Archives for posts with tag: Christ

Sermon for Rose Sunday 2025

By hughdbryant
March 30, 2025 //
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See https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=610162457

Rejoice! Let me speak to you in Latin. ‘Laetare Hierusalem et conventum facite omnes qui diligitis eam: gaudete cum laetitia…’ : it means, ‘ … be ye glad for Jerusalem, all ye that delight in her: exult and sing for joy with her,’..

It says on your pew sheet that today is Mothering Sunday. So what is all this Latin stuff – ‘Laetare’ – all about? This is also, and indeed it has been for a lot longer than it has been Mothering Sunday, what is called ‘refreshment’, or Rejoice! Sunday, which is what the Latin word ‘laetare’ means: laetare, ‘rejoice!’

Traditionally, pink vestments can be worn by the priest on Refreshment Sunday, so it’s also known as Rose Sunday. It’s halfway through Lent, and it’s a chance to relax the rigours of fasting. So if you have been denying yourself, today you have no need to lay off the Ferrero Rocher and vino di tavola rosso di Toscana. Today, you can indulge without feeling guilty.

Mothering Sunday is an old mediaeval concept, which fell into disuse, but was revived during the last century by a lady called Constance Adelaide Smith, a vicar’s daughter, who picked up on plans in the USA to introduce Mother’s Day, which came to fruition in the USA in 1914. Miss Smith wrote a booklet called ‘The Revival of Mothering Sunday’ in 1921, and it started to be celebrated again in the UK around that time, on the fourth Sunday in Lent, Refreshment Sunday.

The rather formidable Miss Smith campaigned for Mothering Sunday to be a celebration of a number of various aspects of motherhood: these were ‘Mother Church’ (the church where you were baptised), ‘mothers of earthly homes’, Mary, the mother of Jesus; and Mother Nature. It is a very wide spread of people and places and things, all to be celebrated as being aspects of motherhood, motherhood to rejoice in on Mothering Sunday.

I think it’s fair to say that these days we mainly think of it as a day to celebrate our mothers, ‘mothers of earthly homes’. It’s a nice opportunity to make a fuss of them, for those of us who still have mothers around, or if not, at least to think about and remember our wonderful mothers.

At this point I must say that in the midst of all this happy celebration, for quite a number of people Mothering Sunday or Mother’s Day are not happy times. If you are a mother who has lost a child, or who has not been able to have a child, this is not a time you want to celebrate. We should pause, and take that to the Lord in prayer. If any of you are suffering in that way, I hope you will excuse my carrying on in a way that may not suit the way you feel. You are not forgotten, and you are in our prayers today.

I don’t think that you really need a homily from me on how to be nice to your mother or to be nice about her. But I would just like to take a minute or two to look at a couple of the things that come up in our Bible readings. I’m struck that in two of them the interesting thing is that the compilers of the Lectionary have selected passages, which come just after, in one case, and just before, in the other, verses which are perhaps more familiar to us and more significant than the ones which have been selected.

The first story, from the first book of Samuel, is the story of the birth of Samuel to his mother, Hannah – obviously today, one of the common themes is stories of mothers – and it is a bit like the story of the birth of John the Baptist to his mother, Elisabeth. Neither woman had been blessed with children for a number of years.

Hannah was praying to the Lord for children, and eventually her prayers were answered. In her prayers, she had said she would dedicate any son who was born to the Lord as what was called a Nazarite. This meant that she would give him over to the priests of the Temple to become somebody who was dedicated, set apart, for the Lord in the Temple. He would not be allowed to cut his hair, touch strong drink, and a whole load of other restrictions, which are all set out in the law of Moses in the book of Numbers.

But the bit which you might expect the story to go on to tell us, is what Hannah did to celebrate, because she sang a song. The song that she sang is very similar to another song in the Bible. She sang:

‘My heart rejoices in the Lord. …

Strong men stand in dismay…

Those who faltered put on new strength …

Those who had plenty sell themselves for a crust,

The hungry grow strong again.’

It has strong echoes of Mary’s song, the Magnificat, that everybody will remember from Evensong.

‘My soul doth magnify the Lord,
and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.…..

He hath shewed strength with his arm.
He hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.
He hath put down the mighty from their seat
and hath exalted the humble and meek. ….

He hath filled the hungry with good things.
And the rich he hath sent empty away.’

Clearly, Mary knew her Bible, and she remembered Hannah’s song from the story of the birth of Samuel. And not only that, but in these songs the two mothers-to-be really forecast the way that God wants us to do things. The last shall be first. The humble and meek shall be raised up. The hungry shall be filled up with good things. A really important message. Think what the world would be like if we really followed it.

And then, in our reading from Saint Paul’s letter to the Colossians, ‘..[C]lothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience..’, all those lovely ideas about how Christians should treat one another. ‘Clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.’

Wonderful words; but the ones, that are not captured by our reading, come just one verse above.

