Benjamin | hughdbryant

Sermon for Mattins and Morning Prayer (Principal Service) at All Saints Church, Penarth, 5th October 2025

Habakkuk 1.1-4; 2.1-4

Psalm 37.1-9

2 Timothy 1.1-14

Luke 17.5-10

It’s a pity that we don’t have lantern slides at 8 o’clock, because I could show you the picture on the slide which is going to be shown at 10 o’clock when I start to preach the sermon then. It’s a sort of shovel, or it could be a large spoon, with round things in it, quite small.

I wondered whether they were my favourite special-treat breakfast cereal, Grape-Nuts – I should explain that I didn’t choose the pictures, as Susannah is leading the service at 10 as well as this one – but I suspect that at 8 o’clock we need to stay away from pictures and screens and things like that, and just keep our worship simple and our pictures in our heads, where, of course, those of you who listen to the wireless know that the best pictures are.

What is in the big spoon? I asked Susannah and she told me that they were mustard seeds, picking up a reference to the Gospel reading, the New Testament lesson today. I have to say that it rather threw me, because I thought mustard and cress was something which you grew on a face flannel on the bathroom windowsill, but apparently this is what mustard seeds really look like.

The lessons are all about how we confront a world which is going wrong, which is going against us. The Old Testament lesson, from the prophet Habakkuk, comes from a time around 600 BC when the Assyrians had overrun the northern kingdom of Israel, and all that was left of God’s chosen people were the two tribes of Judah and Benjamin, together with the survivors from the massacre when the Assyrians invaded the northern kingdom, who had fled to Jerusalem to take refuge there.

Habakkuk was preaching when the Babylonians were beginning to sweep down on Palestine; they are the Chaldeans, if you read a bit more beyond one of the bits that we have for our lesson, which is in two bits, the first four verses of chapters one and two respectively. If you read on in chapter 1, beyond where it says

Devastation and violence confront me;

strife breaks out, discord raises its head,

……

for the wicked outwit the righteous,

and so justice comes out perverted.

Habbakuk goes on in his prophecy by saying

Look, you treacherous people, look:

here is what will astonish you and stun you,

for there is work afoot in your days

which you will not believe when it is told you.

It is this: I am raising up the Chaldaeans,

that savage and impetuous nation,

who cross the wide tracts of the earth

to take possession of homes not theirs.

Terror and awe go with them;

their justice and judgement are of their own making.

Their horses are swifter than hunting-leopards

And he goes on to say how terrifying they are in all sorts of other ways. Obviously they fulfilled the American strategic objective for a successful army in the invasion of Iraq, ‘shock and awe’.

But this terrible army had its limitations.

Their whole army advances, violence in their hearts;

a sea of faces rolls on;

they bring in captives countless as the sand.

Kings they hold in derision,

rulers they despise;

they despise every fortress,

they raise siege-works and capture it.

A terrifying picture. Who could stand against them? But then –

Then they pass on like the wind and are gone;

and dismayed are all those whose strength was their god.

People who believe that ‘might is right’ turn out to be completely mistaken; and the key words in Habakuk’s prophecy come in the second chapter, in our second part of the lesson, [2:4]

Look at the proud!
Their spirit is not right in them,
but the righteous live by their faith.

It’s an idea that St Paul picked up on in two of his letters. In his great letter to the Romans, [1:17], he said that in the gospel of Jesus

is revealed God’s way of righting wrong, a way that starts from faith and ends in faith; he says, as Scripture says, ‘he shall gain life who is justified through faith’.

In the letter to the Galatians [3:11], where St Paul is drawing a distinction between following the provisions of the Jewish law, just carrying out the 10 Commandments, and having faith, saying that the way to salvation is through faith, he says that

It is evident that no one is ever justified before God in terms of law; because we read, ‘he shall gain life who is justified through faith’.

