Archives for posts with tag: Christians
« Older Entries

The Holy Father

By hughdbryant
April 30, 2025 //
0

Sermon preached at All Saints Church, Penarth, 29th April 2025

Acts of the Apostles 4:32-37; John 3:7-15 – see https://acrobat.adobe.com/id/urn:aaid:sc:EU:ab09bab9-b3d3-40fb-94f8-e2783f0f51ba

This morning I want to look at two or three words in our lessons which I think in one way or another, by a happy accident, because the lessons were chosen long before this came about, have reminded me about various things to do with the late Pope Francis. I am sure you have read and watched and listened to many reminiscences and obituaries which have given us a very colourful picture of this great man, this great man of God, this vicar of Christ, the man who takes the place of, represents, Christ – which is what the word ‘vicar’ means.

Someone who takes the place of somebody else. Vice, in Latin, as in vice versa; vice, vicar. I was very tempted just to read out to you a really good article in this week’s Church Times by Prof. Paul Vallely, biographer of Pope Francis, about the late pope. At the end I will read out a bit of the article because it is so memorable and, I think, gives a really authentic reminiscence of this good man.

But first let’s look at our lessons today in the light of what we know and remember of Pope Francis. ‘The Lord is king and has put on glorious apparel’; the opening line of our psalm appointed today; as the vicar of Christ, the pope is often dressed in amazingly rich and ornate robes, and I think that on occasions, Pope Francis was no exception: but very often we saw him just simply wearing a simple alb, a monk’s garment, not weighed down by a beautiful gilded and embroidered chasuble; and that was the key to so much about Pope Francis, that he was a man who believed in not being a ‘prince of the church,’ as it’s sometimes called.

I treated myself last night to watching again on Netflix that wonderful film that came out a few years ago called The Two Popes, with Sir Jonathan Pryce as Pope Francis and Sir Anthony Hopkins as Pope Benedict. 

The film is full of lovely contrasts. The grand style of the former Cardinal Ratzinger, Pope Benedict, a great theologian but quite happy to go along with the tradition of the Catholic Church as it had grown up, and to enjoy the trappings: travelling by helicopter to the summer residence outside Rome and coming in to the Vatican, again by helicopter: and then where Pope Francis rings for a takeaway pizza, which is a very sweet moment; and so on. 

I’m sure we have all read about the only time that Pope Francis drove in a Mercedes was when he was in his Popemobile, whereas normally he used a Ford Fiesta. How he didn’t live in the grand rooms are usually allocated to the pope in the Vatican but rather in a modest guesthouse. How he rang up to settle his newspaper bill in Buenos Aires when he had been elected Pope and suddenly had to stay in Rome permanently.

For Pope Francis the image of the Lord was not so much that of a king who had put on glorious apparel but the servant king, the one who washed the feet of the disciples and healed the sick. One of the stories in the Church Times is of the Pope meeting a man who was horribly disfigured and his face was really repulsive – and hugging him, when nobody else would go near him. You feel that Jesus would have been exactly the same. When Jesus healed a leper it had the same connotation of touching the untouchable.

Then we look at the passage from the Acts of the Apostles with its picture of how the early church conducted itself, that ‘they were of one heart and soul, and no one had private ownership of any possessions, but everything that they had was owned in common’. I’m not going to get into a discussion whether the early Christians were communists – although you will remember what Jesus said about the rich man and the eye of the needle – but certainly there is this passage and the approving reference to Joseph of Cyprus, who became Barnabas and then travelled a lot with Paul subsequently, who, after selling some land, brought the proceeds to add to the early church funds.

This passage, the story, is very much in line with the humble approach of Pope Francis, although he wasn’t actually one of the ‘liberation theologians’ from South America who were also Marxists. He had a really big heart for the poor, and he wanted the church to be a ‘poor church for poor people’. The passage in Acts 4 is, though, certainly reminiscent of Marx’s ‘from each according to his ability: to each according to his need’. 

The other thing that it reminded me of, by pointing out that Joseph came from Cyprus, was what happened at the funeral of Pope Francis on Saturday, that after the main funeral service in several languages, which you can read on the Internet on the Vatican website, there was a second mass in Greek celebrated by the Greek Catholics, the eastern Catholics; not quite the eastern Orthodox church, but certainly a nod towards them and the fact that Christians come in all shapes and sizes. 