‘There is no question here of Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and freeman; but Christ is all, and is in all.’

No such thing as Jew and Greek. This is the first sign of Christianity bursting out from being just a small denomination within Judaism.

Anybody could become a Christian. Christ was, is, there to become a saviour for anyone. It’s the origin of Inclusive Church, which is a charity that the Ministry Area Committee have decided to register our churches with. Of course, we know that we are inclusive, we welcome everybody: but we will also have signs outside, and we will do lots of practical things, to let everybody know that they can come in, and that they will be welcome.

The Lord is here. His spirit is with us. His spirit is for everybody, whatever they look like, wherever they come from.

I suppose if you go away and do your homework and read the lessons at home, you will come and tackle me to say that, when I was mentioning things that weren’t in the lessons, I should have mentioned not just the bit that comes before our lesson from Colossians. but also the bit after, because it has St Paul’s rather infamous words, “Wives, be subject to your husbands“, and to be fair, “Husbands, love your wives, … children, obey your parents, for that is pleasing to God, and is the Christian way“, and so on. Given that there is nothing really about mothers in the lesson from Colossians that we heard, it is quite important to remember that St Paul did include, in this great letter, his own ideas on what makes for happy families.

But then perhaps in our Gospel reading, there is the most moving reference to a mother in the Bible, the story of Jesus on the cross, and what he said, while the three Marys were standing there.

More Latin – ‘Stabat Mater dolorosa’: ‘His sad mother was standing there’; the Marian Hymn, as it’s called. Some of us will no doubt be able to hear in our heads one or other of the beautiful musical settings, by Palestrina, or Charpentier or Vivaldi, among many others right up to today, including James McMillan and Karl Jenkins.

When I was looking at this heart-rending scene in my mind, it did slightly remind me of another time when his family was mentioned, in Saint Matthew’s Gospel chapter 12, at the end of the chapter, where he was speaking to the crowd when his mother and brothers appeared, and someone said, “Your mother and brothers are here outside, and want to speak to you”. Jesus said, “Who is my mother? Who are my brothers?” And, pointing to the disciples, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers. Whoever does the will of my heavenly father is my brother, my sister, my mother.“

This is different; it’s more simple than that; it’s just the story of Jesus, as he was dying on the cross, making sure that his mother was looked after by the disciple whom he loved, (who is sometimes identified with John the Evangelist). It looks as though his earthly father, Joseph, was no longer there, and had perhaps died already.

What a nice example Jesus was setting. Even in a moment of the most acute pain and suffering, he took time and made sure that his mother was looked after. I don’t think there’s anything I can say to improve on that. ‘I was glad’ – and I hope that today, you mothers, and children of mothers, on this Mothering Sunday, are glad too.

Amen.

Hugh Bryant

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Hope and Ash

By hughdbryant
March 10, 2025 //
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Sermon for Ash Wednesday, 5th March 2025 at All Saints Church, Penarth

Joel 2:1-2, 12-17

2 Cor 5:20b-6:10

John 8:1-11

Psalm 51:1-17  

https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=608110117

‘Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. Turn away from sin and be faithful to Christ’. That’s what Jimmy and Craig are going to be saying to you in a minute, when the ‘ash’ in Ash Wednesday is imposed on your forehead. The imposition of ashes is a symbol, a sign of the spirit of penitence, of repentance for sins; and also it is a symbol of our mortality – ‘ashes to ashes, dust to dust’. You will remember those words from funerals. These symbols lead us into the next 40 days of reflection and repentance in Lent. 

The prophet Joel writes all about the day of the Lord, the coming of the Lord, the moment of the Messiah. It’s portrayed as a pretty terrifying event. The day of the Lord is coming, it is near; a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and thick darkness. In the darkness will come a great and powerful army. 

Joel is prophesying about the coming of the Lord against a backdrop where Israel, the chosen people, have not waited for salvation but they have gone their own way in many instances and worshipped other gods. In Joel’s prophecy, and in the way that Saint Paul emphasised similar ideas, it’s important that we shouldn’t separate ourselves from God. We shouldn’t pretend that we don’t need God, and we should acknowledge that we have strayed from the straight and narrow and we have been sinners in many ways. 

Although the book of Joel begins with the description of a plague of locusts, Joel believes in the end there will be a rapprochement between his chosen people and the Lord; a rapprochement, a coming-together again. ‘Return to the Lord your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love; who relents from punishing.’ 

St Paul picks up the idea of the day of the Lord: ’At an acceptable time I have listened to you and on a day of salvation I have helped you’ – it is a quotation from the book of the prophet Isaiah – and Saint Paul says to the Corinthians, ‘See, now is the acceptable time; see, now is the day of salvation!’ The Day of the Lord. 