I’m not sure why the compilers of the Lectionary decided that we should have a lesson from the second letter to Timothy rather than one of these passages from Romans or Galatians, (which clearly reference the passage in Habbakuk), but certainly in the passage from the second letter to Timothy, St Paul celebrates that the fact that Timothy and his mother and his granny, Eunice and Lois respectively, all had strong faith.

But you might be a little bit puzzled about exactly what this faith is. It’s pretty clear that it’s not what we would call blind faith, just believing that something is true without any evidence for it. If that was true, you might never take another paracetamol ever again; or even worse, you might try to cure Covid by drinking some bleach. But we are not talking about President Trump’s belief system; this is a word which has more of a connotation of trust about it. It’s not so much about believing that something is the case, but rather, trusting in God to produce a good outcome, to right the wrongs. It’s very close to hope. Hope in the Lord. Trust in the Lord. As Isaiah puts it [14:31]:

but those who look to the Lord will win new strength,

they will grow wings like eagles;

they will run and not be weary,

they will march on and never grow faint.

They will soar, on wings like eagles: they will ‘mount up with wings like eagles’.

Just now our world looks a bit like what it must have looked like to Habakkuk; there is a lot going wrong. There are terrible wars, invasions; the rule of law looks to be under threat in places: –

devastation and violence confront me;

strife breaks out, discord raises its head,

…..

for the wicked outwit the righteous,

and so justice comes out perverted.

We can think of plenty of places and cases today, where those words would be very apt. We are going to have a vigil later on today here to pray for the people of Palestine; equally our prayers should go for the other places in the world where there is no peace and where the rule of law does not securely run: Ukraine and the south of Sudan chief among them, as well as Gaza and the West Bank; and all those places where people are held hostage or are fleeing violence and persecution and are becoming refugees.

We need to trust in the Lord, to pray with confidence and realise the power of prayer, even if our faith is only the size of one of Susannah’s mustard seeds, or a spoonful of Grape-Nuts. It doesn’t matter. You can rely on God to put things right in the end. Let us pray that he will use us in his service to that good end.

Amen.

Hugh Bryant

From the PowerPoint slides at the 10 o’clock service. What are those little beads?

Sermon for the Second Sunday of Lent, 17th March 2019

Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18, Philippians 3:17-4:1, Luke 13:31-35

As we woke up on Friday, to hear the news about the terrible shootings in the mosques in Christchurch in New Zealand, the New Zealand Prime Minister, Mrs Ardern, made a moving statement about the fact that it seems clear that the 50 people killed were the victims of a racist, Islamophobic terrorist. Mrs Ardern said, ‘Many of those who will have been directly affected by this shooting will be migrants, they will be refugees here. They have chosen to make New Zealand their home and it is their home. They are us.’

A bit later on, a picture appeared on Twitter [reproduced above] of a man who, if I can say this, did not look like a Moslem, but rather like Andy Capp in the cartoons, in a flat cap, standing smiling outside a mosque in Manchester with a placard which said, ‘You are my friends. I will keep watch while you pray.’

Terrible atrocities do sometimes seem to bring out beautiful and uplifting thoughts, like those of Mrs Ardern and of the man in the flat cap outside the mosque in Manchester.

In our Lent study groups we are going through the Beatitudes, the ‘blessed are they’ sayings which Jesus spoke at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5.

The second one, perhaps the right one at a time of tragedy, is ‘Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.’ This is one of those short sentences that contains impossibly dense and complicated ideas. On the face of things, for somebody to be mourning, to be sad, to be heartbroken, is not in any sense the same as to be fortunate, which is what the word translated as ‘blessed’ means.

How lucky for you that you are heartbroken; what a wonderful thing it is that you are in floods of tears. Clearly there’s something which doesn’t add up. Try telling the distraught people that were on the TV from New Zealand that they were in some way blessed or fortunate. But really it means, as it says, that those who mourn will be blessed, will be comforted in future: and that is a message of hope after all.