At the time of Jesus Latin, which only became the international language of the Church from the time of Constantine, 300 years later, wasn’t used everywhere, but Greek was; so also the mention of Barnabas coming from Cyprus reminds us of the Greek heritage of the early church.

Just moving away from Pope Francis for a minute, our second lesson is this rather mysterious passage from St John’s gospel which tells of Jesus’ discussion with Nicodemus, a rabbi, a senior rabbi, a member of the Council who had come to see Jesus secretly by night. It’s worth reading the bit of the chapter which comes before our second lesson so you can see the context more clearly. 

‘‘Rabbi,’ he said, ‘we know that you are a teacher sent by God; no one could perform these signs of yours unless God were with him.’  Jesus answered, ‘In truth, in very truth I tell you, unless a man has been born over again he cannot see the kingdom of God.’ ‘But how is it possible’, said Nicodemus, ‘for a man to be born when he is old? Can he enter his mother’s womb a second time and be born?’ Jesus answered, ‘In truth I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born from water and spirit. Flesh can give birth only to flesh; it is spirit that gives birth to spirit. [John 3:2–6, NEB, https://ref.ly/Jn3.2-6;neb]

You ought not to be astonished, then, when I tell you that you must be born over again. [John 3:7, NEB, https://ref.ly/Jn3.7;neb] In the lesson that was read out from a different translation, this line reads, Do not be astonished that I said to you, “You must be born from above.” [NRSV]

Born over again or born from above: which is it? The word in the Greek original – άνωθεν – could mean either of these things, so the different translators have gone in different directions and neither of them is necessarily wrong. But it does seem to me that more logically it must mean born over again, and this passage is all about that division between body and soul, body and spirit, which you come across here and also in Saint Paul’s letters, notably his first letter to the Corinthians chapter 15. 

Paul picked up on Jesus’s teaching here, and said that the mechanism of resurrection, being born again, involves the spirit rather than the body. The other thing to say at this stage is that as well as the word for ‘over again’ or ‘from above’ being capable of two different meanings, one single Greek word can mean spirit, wind, or soul. 

We will all probably remember the King James Version of this passage, ‘The wind blows where it listeth’, which is somehow much more memorable than ‘the wind blows where it chooses’ [NRSV]. The bathos of the modern translation loses the poetry entirely. 

But the point is that it’s not just the wind. The same word can also mean spirit, the Holy Spirit, and thus, the life force. There is clearly a reference here to condemnation and punishment in the reference to Moses lifting up the serpent in the wilderness and the son of a man being lifted up, lifted up on the cross. The idea is that, as Moses made the golden serpent and lifted it up on the pole, and anyone who had been bitten by the snakes which were plaguing the Israelites had only to touch the serpent in order to be healed, so Jesus is suffering and death on the cross has the potential to heal as well. 

The exact mechanism, how this healing works, is really difficult to understand; I think we should have some sympathy with Nicodemus. I think in a way he is a bit like doubting Thomas in the sense that there’s nothing wrong with his intellect but the things that he is expected to believe, the things that he is confronted with, in his encounters with Jesus, are just beyond human understanding. 

But maybe even that passage has a reflection in the life of Pope Francis. Let me close by reading you a story about him from the Church Times, which shows how he answered another, similarly tricky, question about the mystery of God.

A FEW years ago, on a visit to a poor parish on the outskirts of Rome, Pope Francis offered to answer questions from the youngest parishioners. But, when one young boy, aged about six, was invited to step up to the microphone to ask his question, he became suddenly overwhelmed.

“I can’t do it,” whispered the boy to a papal aide. “Go on, go on,” Pope Francis said, sitting on a little stage in front of the children and their parents. Children clapped to encourage the boy, who was called Emanuele. He started to cry. “Come up, Emanuele, and whisper your question in my ear,” the Pope said.

The aide led the boy, still crying, up the few steps to Francis. The boy buried his face in the Pope’s neck and hugged him. Francis patted the boy’s back and placed his hand upon his head. The child began to speak. No one could hear. The crowd sat in silence. The Pope was listening. The boy was speaking. On the Pope’s finger we could see the silver ring that he had worn since he first became a bishop in Buenos Aires. On his wrist we could see his cheap black plastic watch.

