Archives for posts with tag: Anglicans

Talking to the Archbishop

By hughdbryant
September 7, 2023 //
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Sermon for Mattins on 3rd Sept 2023 at All Saints Church, Penarth

Romans 12:9-21

Matthew 16:21-28

https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=560606098

What does it mean to be a Christian? Is it one of those organisations that have a rule book or a constitution which you have to keep to if you are going to be a member? Some people say that they think that what’s really valuable about Christianity is that it provides a moral compass that people can live by, especially today, when even in public life people do things and say things that perhaps in the past we wouldn’t have thought possible.

I won’t try to trace that pattern through recent history, in case I say something wrong about one of your heroes; but I think one could mention in passing things like former President Trump continuing to repeat a patently untrue story about having won the last election, for example: and I think it would be fair enough to have in mind some of the things that former prime ministers of recent years have said as well, as being ‘economical with the actualité’, as somebody once described it. You hear people say, ‘Things are going to the dogs’: ‘The policeman are getting smaller’: ‘Nobody knows the difference between right and wrong any more’.

So it’s interesting to come across what almost looks like a rule book for being a Christian, in what St Paul wrote to the Christians in Rome. ‘Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good’. ‘Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers.’ It reminds us of Jesus’s own Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5). St Paul says do not repay anyone evil for evil, for example. Live in harmony with one another – and in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says don’t just go tit for tat, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, but turn the other cheek; if someone wants your shirt, give him your coat as well. If a ‘man in authority’ makes you go one mile, go with him two. Give when you are asked to give and don’t turn your back on someone who asks for a loan. Jesus and Paul are pretty similar. This is the moral philosophy of Jesus Christ. Saint Paul, writing to the Romans, was probably writing before any of the gospels were written down, so it’s pretty clear that what he was saying reflected what all the early Christians held to by way of their moral beliefs.

I was thinking about that when I started listening to one of those radio programmes where the Archbishop of Canterbury interviews various people. I don’t know whether you’ve come across them, on BBC Radio 4, but I heartily recommend them. They are absolutely fascinating. The interviews are with a very wide variety of people. I think it’s true to say that most of them are top people, leaders, in one way or another, but they’re not necessarily people who would immediately spring to mind as wanting to have a public chat with the Archbishop of Canterbury.

A person like that was a lady called Dr Susan Blackmore, whom I’m sure some of you will know far better than I do: she was certainly a new one on me. It turns out that she is a ‘psychologist who is interested in the paranormal and matters spiritual’, according to the BBC, and who is keen on ‘Zen meditation’.

A lot of the people that Archbishop Justin interviews are not actually believers but are atheists, and Dr Blackmore is one like that. What struck me was that she and Justin Welby both seemed largely to believe in the same moral principles: they would both, I think, have recognised the same things as being good and bad; and if you took the labels off I think that Dr Blackmore would have been quite happy with most of the moral ideas outlined by Saint Paul – and indeed, by Jesus himself. She certainly believes that mankind is capable of altruism, going the extra mile and so on, being generous to strangers, and also, to some extent, in being ultimately generous: ‘greater love hath no man’ and all that, sacrificing oneself for your friend.

Then a very interesting moment in the conversation happened. These two people, who appeared to be identikit decent middle-class English people, with plenty of goodwill towards their fellow men and women, suddenly came to something which clearly stopped both of them in their tracks.

That was this: Dr Blackmore asked the Archbishop, “Hey, look: what would happen if it turned out that you discovered that there was good scientific evidence that the resurrection of Jesus Christ never happened, and that Jesus had died just like any one of us – and stayed dead?” Clearly Dr Blackmore expected him to say that it wouldn’t matter too much; that he had a ‘belief in the round’ and that he would still be a Christian even if it turned out that Jesus was just another bloke, perhaps a prophet, as Muslims believe.

But Archbishop Justin didn’t say that. He said, “Well, if Jesus wasn’t resurrected from the dead, it would be over. All my Christianity would be washed up instantly.” He said that it might be possible, perhaps, that he would revert to a kind of agnostic position about whether there was a God, in the sense of an ultimate creator, but he was quite clear that, just like St Paul, he believes that the whole thing depends on the resurrection of Jesus. In his first letter to the Corinthians Paul says, “If Christ was not raised, then our gospel is null and void” (1 Cor. 15:14).

