I realise this is like so many other things that we learn about Jesus. In a sense, he was a king, but in other senses he was much more modest. I think we can learn from him on all sorts of levels as a result. God isn’t like superman. He doesn’t necessarily weigh in on one side or another. But equally he is not a normal king. He doesn’t have the trappings of office and he doesn’t rule in the sense that King Charles rules, or even like an actual absolute monarch – as King Zog of Yugoslavia did, perhaps.

Instead Jesus defined his kingship in relation to something he called the truth. ‘Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice’. And Pontius Pilate came up with the sort of thing that you might hear from Piers Morgan: ‘What is truth?’ It’s a good challenge.

That’s all very interesting, you might say. All that stuff about being a king. But at the beginning you did say that the Feast of Christ the King is a celebration. How are we supposed to go about celebrating? You get the answer in the first collect, the first prayer of the day, which Beth will say. It goes, “Stir up, we beseech thee, Lord, the wills of thy faithful people”. So today is not just Christ the King Sunday. It is sometimes called “Stir-up Sunday”. This is the day when you are supposed to start mixing the Christmas pudding. That is something to celebrate. I wonder, if you are stirring up a Christmas pudding, if it makes you what Samuel called a ‘confectionary’. Why not be a confectionary? A confectionary for King Jesus, indeed. Keep stirring!

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