Almost using the language of Joel, St Paul writes to the Corinthians, ‘We entreat you on behalf of Christ to be reconciled to God, to come back from sin’. He puts himself alongside the prophets, doing a rather similar job. ‘We are ambassadors for Christ’, he says, ‘since God is making his appeal through us’. That’s pretty well what the Old Testament prophets like Joel was doing. They were putting the voice of God into the human language. 

St Paul appeals to the Corinthians to be reconciled to God. He feels they have gone away from God. Saint Paul tells the Corinthians that he and his team have been through tremendous trials as a result of their trying to proclaim the gospel. But it is worth their suffering. Now is the crucial time: now is the moment, now is the moment about which the prophets were prophesying, so now is the time to turn away from sin and be faithful to Christ. 

If you read these passages while you are thinking about the situation in Ukraine or in Gaza, for example, you might well feel that one of those visions of the day of the Lord, the day of vengeance, the End Time, might be an apt description; especially if you reflect on the thought that nobody is really considering a wider perspective, or a higher perspective, than the relative strengths of the humans involved in any of these terrible situations. 

The Israelis can go on killing Palestinians, quite irrespective of any questions of principle, let alone the Ten Commandments. Is it right to do so? Does it break international law? They really don’t seem to be interested. As they see things, it is a question of self defence; although it seems more likely that it is retaliation, and it is extraordinary that in order to attack Hamas they don’t appear to be worried about killing thousands of Palestinians, at least half of whom are children, who haven’t ever done anything to harm them. 

Similarly in Ukraine, if you are at the court of Donald Trump, it doesn’t appear to be a question of what is right or wrong, but rather the only consideration is that might is right. President Trump and his team have said that Russia is entitled to keep the land they have seized from Ukraine, because they have ‘lost a lot of men in the process’. There is nothing about whether it was right or good to invade another country. 

President Zelenskyy is supposed to agree to a form of capitulation because, according to President Trump, he ‘doesn’t hold many cards’ – or maybe, any cards  (I’m not quite sure what was said, because everyone was shouting). Because he doesn’t hold any cards: again no question whether he is doing the right thing, whether it is legitimate to defend your country when it is attacked, but rather just a question whether his relative strength is less than the aggressor. Might is right, although they do not actually say this. If you re-read the passage in Joel about what the Israelites were doing wrong, following other gods, turning away from the true God, it could be a way of describing what is happening now in Ukraine. 

Joel suggests that, if people repent, the Lord will forgive them. But we watch and we see no signs of repentance: so we begin to fear that there is no way out of this. President Trump accuses President Zelenskyy of playing with the possibility of a third world war and it is believable that a third world war would be a form of apocalypse, that it might be the end of human life as we know it. 

In a way, therefore, no wonder that we are at least metaphorically in sackcloth and ashes over this situation. It shames the whole human race. Is it really going to be the case that we are dust, and to dust we shall shortly return? You might wonder how Jesus would deal with such an awful situation. What would Jesus do? When something has gone horribly wrong, when people have clearly behaved totally sinfully, what would Jesus do? 

This is where we have this wonderful story, (which nobody really knows where it properly belongs in the Bible, because it’s in different manuscripts in different places, and indeed is completely missing from some manuscripts), the story of the ‘woman taken in adultery.’  The very words, in their archaic ghastliness, tell you that something extraordinary is going to be played out. The context is a provision in the Jewish law which you will find in the book of Deuteronomy chapter 22 according to which adulterers were to be stoned to death. 

When you read about all the awful punishments that were used in the ancient world and indeed are still sometimes used in the Middle East today, the true horror of what was being proposed might escape us; but this was a truly awful form of killing, right up there with crucifixion in its cruelty and inhumanity. But it’s not necessary to go into all the ghastly details in the story in order to understand that it is another example where Jesus turns things on their head in a marvellous way. 

Who will guard the guards themselves? I wonder if Albert Pierrepoint, the last British executioner, was a good man who never did anything wrong. Jesus is saying that there is room for mercy and room for repentance. The only thing that he asks the woman to do is not to sin again. Don’t miss the mark again; stay close to God. However awful, whatever it is you’ve done, whatever it might be, there is room for forgiveness. 

That’s the second half of the message with the ash. Turn away from sin and be faithful to Christ. That’s good advice. It’s the best advice. But let’s just look again at the beginning. ‘Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return’. Do you remember what comes next? In the funeral service it is the ‘sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life through our Lord Jesus Christ’. So in our Lenten reflections this isn’t just a time for despair: a time for sadness and fear; a time for regret, although we may have all those things; but it is also a time for that sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life. For the sure and certain hope of Easter. 

So even in the face of a world which seems to have abandoned the Lord and to be headed for that day of darkness and gloom when ‘like blackness spread upon the mountains a great and powerful army comes’, even so we can have a sure and certain hope that ultimately Jesus will be the winner, Jesus will be the conqueror, the conqueror over death and sin. So we are invited to return with all our hearts, with fasting, weeping and mourning; but not to do it just for show: to ‘rend our hearts but not our clothes’. Because ‘the Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love’. Brothers and sisters, we must not lose hope. 