It isn’t the case that Christians believe in a sort of generalised creator, a creative force, some kind of ill-defined spiritual positive force, what William Paley in the 17th century referred to as the divine watchmaker: a creator, who, sure enough, created the world and everything in it, and just like a watchmaker he had made the mechanism and set it off, and away it went without any further interference from him. That’s not Christianity.

Christianity is about Christ; and that crunch moment is what we see in the story from Saint Matthew’s Gospel, with Saint Peter trying to talk Jesus out of going to suffer and die in Jerusalem. Jesus knew what was waiting for him, and he told the disciples about it. Peter reacted as I think any of us might have reacted if we’d been there. He didn’t want to see this good man, who’d taught him so much and had shown him so many wonderful things, hurt in any way.

But he didn’t get it. Peter acknowledged Jesus as his Messiah, as his heavenly king come on Earth. But he didn’t really know how that worked. He probably had a picture in mind of something more like an earthly king, a King David or a Roman emperor in triumph; and of course, Jesus turned everything upside down, as he always did. The triumph was a triumph over suffering. He had to suffer first, before his triumph, because he wasn’t a king who was above all suffering, but was rather a king who was at the heart of everything, suffering what his people suffered – and worse.

It might be interesting at that point just to look back to the differences between how St Paul saw morality as it affects Christians – and how Jesus himself did ; and to compare it with somebody like Dr Blackmore the psychologist, who denied that there was any such thing as free will, but seemed to be able to recognise good and evil nevertheless. She certainly didn’t acknowledge that there was a God, or that Jesus was in any way divine. I think that, although she didn’t actually say so, she didn’t believe in the resurrection.

But if you say that you don’t believe that people can choose what they do freely, because you’re determined, pre-programmed, so you are fixed by your evolution, your genes and your experience, then is there any real meaning to good and evil? Dr Blackmore is left looking down an empty hole. On the other hand Saint Paul can say, “Hold fast to what is good”, because he can point to what Jesus has said, and through Jesus, in Jesus, Saint Paul recognised ultimate reality, a justification for everything.

Justin Welby said that when he was 19, in his second year at university, a friend had taken him to church and then on to supper, during which the friend had been telling him about the cross and the resurrection of Jesus, and the Archbishop said there was suddenly a ‘sense of presence’ in the room. “I’m not sure how to explain that,” he said, and his friend had apparently said, “What do you want to do now?” The Archbishop had said, “Whatever it is, it is good – and I need to cooperate with it”.

It’s perhaps a bit like John Wesley, walking down Aldersgate Street to a Bible study meeting, to study one of St Paul’s letters, and he said he was feeling a little bit reluctant, perhaps because he had done too much Bible study that day, and then all of a sudden he ‘felt his heart strangely warmed’. He had a strong feeling that Jesus, God, was there and that He did care, personally, for him.

Dr Blackmore by contrast, when she was 19, had one of those out of body experiences – although she did say she was smoking cannabis at the time – but apparently she experienced a very real feeling of going down a tunnel with a light at the end, which is an experience which quite a number of other people have testified to, but which doesn’t necessarily lead you to believe in God.

So what is it that makes you a Christian as opposed to someone who does Zen meditation? The difference is Jesus. The difference is the unique history of Jesus. After this we will say the creed – we’ll say, “I believe”- and there is nothing like it. Maybe there are some bits that you find difficult to understand or even to believe. But taken as a whole it is like the constitutional document for being a Christian.

I believe. I believe in God the father Almighty. I believe in Jesus Christ, who was crucified, died and was buried. On the third day he rose again. There is nothing like it. Frankly we wouldn’t be here, and there wouldn’t be people in church all round the world, if that was some kind of illusion, if it hadn’t happened.

As the Archbishop himself said, there are today about 85 million Anglicans, let alone the other denominations, Roman Catholics, Baptists, Methodists, Lutherans, Pentecostals, Orthodox, and although in Western Europe and in the northern hemisphere generally, fewer people are coming to Christ, in the world as a whole Christianity it’s still far and away the biggest and fastest-growing religion.

Christ is coming to more and more people. More and more people are being confronted by this amazing story and realising that they can’t make sense of their lives without in some meaningful way coming to terms with it. And they realise that coming to terms with it isn’t necessarily a picnic.