Then it was over. The boy was led back to his seat to applause. The Pope spoke to the crowd: “OK. I asked Emanuele’s permission to tell you the question he asked me. And he said Yes. So I will tell you. He said: ‘A little while ago I lost my father. He did not believe in God, but he had all four of his children baptised. He was a good man. Is my papà in heaven?’”

The Pope continued: “God is the only one who says who goes to heaven. But what is God’s heart like, with a dad like that?” he asked the rows of parents. They were silent. The Pope smiled. “This dad, who was not a believer, but who baptised his children and gave them that advantage, what do you think? God has a dad’s heart. Would God be able to leave such a father far away from himself?”

“No,” said a few people in the crowd.

“Louder,” said Francis. “Be brave, speak up. Does God abandon his children, when they are good?” “No,” chorused the crowd. “There, Emanuele, that is the answer. God surely was proud of your father. Because it is easier as a believer to baptise your children than to baptise them when you are not a believer. Surely this pleased God very much.” Smiling at the child, he added: “Talk to your dad. Pray to your dad.” [From Paul Vallely: ‘Pope Francis was pastor to the world’, Church Times, 25th April 2025]

I hope that this Easter will be remembered, and you will remember it, as the Easter when Pope Francis, the humble pope, went home to the Lord. He was a Holy Father indeed.

Tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Categories Uncategorized

Sermon for Rose Sunday 2025

By hughdbryant
March 30, 2025 //
0

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

Tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Categories Uncategorized

Sabbath Day Observances

By hughdbryant
October 21, 2024 //
0

Sermon for Evensong on the 21st Sunday after Trinity, 20th October 2024, at All Saints Church, Penarth

Lessons: see https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=596249536

Matthew 12:1-21

As you can see, Evensong today is a team effort. The vicar, our ordinand and I all wanted to join in to praise the Lord this afternoon. You may not realise this, but the vicar has not only been leading the service but also, without knowing it, he’s written most of this sermon. 

We meet to say morning prayers at 9 o’clock most mornings during the week, and anyone can come, but most usually, it’s just the vicar, our ordinand and me. We often take the opportunity, as we say our prayers, to reflect on what we have read in the Bible and our church life; and if that sounds a bit serious, I can immediately reassure you that there’s always a lot of laughter and joy in what we discover together.

This week I shared with the vicar the thought that today we were going to be talking about sabbath day observance – when all the shops used to be shut and you used not to be able to get a drink in a pub on Sundays, and all that good stuff. I was muttering slightly that I thought that things have gone a bit too far in a secular direction and that Sunday wasn’t special any more, whereupon he brought me up short, because he said, first of all we have to be clear that Sunday is not the sabbath.

The sabbath is a Jewish idea and it was Saturday, the day when God rested, the seventh day, during the story of creation in the book of Genesis, whereas Sunday is the day on which we as Christians commemorate Jesus’s resurrection, the first Easter. And so we started to talk about that, and I made a mental note of what the vicar was saying, for this sermon; and I invite you to join in this discussion, or at least to think a little bit about it. I don’t think it matters, by the way, that most of us, when we talk about Sabbath day observance, are not talking about Saturday but are talking about Sunday.

Another thing: do we as Christians have any right to inflict on society as a whole a way of spending Sunday that perhaps only makes sense if you are a Christian? The story of Jesus clashing with the Pharisees and scribes about working on the sabbath, either through the disciples picking up heads of grain in the fields and eating them, sort-of harvesting them, or more clearly as a question of work when Jesus did some healing of the man with the withered hand, those things put him at odds with the Pharisees and the scribes, who said that on the sabbath no work of any kind should be undertaken, because it was a time of rest, picking up from what God did in the creation. He rested on the seventh day, and we should follow God, they argued, and so rest as well. But is that just a religious thing, and not really appropriate these days, when perhaps only a minority are believers?

This story comes up in three of the gospels, Matthew (the version we had as our lesson today), Mark and Luke, but crucially it only has the really memorable, famous, words in Saint Mark’s account: ‘The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath’. (Of course if you want to say it in a gender-neutral way, you say that the sabbath was made for ‘humankind’ and not ‘humankind’ for the Sabbath, but somehow it doesn’t have the same ring to it.) The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath.