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We are Witnesses

By hughdbryant
April 28, 2019 //
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Sermon for Holy Communion on the Second Sunday of Easter, 28th April 2019

Revelation 1:4-8, Acts 5:27-32, John 20:19-32

http://bible.oremus.org/?ql=423140630

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This Sunday our Bible readings take us back vividly to the life of the apostles just after the Crucifixion and Resurrection. Each passage illustrates a different angle. First in the Book of Revelation.

What is your favourite hymn? A little while ago there was a series in the parish magazine – well, actually in the old parish mag, before the beautiful St Mary’s Quarterly came out, of course – anyway, the series was on ‘favourite hymns’. People were invited to pick their favourite hymn and to explain what it was they liked about it. What would my favourite hymn be? One strong contender in my heart would be ‘Lo! He comes with clouds descending’, one of Charles Wesley’s greatest hymns. It’s number 31 in our hymn book, if you want to look it up.

Like many hymns, it contains several sermons and profound theological insights. It’s based on our first lesson, from the Book of Revelation, which says:

Look! He is coming with the clouds;

   every eye will see him,

even those who pierced him;

   and on his account all the tribes of the earth will wail.

So it is to be. Amen.

The hymn covers the same ground – in rather better poetry, I think.

The Book of Revelation is a book about the End Time, a vision of heaven, a vision of the divine. It’s a vision of God, and of Jesus sitting at his right hand, ‘up there’. Since Bishop John Robinson’s great little book ‘Honest to God’, or Don Cupitt’s BBC series called ‘The Sea of Faith’ in the early 1980s, we haven’t tended to see God as a man with a white beard sitting on top of the clouds. Even if we weren’t influenced by Bishop John Robinson or by Don Cupitt, you might remember that according to President Krushchev, when Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, returned to earth, he is supposed to have mentioned that he hadn’t seen God ‘up there’. The great vision in Revelation is a metaphorical one; its truth is not literal. Our reading from it says

Every eye will see him,

even those who pierced him.

‘Those who pierced him.’ We have to be careful not to take early accounts of the passion and resurrection of Jesus as being very anti-Jewish. The Pharisees and the Sadducees, the Sanhedrin, the ‘the whole body of the elders of Israel’, did, as a matter of bare facts, cause Jesus to be crucified: but as Jesus himself said, they did not know what they were doing. They were not consciously killing the Son of God. In the early encounter between the Jewish authorities and the disciples which we heard about in the words of Acts chapter 5, if you read a bit more of the chapter after this, you’ll see that it isn’t simply a question of a brush between the Jewish leaders and the apostles, not simply – or at all, actually – a kind of repeat of the persecution which had resulted in Jesus’ death. The full story tells that the High Priest and the Sadducees, motivated by jealousy, arrested the apostles and put them in prison. But ‘an angel of the Lord’ opened the doors of the prison and let them out during the night, so that when they went to get them in the morning, the police reported that they’d found the prison locked, but no apostles inside. They’d gone back to teaching in the Temple. They sent the police and fetched them to appear before the Council – but without using any force, ‘for fear of being stoned by the people’.

Then comes the passage which was our second reading, the exchange between the High Priest’s group, the Sadducees, and Peter. They asked, ‘Why did you ignore our injunction to prevent you from preaching?’ …. And the answer was, ‘We must obey God rather than men.’ Then Peter went on to rehearse the crucifixion story. ‘The God of our fathers raised up Jesus whom you had done to death’, and most important, ‘We are witnesses’. The Sadducees, extraordinarily, wanted to kill them. They couldn’t cope with how popular the gospel message had already become. To the apostles, it must have felt horribly reminiscent of the time immediately before the crucifixion.

But then another Jewish leader, a Pharisee called Gamaliel, a ‘teacher of the law held in high esteem by all the people’, stood up in the Sanhedrin council and said, ‘Keep clear of these men, I tell you; leave them alone. For if this idea of theirs or its execution is of human origin, it will collapse; but if it is from God, you will never be able to put them down, and you risk finding yourselves at war with God.’ These were wise words – and they came as much from a Jewish source as any of the cruel Sadducees’ threats. Both sentiments came from Jewish sources, enlightened, Gamaliel, or cruel, the Sadducees. You can’t really blame the Jews. They really had no idea what the big picture was.

A quick look back, before we move on to consider Doubting Thomas. An ‘angel of the Lord’ organised the apostles’ gaol break. What was this angel? Given that the name ‘angel’ means ‘messenger’ in the original Greek, rather than thinking about angels as being superheroes like Superman, let’s think instead that they could just have been ordinary Christians, doing the will of the Lord. You can understand quite a few of these apparently supernatural terms in natural, normal terms. Most likely it was just ordinary humans who got them out of jail – but in so doing, they were doing the work of God. But of course, if you want to believe in angels as something magical, between gods and mere men, fair enough. I’ve got no proof either way.