As Jesus himself said, ‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me’. It’s not a prosperity gospel. It can be tough, but once you’ve confronted it – once it’s confronted you – then your life is changed forever. If you do the things that St Paul recommends, your love will be genuine, you will rejoice in hope, you will be patient in your suffering; and, so far as it depends on you, if it is possible, (because Paul is a realist), you will live ‘peaceably’ with all.

That’s a perfect context for this service. What we are doing is celebrating, praising, the God who came to us in the form of a man, went through terrible suffering, died, in the most horrible and undeniable way, and then, on the third day, he rose again. So today we must give him our praise; and we must show our love, love for God and love for each other.

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Must Rhodes Fall?

By hughdbryant
January 22, 2017 //
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Sermon for Evensong on the third Sunday of Epiphany 22nd of January 2017
Ecclesiastes 3:1-11; 1 Peter 1:3-12

I said when I welcomed everyone at the beginning of the service, this is the Sunday in the middle of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. It’s particularly nice to have Father Jonathan and some of our friends from Sacred Heart here to worship with us. That of course goes for all our friends from all the other churches, but today I have a particular thing to discuss with our Roman friends.

This morning I preached on Christian unity and tried to reconcile our modern tendency, to elevate our tastes and our wish to be able to choose, with the clear biblical imperative that we should all be one in Christ Jesus.

Tonight I want to be more specific in touching on the fact that this week is not only the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, but also that we are beginning to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, or to be more precise, the 500th anniversary, on 31st October, of Martin Luther’s 95 Theses protesting against various practices in the then Roman Catholic Church; in particular, the sale of ‘indulgences’ in order to shorten one’s time in ‘purgatory’.

In those days, the belief was that, after death, your soul went into a halfway house, purgatory, where it was tested and purified so as to eradicate from it any traces of sin. This could be a lengthy and painful process, which you could shorten by buying indulgences. Without going into the theology involved in Martin Luther’s challenge, I would just point out that this dispute about indulgences was the beginning of the split between the Roman Catholic Church and the churches which are subsequently described as Protestant.

What I am interested in tonight is to some extent influenced by our first lesson from Ecclesiastes, the famous lesson about time, a time to be born and a time to die, a time to get, and a time to lose, and so on. Everything in its season and a season for everything

As some of you may know, I was an undergraduate at Oriel College, Oxford. The College has been in the news recently because it has become the subject of protests by a movement called ‘Rhodes Must Fall’, started originally in South Africa, protesting against memorials to Cecil Rhodes, who, as well as founding the famous Rhodes scholarships, and paying for the building of Rhodes House, where the Rhodes Scholars could meet, gave to my old college, Oriel, enough money to fund the building of a new Rhodes Building which was finished before the First World War and which has just been subject to a complete refurbishment including the building of a new additional top floor with very splendid penthouses for students looking over the rooftops towards the dreaming spires of Oxford.

On the side of the building which faces the High Street there is a large statue of Cecil Rhodes, and the protesters have been demanding that the statue be removed, just as a similar statue in Cape Town has been removed as a result of their protest. The protesters have argued that Cecil Rhodes exploited his workers in his diamond mines, that he had been a racist and colonialist of the worst type, and he should not be remembered favourably in any way.

This has prompted a huge amount of soul-searching in the governing body of the College, who have in their turn consulted the old boys like me – and the old girls; this consultation taking the form of a seminar which took place recently with three distinguished academic speakers and open discussion aimed at placing the heritage of Cecil Rhodes in the appropriate ‘context’.

I have to say that I was rather disappointed that, with the exception of one speaker, none of the discussion concerned the moral question whether or not it was acceptable to judge people by contemporary standards when, at the time they were active, moral judgement would have viewed them differently. Or, if even then Cecil Rhodes was a bad man, was it a good thing to accept gifts, albeit generous ones, from such a bad man?

Then having regard to our lesson today, what difference does time make? If at that time the gifts were made, Cecil Rhodes was not a bad man, according to the standards prevalent at the time, what difference does it make that in time that perception may have changed?

Those sort of perceptions seem to me to affect our view of the Reformation as well. There is a statement from our two archbishops, Justin and John Sentamu, about the Reformation, celebrating the good things that have come from it, the proclamation of the gospel of grace, the availability of the Bible for people to read in their own languages, and the recognition that lay people are called to serve God in addition to those who are ordained. This is an echo of Calvin’s idea of the priesthood of all believers.