I think this is a really encouraging story, and that Jesus is giving us the freedom to do what our conscience tells us to do, whatever the rules may seem to say. If you imagine the story of the healing of the man with the withered hand and put it in the context of an operation in a modern hospital, it would seem nuts to us if the surgeons had to stop operating at midnight on Saturday. The work of healing goes on every day, 24/7, and Jesus confirms, in effect, that that is what God intends.

But – perhaps it’s not quite as clear cut as that. The Jewish law, the first five books of the old Testament, contains some very enlightened ideas, two of the best of which, I think, are jubilee and the sabbath. Jubilee is not just a royal beano, but the idea that every seven years debts should be forgiven, written off. This is an idea which is still highly regarded in international affairs as there are many benefits to the world as a whole if the rich nations periodically excuse the poorer nations their debts. 

And similarly with the idea of sabbath, the day of rest. It has very clear benefits for society as a whole. If people are worked into the ground it is clearly harmful for them, and it’s ultimately harmful for the people they are working for as well, because tired people do a progressively worse and worse job, the more tired they are.

The Jews interpreted the idea of the sabbath as meaning that people were not allowed to do any work; and indeed, orthodox Jews to this day don’t drive to the synagogue on the sabbath, they don’t work and they keep exercise to the minimum. But that is quite legalistic. 

As Jesus pointed out, if people start to regard the rules as being more important than the situations which the rules are intended to cover, then things won’t turn out well. It wouldn’t be good to tell the man having open-heart surgery that the surgeon was out of time and had to stop for his statutory rest period, even though he was in the middle of the operation! 

But Jesus didn’t want to make a song and dance about it. The writer of the gospel quotes bits of the book of Isaiah, in Isaiah 42 and Isaiah 61, “Here is my servant, whom I have chosen, my beloved, with whom my soul is well pleased.” This is a reminder of the words which were heard when Jesus was baptised by John the Baptist, the voice from heaven, “This is my son, the beloved”. What Jesus said, and what he did, had divine authority.

It’s quite difficult to believe that Jesus really expected to keep all this quiet; his miracles were truly sensational. All that we can say about them is that it looks as though he did do them, but there’s absolutely no information about how he did them. They are just as startling now as they ever were before. 

So what should we say about sabbath day observance? I can’t help feeling that, just as the idea of Jubilee still has some real validity today, particularly in the context of international development and fairness between the richer and poorer nations, so the idea of a sabbath, in the sense of a day of rest, is still important; but I think it has to be interpreted consistently with what is practical, so that it may well be that some people do have their day of rest, but not actually on the seventh day (and never mind whether that is Saturday or Sunday). 

The important thing is that they should have the right to have some rest. God rested, according to the story, and so should we. Everybody should have a protected right to a day of rest. And that would be valid in a trades union meeting just as much as in Evensong – it’s not just Christians inflicting religious ideas on the heathen masses. 

It always used to amuse me that after I had taken a service, maybe Mattins, at my old church, I would see the congregation again, half an hour later, as we all did our shopping in the supermarket. But the only people that I would worry about, in that context, would be the people who worked in the supermarket. I do hope that they were not being pressed into working on Sundays, when they would rather have been taking a day of rest, or even, perhaps, coming to Evensong. It was Waitrose, after all…

Tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Categories Uncategorized

Any Questions?

By hughdbryant
June 17, 2024 //
0

Sermon for Evensong on 16th June 2024

Jeremiah 7.1-16; Romans 9.14-26

https://tinyurl.com/5xdpyys2

On Friday night I was nearly on the wireless. On BBC Radio 4. Completely by chance I had heard, when I was listening to the news in the morning, that Any Questions, which is not to be confused with the TV programme Question Time, and is much more venerable – it is apparently the oldest continuously running radio programme anywhere in the world, 76 years old, so it’s even older than me – that Any Questions was coming that same night to Newport to Newport Cathedral, to Saint Woolos’. There were a few places still available in the audience. I quickly booked a ticket and went over there. When you arrive, you are given a card to complete and hand in, with any suggested questions which you might have for the panel. Some of you may well have listened to the programme on Friday night or possibly when it was repeated at lunchtime yesterday.

The panel was a distinguished group, mostly Welsh people, two socialists, one Plaid Cymru and the other, less socialist, Labour; Boris Johnson’s press spokesman (who actually had had a long and distinguished career as political correspondent for the BBC before working for the Conservatives), a champion of industry with a strange name, and the Conservative Secretary of State for Wales who had apparently had a career as an amateur boxer, fighting under the name the Tory Tornado. It was all chaired by Victoria Derbyshire.