Then we do go on to think about Doubting Thomas. The story of Doubting Thomas has strengthened so many people’s faith. It certainly did mine. ‘Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe’. That’s us. We haven’t been able to do what Thomas did and verify empirically that they were encountering the risen Jesus. Our understanding, our trust in the whole Gospel, has to have been based on things we ourselves haven’t seen.

The essence of that faith is that Jesus rose from the dead. That’s not just an extraordinary miracle, something to amaze and delight you, which is really what the word ‘miracle’ meant originally, (something to amaze and delight), but also most crucially it means that God, however we understand him to be, the unmoved mover (according to Aristotle), the creator and sustainer, the Almighty, all-powerful, all knowing, He, has a relationship with the human race, with us.

God is bigger and infinitely more detailed than I, certainly, can comprehend. The Bible says, in St John’s Gospel, Jesus is quoted as saying, that whoever has seen him has seen the father (John 14:9). I suppose if you take literally the passages which have Jesus sitting at the right hand of God the Father in heaven, then those glorious images of a heavenly palace above the clouds will resonate with you.

But I think that I am too much a prosaic, matter-of-fact person to believe literally that that is how things are. I’m with Yuri Gagarin. I don’t actually think that God lives above the clouds, or indeed that he can be tied down to a particular time or place. Except of course he can. He can be tied down in a sense to the time and place of Jesus. If we didn’t know about Jesus we wouldn’t know anything at all about God except in purely functional terms, making stuff, creation, and knowing stuff, omniscience, and so on. And the story of Thomas is the most powerful expression of this.

But hang on a minute: if God isn’t somewhere, if there isn’t a sort of Mount Olympus somewhere, with God and his angels and Jesus together on top of the clouds on their thrones in some glorious palace which looks just as we would imagine 20th Century Fox and perhaps one of those great directors like David Lean would portray it, larger-than-life for sure; if that’s not the way it is, and if Jesus was not saying something completely fanciful, when he said that if we have seen him we have seen the father, then can we actually know God a bit more after all?

I wonder whether the angels are a clue. As I said earlier on, when the angel of the Lord came to let St Peter and the apostles out of the gaol, I did just wonder who the angel was. It occurred to me that, just as we say that the Holy Spirit – which is God in one form – just as we say that the Holy Spirit is in our church, is in all of us, and that we are called ‘the body of Christ’, here today as well, so it means that angels, messengers of God, could be ordinary people, just as Jesus was an ordinary human being in one sense.

So we could be angels. Surely we are angels, when the Spirit is at work in us and when we do God’s work. I’ve preached before about saints. I’ve made the point that the saints are all of us Christians. Another hymn:

For all the saints who from their labours rest,

Who thee by faith before the world confessed.

That’s us. We are in that wonderful ‘apostolic succession’, as it’s sometimes called, from the earliest Christians; and thousands and thousands of new Christians are coming forward every minute, who haven’t seen, but yet believe.

Well that’s great. It’s a very major thing – and we could stop it there and go away from this service feeling perhaps that we’d come a little closer to God. But the other major thing that we must consider is that, if we are to be saints and angels, real saints and angels, we must behave like them.

So today in a society where there is a terrible xenophobia, where people say things against immigrants, ignoring the fact that they are human beings like us, where people blame those who go to food banks, for being in some sense feckless or undeserving, where we turn our backs as a country on our relationships and treaties with other countries, where we fail to take our fair share of refugees, where we allow a government ministry to uproot people who have being here working and making their lives among us for decades, and send them to countries which they have not seen for those decades, on the grounds that they are in some way here illegally, where there are so many instances of our society’s meanness and failure properly to provide for those who are less fortunate than ourselves, where we justify it by shrugging our shoulders and saying that it is all very sad but there isn’t enough money to go round; but then, miraculously, the government finds billions for Brexit.

Yes, what I’m saying is political; but it is not intended to be party political. It’s true whether you’re Labour or LibDem or Conservative. The important thing is that we’re Christians. I’m saying that, as Christians, we should have a view on these things. We should call them out; we should stand against them, because we are Christians. We should, if we have a spare room, consider welcoming some refugees to stay with us when they first arrive. We should tell our politicians that it’s not acceptable not to put sprinklers in high rise council blocks like Grenfell Tower, (even though government ministers have promised to do it); tell our politicians it’s not acceptable not to pay proper compensation to the people whose lives have been ruined by the Windrush scandal; it’s not acceptable that thousands of people – last year, over 4,000 – are denied benefits on the grounds that they are fit to work, and then are so ill that they die within three months of that decision. It’s not acceptable that the newspapers should be full of pictures of a poor man, Stephen Smith, so emaciated that his bones are sticking out, so obviously desperately ill, denied benefits, on the ground that he is ‘fit to work’: he died. But not until he had won an appeal in court, as 70% of the appeals are won. [See https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/22/stephen-smith-benefits-system-dying]

This institutional meanness doesn’t just come out of the air. Just as we are saints and angels with the Holy Spirit in us, we have God’s power in us. We are not impotent. We have God’s power to do something about it. We need to speak to our MP, to write letters, to demonstrate on the streets if necessary, to rise up.