At the same time the archbishops express regret, and acknowledge that the time of the Reformation was a time of violence and strife between the Christian people on either side of the Reformation process, all claiming to know the same Lord.

We have been using tonight – as we do every Sunday at St Mary’s at 6 – the Book of Common Prayer, which was originally written by Thomas Cranmer in 1549. It was – and still is – the finest expression of reformed theology in the English language. Even so Thomas Cranmer was burned at the stake as a heretic seven years later. The turmoil in the English Church did not really subside until nearly 100 years later. The prayer book which we are using is the 1662 edition.

The Reformation in England claimed many lives. England had see-sawed between Henry VIII’s version of Protestantism, which really was Catholicism minus the Pope, (because of his inconvenient objections to Henry’s desire to obtain a divorce), to the Catholicism of Mary, back to Protestantism under Elizabeth and so on. Until after the Civil War and the death of Charles I, under the reign of Cromwell and the Puritans, extreme Protestants; England had lived out the Reformation for over 100 years. It was a live issue, and unfortunately, an extremely violent time. The poor Roman Catholics suffered a lot.

There has always been a paradox in the area of religious belief and tolerance of other people’s beliefs. Jesus preached a message exclusively of love and caring for one’s neighbour. But at the same time he foresaw that divisions would be caused by his gospel. Matthew 10:34f: ‘Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.’ But he told them to love their enemies and turn the other cheek.

Unfortunately his followers did not listen, because for them, for someone not to believe what they regarded as being fundamental and true, was sacrilege, blasphemy and had to be completely eradicated, even by killing the person who had expressed the unacceptable view.

Is very difficult for us to understand why people should have been horribly killed like this, for example by being burned at the stake; but of course we do see the same sort of religious violence today, this time between Muslims and other religions including our own, in the Middle East. Converting from the Muslim religion to another religion is regarded in many Islamic countries as a capital offence.

Does Ecclesiastes have anything to say about this? Is it a recipe for moral relativism? It seems to say that at different times, the same thing is both good and bad. We see the same issue in the context of safeguarding and sexual misconduct. Those of us who grew up in the swinging 60s were frankly not terribly shocked by what rock musicians got up to after concerts with adoring groupies.

But now it is recognised that there was a great inequality of bargaining power, if I can put it that way, and great scope for glamorous individuals, usually men, in effect to coerce impressionable young girls. What is it that makes things right and wrong? What is it that makes things right at one time and wrong at another?

I think that among the various Christians here in Cobham there is more that unites us than divides us. We are all looking to follow Jesus’s message of love and care for our neighbours, and that is the standard which we seek to apply to our conduct. Not everything is what it seems at first. Apparently the first student to win a Rhodes Scholarship was a black African.

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Lo! he comes

By hughdbryant
November 30, 2014 //
1

Sermon for the First Sunday in Advent, 30th November 2014, at St John’s Episcopal Church, West Hartford, Connecticut

Isaiah 64:1-9, Psalm 80, 1 Corinthians 1:3-9, Mark 13:24-37

Yesterday I asked your Rector and her Assistant, Hope and Bill, ‘Is today still part of the Thanksgiving season? Or is it the beginning of the run-up to Christmas – Advent?’ I needed a bit of technical advice – both on the Thanksgiving part, and of course also on the theological side.

As you will realise, I can claim to be at all qualified only about the theology. As a mere Englishman I don’t know enough about Thanksgiving – although, as this is my third Thanksgiving here in Hartford, I am getting the hang of it. It’s a lovely time. I have to tell you that at home in England, a supermarket chain, Waitrose, in their in-house newspaper, are claiming that 17% of Brits – yes, Brits – are now celebrating Thanksgiving – or at least having turkey dinners on Thanksgiving Day. Perhaps – and I hope this is not too cynical – this is some variation on the idea of turkeys voting for Christmas, but this time promoted by the farmers.

Hope preached a lovely sermon here on Thursday about remembering: looking back at the year and giving thanks for all the blessings we’ve received. At our Thanksgiving dinner, she went round the table and we all had to tell the others about something we wanted to give thanks for. Both the lovely thoughts the sermon brought out, and our stories round the table, were gentle and kind and good. Good memories, good feelings; real thanksgivings.

But now, as members of Christ’s church, we are called to be in a different mood. The secular world and the Christian one have different calendars here. If we’re not churchgoers, Christmas marks the end of the year, and Christmas, not Thanksgiving, leads to the new year.