St Paul, in his letter to the Philippians, condemns those who live as enemies of the cross of Christ. Earlier in the chapter we had as our reading, he identifies the people that he condemns. He says, ‘Beware of those dogs and their malpractices. Beware of those who insist on mutilation – I will not call it ‘circumcision’’. Beware of people who tell you you have to become a Jew in order to become a true Christian.

Nevertheless, Paul was proud to tell everybody that he had been circumcised and that he was an Israelite of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born and bred, and a Pharisee [Phil. 3:5]. He’d thrown it all over, after his Road-to-Damascus experience, and in his letters, for example to the Galatians and to the Romans, he made the point that, in the kingdom of heaven, there is no difference between Greeks, (Gentiles), and Jews.

The Israelites had been the chosen people of God, and the others, the Gentiles, the ‘nations’, were the great unwashed. But St Paul’s mission was to bring the good news of Jesus precisely to those Gentiles, to those who were not circumcised. He said, ‘Our citizenship is in heaven.’ Ordinary nationality doesn’t apply in heaven.

But originally, Paul – and Jesus – were Jews, sons of Abraham, descendants of Abraham. The word of the Lord came to Abraham and said, ‘Look toward heaven and count the stars; because that’s how many your descendants will be.’ The sons of Abraham. They were Israelites, the chosen people of God.

The gunman is supposed to have said that one of his reasons for shooting Moslems was because he saw them as strangers, ‘invaders’. At the beginning of this week in morning prayers we were reading from the Book of Deuteronomy, where Moses speaks the words of the Lord, a prophecy about offering sacrifice of the first fruits of the land, the land of milk and honey, which the Israelites have been led into, the promised land. Moses tells them to say in their prayers that they are descended from ‘a wandering Aramean’, or from ‘a Syrian ready to perish’, that they have been led into Egypt and then eventually out of Egypt again, as strangers in the land. Even they, the chosen people, started out as strangers.

There are many passages in the Book of Deuteronomy, and in the Jewish Law generally, which St Paul would have been very familiar with, which impose on Jews a duty to care for a stranger that is within their gates, to care for strangers along with orphans and widows. That is the spirit that Mrs Ardern has so eloquently reminded us of. It is not a spirit of antipathy towards immigrants and refugees, not against strangers, not against people who are different from ourselves.

This is such a difficult area. There are so many apparent paradoxes. The Jews, refugees, made it to the promised land; they went to the holy city, Jerusalem, and set up the temple there. ‘Jerusalem the golden, with milk and honey blest’.

But Jesus points out that, because that is where the council, the Sanhedrin, is based, it is only in Jerusalem that he can be condemned, and that Jerusalem is a city that kills prophets, that throws stones at people who are sent to it.

Mrs Ardern was one of those world leaders, like Mrs Merkel in Germany, who has dared to extend a welcome to refugees. She still extends that welcome. But what about us? The challenge to us today is surely not to be fixated with ‘taking back control’, with restricting immigration and upholding national identity, however important some of those things might seem to be at first.

Jesus said, ‘Strive to enter in at the strait gate. Struggle to get in through the narrow door. For I tell you that many will try to enter and not be able to. You may stand outside and knock: say, ‘Sir, let us in.’ But he will only answer, ‘I do not know where you come from.’ [Luke 13:24]

Where do we come from? You could say that Jesus makes getting into the kingdom of heaven seem like a refugee trying to come ashore in Italy, or trying to get through at the Hungarian border or even being caught up in our own Government’s ‘hostile environment’ at Heathrow today. Contrast that with what Mrs Ardern said. ‘ … They will be refugees here. They have chosen to make New Zealand their home. It is their home. They are us.’

The challenge for us as Christians is to raise our sights above the earthly ghastliness which stems from narrow nationalism, and to seek what is truly heavenly. ‘Blessed are those who mourn, because they will be comforted.’ Let us pray that, with God’s help, we can become channels of peace, so that we too can say that they are our friends, and that we will keep watch while they pray.

Are they Grape-Nuts?

You are my Friends