So today the message, the Easter message, is that we have seen the Lord. We have seen him at work in our fellow saints and angels. Let us join them, let us take that divine power and use it.

Stephen Smith
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‘There but not There’

By hughdbryant
November 4, 2018 //
0

Sermon for Evensong at All Saints’ Day, 4th November 2018

Isaiah 65:17-25; Hebrews 11:32-12:2

As you can see, you’ve got some neighbours in church today. 17 silhouettes, each one representing a soldier from Stoke D’Abernon who died fighting in the First World War. There are little plaques in front of each one of the silhouettes which tell you the name of each of the soldiers and the regiment that he belonged to. There are two pairs of brothers, you will find. All over the country there are churches with these silhouettes in. They have been created by a new charity called ‘Remembered’ and our Vanessa Richards is a trustee of the charity. A number of us have subscribed to buy the silhouettes which are in the pews.

These soldiers are ‘there are but not there’, which is the name of the campaign, launched by this charity called Remembered, to remind people, and especially people like me who have never been in a war, to remind us of the great sacrifice and bravery of our soldiers – in what they had hoped would be the ‘war to end all wars’; and also to raise money for the relief of mental conditions caused by war such as PTSD, combat stress, which used to be called ‘shell shock’.

Our silhouettes were first installed in the pews on Friday, for the All Souls service, when we remembered the dead, our dear departed, and today is All Saints, when we remember and celebrate that ‘cloud of witnesses’ that was mentioned in our second lesson from Hebrews.

We will of course come back and make our main act of remembrance next Sunday. Today we are celebrating All Saints’ Day, which follows very closely after our celebration of All Souls. Using the word ‘souls’ reflects the idea that we are made up of a body and a soul and that in some sense our souls are immortal and eternal, carrying on after our bodies have died. So All Souls is the great commemoration of the dead.

Today we focus on the idea of saints and sainthood. Through both these festivals we may get a glimpse of heaven; this is a chance for us to reflect on what we can understand of heaven, at All Souls on life after death and today on the saints, the great ‘cloud of witnesses,’ in history – and perhaps nearer to home as well.

We can think of ‘saints’ in two ways. On one hand we can understand the expression ‘saint’ to cover all Christian people. St Paul’s letters refer to the ‘saints’ at Ephesus and in Rome and in Jerusalem, meaning the normal members of the congregation in each church. So in that sense we are all saints. We are the saints at Stoke d’Abernon.

The other sense, which is perhaps the one which we would normally think of when we use the word ‘saint’, is to identify people who lead exemplary and virtuous lives, who are witnesses to the gospel of Jesus through the self-denying love which they show.

We should notice that there is a difference between the beliefs of the Protestant churches and the Roman Catholic Church where saints are concerned. Roman Catholics see the saints as being so close to God and to Jesus that they can intercede for us. In other words, Catholics address prayers to one or other of the saints and ask them to pass on their prayers to God. As Protestants we use the same language and perhaps adopt the same thought when we end our prayers with the words ‘through Jesus Christ our Lord’, but this is as far as we go.

Praying through a saint, through a person who speaks for us to God, is a very old idea, a mediaeval idea, but it was one of the things which was attacked by Martin Luther and the Reformation theologians. If you look at the 39 Articles of Religion at the back of your little blue Prayer Book, if you look at article 22 on page 620 and article 31 on page 624, you will see what the reformers were objecting to.

Article 31 was against people saying masses for the dead – at first sight, against what we were doing on Thursday. Before the Reformation, people left money in their wills to pay for masses to be said for them after they had died, to help them to get to heaven and not be stuck in ‘Purgatory’, a kind of half-way house for those whose virtues were not clear enough for them to pass straight through the Pearly Gates. People built ‘chantries’, chapels where they could be remembered and prayed for.

Our Norbury Chapel is an example of a chantry. It was built for Sir John Norbury after the Battle of Bosworth which ended the Wars of the Roses in 1485. Sir John died in 1521, before the Reformation, or more particularly before Henry VIII. His original statue must have been destroyed in the Elizabethan purge on ‘monuments of superstition’, and now his monument is the little figure of a kneeling knight, whose armour is in the style of Charles I’s time, 100 years later.

I think that we can agree with Article 31 that Christ’s sacrifice on the cross is the only thing we need, in order to be reconciled with God and forgiven our sins. We don’t need to make a ritual sacrifice as well, in order to buy forgiveness for someone’s sins. But remembering our dear ones by reading out their names doesn’t go against this, I believe.