It came out that all the panel had gone to Oxford, except, of course, for the ‘Tornado’. Presumably most of them had gone to Jesus College, so there was a high degree of courtesy and comity between them, despite some very different views. Shortly before the programme began the producer appeared and called out eight names of people who had been selected to put their questions to the panel. I was very excited to learn that my question had been chosen, and I was number six. So we sat at the front clutching little bits of paper on which our questions had been nicely re-typed by the BBC; but alas, by the time they had dealt properly with question number five, the hour was up and I, together with the last two questioners, was left on the bench.

Before my turn there had been some very interesting questions, one involving bets on the likelihood of a conservative victory and the willingness of the panel members to ‘have a flutter’; on whether the allegedly inferior performance of the NHS in Wales was to be attributed to underfunding from Westminster or to mismanagement, by the party of Nye Bevan; about the potential effects of imposing VAT on private school fees; about which party’s manifesto would provide growth and stability; and finally, before my turn, there was this question.

A lady called Julie Pearce asked, ‘Where have honesty truth and integrity gone in politics, and do you think politics has deteriorated as a result?’The politicians on the panel predictably danced on pinheads, and perhaps the apologist for the most egregious immoralist in recent politics, Boris Johnson, produced the most ingenious evasion, when he turned immediately to discussing the merits and demerits of Lloyd George 100 years ago, whom he praised as the greatest Welsh prime minister, even though he was at the same time spectacularly immoral, he said.

Interestingly, none of the panel identified either themselves or other members as exhibiting any tendencies towards vice. Exceptionally, they were all as pure as the driven snow, we were asked to believe. As I sat there in the cathedral, I pondered what we as Christians at All Saints might have said in response to this question. Our Bible readings today are very relevant. The passage from Jeremiah is a prophecy in which God puts words into the mouth of the prophet chastising the men of Judah for their immoral behaviour. Although they went to worship in the temple, they still needed to mend their ways and their doings, the Lord said. Deal fairly with one another, do not oppress the alien, the orphan, and the widow, shed no innocent blood, and do not chase after false gods.

That could be very relevant even today. Deal fairly with one another: don’t just go for the cheapest thing on the internet and do our local shops out of business.

Don’t oppress the alien, the orphan and the widow: surely refugees – aliens – ought to be welcome and we should recognise that immigration is a good thing; after all, quite apart from whether we should offer safety and sanctuary, immigrants supply much-needed skills in industry, in the NHS and in our social services.

Does the policy of a ‘hostile environment’ and sending people to Rwanda in breach of the Refugee Convention amount to ‘oppressing the alien’? What do we do for orphans and widows? How does the two-child benefit cap fit in? What about social care and nurseries?

God isn’t having any. This is what he says: ‘You steal, you murder, you commit adultery and perjury, you burn sacrifices to Baal, you run after other gods whom you have not known; then you come and stand before me in this house, which bears my name, and say, ‘We are safe’; safe, you think, to indulge in all these abominations.’ And he says he will ‘fling them away out of his sight’ as he previously thrown away the people of Ephraim. No prayers would avail to save them.

That was the fierce prescription in the Old Testament. Did things become softer and more understanding after the coming of Jesus? St Paul’s letter to the Romans suggests not. But Paul comes at it from a different angle. Does God’s willingness to punish immorality mean that God is unjust? Paul says that it is up to God whether or not to punish somebody, and it does not depend on what he calls ‘man’s will or effort’. So why does God punish some people, or rather, allow them to be harmed? What are the rules? Is God just capricious, harming some people without a good reason?

Interestingly Paul doesn’t answer that. Instead, he suggests that it’s almost impertinent for us to ask that kind of question. ‘Who are you, sir, to answer God back? Can the pot speak to the potter and say, ‘Why did you make me like this?’? Surely the potter can do what he likes with the clay. Is he not free to make out of the same lump two vessels, one to be treasured, the other for common use?’

We have to recognise that God is bigger than we can understand, beyond our comprehension. As Jesus showed and taught, things are sometimes not what they seem, and values can be turned upside-down. The last shall be first … And being the chosen people of God may not protect you. Again, there are things happening today which might fit into this kind of analysis.