But as Christians, Episcopalians, Anglicans, we mark the end of the church year and the beginning of the new one now, just after Thanksgiving, at the end of Ordinary Time, as it’s called in the Lectionary, at the beginning of Advent, today. This is the beginning of a new church year.

And Advent is a season not of unmixed jollification, but of penitence. As Isaiah says, we have rather forgotten God. ‘There is no one who calls on your name.’ We are caught up in Black Friday, and in ‘so-and-so many shopping days to Christmas’.

But if we change our point of view, and see things through the prism of our Christian faith, then Advent is the beginning of a new year, the time of anticipation, looking forward to the Christmas story, to the momentous events which show that God is with us. With Isaiah we say, ‘You are our Father, we are the clay, and you are the potter; we are all the work of your hand’. But God is not just the divine watchmaker, a creator who has simply wound up the mechanism, put it down and let it run, without any further interference. Instead God has become incarnate, become flesh and blood, become a man like us.

So in Advent we are waiting to celebrate the coming of Jesus, the coming of God as a man, that was His first coming. That is certainly something to look forward to, and surely it’s all right to be quite jolly about it. Of course the children – and maybe some of us grown-ups too – get pleasure out of thinking about the nice things they hope to get as presents. But for us the biggest present, the most generous gift, is the one from God, the gift of Jesus.

That should also make us pause and reflect. In the face of this, in the face of the fact that God didn’t just make the world and then ignore it, didn’t just leave it to get on by itself, we have to reflect on the fact that God knows about us, God cares about us. What do we look like to Him? What sort of shape are we in to meet God? That’s why Advent is a time for reflection, for penitence.

Just after my sermon we will say the Creed together. We will say, ‘He will come again’. Jesus will come again. We will pray in the Lord’s Prayer, ‘Thy kingdom come’. In both cases, we will imply that Jesus, and Jesus’ kingdom, haven’t come yet. The coming of the Kingdom, the Second Coming is still ahead.

Jesus talked about these things in his sermon which we heard in our Gospel reading today. ‘Lo! he comes, with clouds descending’ as Charles Wesley’s great hymn, which we just sang, puts it. The last trump, the Day of Judgment, the end of the world.

Now I suspect that for most of us that’s a vivid image, a powerful picture – but nothing really more than that. In any case Jesus must surely have been mistaken when He said, ‘Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place’: even if we don’t actually contradict that, or reject it, we are tempted not to try to understand it at all. It’s too far-fetched.

But Jesus clearly did want us to keep it at the front of our minds, not at the back. ‘Wachet auf! (‘Keep awake!’) as the music at the beginning and end of the service says. ‘Keep awake, the voice is calling’. There might even be a contradiction between Jesus’ first statement, that ‘this generation will not pass away’ until the end time has come, and His second statement that ‘about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.’

What would you do if you encountered the risen Jesus, now? To put it another way, are we right to keep all this talk of the Kingdom of God conveniently separated from our normal lives? Are we right to think of it as something that might happen in thousands of years, but definitely not something that will happen to us? Can we be absolutely sure about that?

Jesus definitely wanted to make us less certain. I would suggest that He wasn’t necessarily talking about a Second Coming which was all in the future. Remember the wonderful passage in St Matthew’s Gospel, chapter 25, when Jesus has come in his glory to judge the nations, dividing the sheep from the goats; and He says to the righteous people, the good sheep who are going to heaven, to eternal life, ‘I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat; I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink; I was a stranger, and ye took me in.’ They didn’t understand. ‘When did we do all this?’ they asked. ‘And the King shall answer and say unto them, “… Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”‘

How really important that is. It means that in one sense, the Second Coming, the Kingdom of God, has actually happened already. Jesus is with us. He is in everyone we meet. If you do it to someone else, you do it to Jesus. You may have difficulty believing in some kind of supernatural Flash Gordon riding on the clouds. But you’d be far less wise to rule out seeing the Holy Spirit in the people you meet.

So do keep awake. Look out for someone who is ‘an hungred’, hungry; someone who has no clothes; who is sick, or in prison. But I would dare to say, don’t worry about the four horsemen of the Apocalypse. No-one knows when they will be coming. Have a happy and blessed end to the Thanksgiving holiday, and I pray that this time of Advent will be for you a time of prayerful – and joyful – expectation.

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