Martin Luther, who started the objections to ‘masses for the dead’, was aiming at what he thought was a racket run by the Roman church, getting money for saying masses and building chantries, although there was no theological justification for it. We should remember that Jesus’ salvation is for all, not just for the ones whose names we read out in church – but that’s not a reason for us not to remember our dear departed ones.

Article 22 is even more specific about the worship, or ‘veneration’, as it was called, of saints, their statues and pictures. It reads:

‘The Romish Doctrine concerning Purgatory, Pardons, Worshipping, and Adoration, as well of Images as of Reliques, and also invocation of Saints, is a fond thing vainly invented, and grounded upon no warranty of Scripture, but rather repugnant to the Word of God’.

The reformers thought that there was an element of idolatry, that people were worshipping the saints rather than God, and that there was really no need to use an agent in order to be able to say your prayers to God. There is a reflection of John Calvin’s idea of the ‘priesthood of all believers’ here. Again, in the Jewish faith, only the High Priest could enter the the Holy of Holies, in the Temple, to come close to God, once a year only, without being consumed (cf Moses in Exodus 33:20). This is one place where the idea, that God needs to be approached through somebody, comes from. In our first lesson from Isaiah there is also the example of prophecy, where God speaks through the mouth of a human, a prophet.

Because St Mary’s is so old – its origins are 7th century Saxon – if you look around, it shows you signs of all this historical theology. You will see some images of saints in some of the windows, but the only statue of a saint is the statue of Mary, the Madonna and Child, at the front. Actually pretty well all the images of saints, the windows and the statue, although they are often of mediaeval origin, were imported during Revd John Waterson’s time (1949-1983), because whatever was here before the Reformation was removed or smashed up. In the Baptistry some of the windows contain bits of the remains of pre-Reformation windows, but I think that is all.

The Church of England is often called ‘catholic and reformed’. Henry VIII was a faithful Roman Catholic, except for his little difficulty with the Pope! The question of how we look at saints today is a good example of how our church’s theology and history are combined in a rich mixture. The greatest of the saints is Mary, the mother of Jesus, who was always closest to him, even at the end; his mother stood grieving at the foot of the cross. Who better, who closer, to intercede, if you feel you need someone to do it? The words of the ‘Hail Mary’, which Roman Catholics use almost as much as the Lord’s Prayer, end with

‘Holy Mary, Mother of God,

Pray for us sinners now,

And at the hour of death’.

Indeed Mary is the saint preferred by more people than any other to pray through, in the Roman Catholic Church, where veneration of the saints and praying through them still thrives – they still create saints, for instance recently Archbishop Romero, the Bishop of San Salvador, who was martyred on the steps of his cathedral in 1980, and who was renowned as a liberation theologian, concerned to minister to the poor.

So I have taken you through the story of what it could mean to be a saint. We can be one of the saints at Stoke d’Abernon, one of the people who turn up faithfully in the pews, contribute to good causes and are happy to let people know that this is what we do on a Sunday and indeed, perhaps, what we do on other days. Church saints are involved, involved in church activities.

Or you could be a witness. You could stand up and say to other people what it means to be a Christian in today’s society. You could do things, things which actually take a little bit longer than signing a cheque or turning up to a meeting. You would have to show commitment. The touchstone for being this kind of saint is selfless giving.

Or you might even be a martyr. ‘Martyr’, after all, is just the Greek word for a ‘witness’. Your being a witness may have a price. People may not approve of what you have to say. You may be put to the test as a result. Being a saint, being a witness to the gospel of Christ, may be tough.

There have been occasions when some of you have said to me that my interpretation of what it is to be a practical Christian, to be a practical witness, shades over into politics. Well, on this occasion, I leave it to you. You work out what it would be for you to be a saint. All I would say to you is that I think we all have it in us to be some kind of a saint. Which one are you?

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Επιφάνεια

By hughdbryant
January 5, 2014 //
0

Sermon for Evensong on the Sunday of Epiphany, 5th January 2014
John 2:1-11 The Wedding at Cana in Galilee – Christ Reveals his Glory

You might wonder why our lesson just now was about the wedding at Cana in Galilee rather than Jesus’ visit from the Wise Men, given that this Sunday is our celebration of Epiphany; Epiphany, which means showing off, revealing.

This morning indeed the Gospel was the story of the Wise Men: the last of the traditional Christmas stories. It’s the lesson for the twelfth day of Christmas. Our decorations are supposed to be taken down tonight, Twelfth Night. Christmas is over. The season of Epiphany begins.

In the Epiphany season, next week we mark the baptism of Christ, and three weeks after that, the Presentation of Christ in the Temple, Candlemas – when we are going to have a special Evensong here at St Mary’s. In between, in a fortnight, on 19th January, there will be our Christingle service in the morning before Mattins, and – as this is another traditional Epiphany theme – there will be the annual Week of Prayer for Christian Unity service in the evening, at the Methodist chapel, instead of Evensong here.

The candles, the Christingles and at Candlemas, are symbolic of the Epiphany light, the enlightenment, that the coming of God’s kingdom brings. ‘Arise, shine; for your light has come,’ says Isaiah in our first lesson. It is all about showing, showing to the world that Jesus is here.

The wedding at Cana fits in with this. The evangelist says that Jesus turning the water into wine was his first miracle, ‘and he revealed his glory.’ Revealed, manifested. Epiphany.

That’s all very familiar. Emmanuel, God with us. ‘O come, O come, Emmanuel’. But what does it really mean, mean to us today?

Time was, when the idea of light, the idea of enlightening people, was seen differently. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the time of the Enlightenment with a capital E, it was the time of Erasmus and the Humanists. They believed that the world could be completely understood through the use of reason, reasoning and logic. That went for knowledge of God as well: whatever we could know about God, we could know only by the use of our intellect – the same way in which we learned about animals and geology and so on.

It led some theologians and philosophers to look at the findings of scientific enquiry, like Darwin’s work on evolution, and to reach the conclusion that life on earth may have been started by God, but that we could not know much more about this God than that He is an ultimate first cause, a creator from nothing, an unmoved mover.

Reason could take you to a belief in that rather limited god, the divine creator – but not much further. You could not know much about what such a god was like. Most importantly, there seemed to be no evidence that God had done anything more than just starting the process off. No evidence that God had any interest in human life, or in particular, that He cares for us.

That’s quite a contradiction with the things that we say we believe in our worship. Look at the Magnificat:

‘He hath shewed strength with his arm: he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.
He hath put down the mighty from their seat: and hath exalted the humble and meek.
He hath filled the hungry with good things: and the rich he hath sent empty away.’

That’s not a description of a laissez-faire god, of an unmoved mover who has, frankly, just moved on: it’s a description of an interventionist God, a God who cares for social justice. God with us. God with us, who does not stand idly by in the face of injustice, in the face of poverty and exploitation.

Somebody like Richard Dawkins might say, the Magnificat is just pretty words. It doesn’t really mean anything. Science can’t lead you to believe in a God, or at least in a God who has any personal interest in us.

At the time of the Enlightenment, in the 18th and early 19th centuries, the answer to the deists, as they were called – to the people who said that God was just the creator, a blind watchmaker, and nothing more – the answer was that our religion is revealed religion. There are things beyond what reason can tell us, things nevertheless revealed to us, revealed to us by God.

One sort of revelation is the sort of thing which we are celebrating today. Turning the water into wine was a demonstration, an epiphany. Did it really happen? It can’t be proved. But one thing you can say is that if it did happen, then it was a complete contradiction of the idea that God has moved on, that He doesn’t care.

If God has manifested Himself, has showed Himself to us, in the person of Jesus, then it can’t be true that He doesn’t care for us. Jesus is the Good Shepherd. He in turn calls on his flock to be good sheep. In the parable of the Good Samaritan, in Jesus’ new commandment, that we love one another, He calls on us to live like people who recognise that they have God in their midst, God with us, Emmanuel.

‘Whoso have this world’s good, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him?’ (1 John 3:17). You’ll remember that from the Communion service. It goes on, ‘My little children, let us not love in word, neither with the tongue; but in deed and truth.’

It was, and still is, a revolutionary message. By turning the water into wine, by manifesting himself in his divine nature, Jesus was challenging the powers that be, both spiritual – the Pharisees and the scribes – and temporal, the Romans. They both had a vested interest in the established order – ‘the rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate’. To upset it was dangerous. In the story of the Wise Men, Herod ‘was troubled, and all Jerusalem with him,’ when the Wise Men told him of the new king’s birth.

Similarly today. Let’s not be too ‘political’, or upset the status quo, people say. Look at all those respectable people who say they are all right, they have no need to believe: there is nothing missing in their lives. They never say, like the bod in the Alpha Course poster, ‘Is that all there is?’ But they have no proper roots, no real understanding of what is good. Instead, they tend to cling to status and possessions. There is nothing else, for them, nothing else to cling on to.

But a Christian has faith, a Christian has faith that there is more, there is a reality beyond what we can reach simply by the exercise of reason, excellent though that is. Our prayers are answered; we know we are not alone. It is reasonable, it makes sense, after all, for us to read the miracle stories, to open our minds to analogy, to metaphor, and to see God, revealed.

‘He hath shewed strength with his arm: he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.
He hath put down the mighty from their seat: and hath exalted the humble and meek.’

The Lord is here: His Spirit is with us – but we mustn’t ignore Him. It must make a difference – we must change. That’s what Epiphany calls us to do.

‘He hath filled the hungry with good things: and the rich he hath sent empty away.’ Now what are we going to do?

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