What about the war in Gaza? Does it make a difference that today’s Israelis say, as some of them surely do, that Hamas is like the Amalekites, previous occupants of the Promised Land, whom God told Saul and the Israelites, as told in the first book of Samuel [1Samuel 15:2-4], utterly to destroy – and God took them to task when they left some of them alive? Does that justify what the Israeli army is doing in Gaza?

Or we should consider what Paul points out in what the prophet Hosea said; [Hosea 2:23]: he said, ‘As it says in the Book of Hosea: ‘Those who were not my people I will call My People, and the unloved nation I will call My Beloved. For in the very place where they were told “you are no people of mine”, they shall be called Sons of the living God.’

The message is that just because one goes through the motions of worship, or goes to the temple, to the biggest cathedral, to the poshest church, it doesn’t somehow sanitise the things we do. We must love our neighbours, and worship just the one true God.

And we mustn’t use God as an excuse either. Fergal Keane, the veteran BBC war correspondent, was interviewed recently, and he said this: “It takes human beings to inflict injustice, pain, and cruelty on others. And it is too much of a cop-out to say ‘I blame it all on religion.’ That allows us, people with freedom of choice, off the hook. There are many places where faith has been manipulated, used as a banner, a suit of armour, as something to drive people on to hate their neighbours.” [https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/246585]

Perhaps that’s all a bit deep for Any Questions. But we should keep asking questions – and saying our prayers.

Tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Categories Uncategorized

The Morning After

By hughdbryant
April 21, 2024 //
0

Sermon for Morning Prayer on 21st April 2024, Fourth Sunday of Easter

Acts 4:5-12, 1 John 3:16-24

https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=580609123

I want you to think about the morning after the morning after the morning after the night before. Or possibly, the morning after that.

Think of something that has happened, something that you’ve been involved in, that was really a big deal. Something that really made a difference.

Maybe it was the day you got married, if you did. Or the day when you won an Olympic gold medal. Or the day when something really momentous happened in the world outside. Perhaps you can even remember Armistice Day, or perhaps more likely, the day after the Brexit referendum. In all those cases, things changed; things changed really radically for ever. Nothing would be the same again. In our Bible lessons today the context is another of those enormous events as we enter into the world of the very first Christians, in the first, the earliest, churches.

The momentous event was of course Easter, Jesus’ resurrection. They had either experienced meeting the risen Christ themselves or they had met people who had. That’s one reason why I always find it very exciting to read the Acts of the Apostles, written by St Luke, as book 2 of his gospel, in effect; and St Luke was certainly around at the earliest time even if he didn’t actually meet Jesus. St Paul describes him as the ‘beloved physician’ and there are certainly moments in the Acts of the Apostles, describing St Paul’s journeys, where the third-party narrative, ‘they’ did this, ‘they’ did that, turns to ‘we’ did it, so we can infer that Luke was there.

So it is a very immediate, personal account of what it was like to be an early Christian. And so we are seeing the Easter people, the first Easter people, picking up their lives and carrying on after the amazing events of Easter. And we hear that they ‘met constantly to hear the apostles teach, and to share the common life, to break bread and to pray. A sense of awe was everywhere and many marvels and signs were brought about through the apostles’. They held everything in common, as we heard in one of the lessons a couple of weeks ago.

And then the part which we heard read today: Peter and John had healed a man who had been crippled from birth, who was begging at the gate of the temple. Peter said, ‘I have no silver or gold; but what I have I give you; in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, walk!’ And the man who had been crippled from birth sprang up, stood on his feet and started to walk.

Needless to say it attracted a lot of attention, and Peter said this to the crowd: ‘Why stare at us as though we had made this man walk by some power or godliness of our own? The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of our fathers, has given the highest honour to his servant Jesus… And the name of Jesus, by awakening faith, has strengthened this man, whom you see and know, and his faith has made him completely well.’

The chief priests and the Sadducees, just as they had done with Jesus himself, took exception to this and considered it to be blasphemy. They arrested Peter and John and put them in prison. And the passage describes what happened when they were asked to explain themselves.

It’s very reminiscent of a similar episode when Jesus himself was tackled about healing somebody on the sabbath day. Again, to use a contemporary expression, the disciples pushed back against the criticism. What was wrong with healing somebody who was sick? You might be tempted to say, what does it matter who the doctor was? Just be grateful that the cure worked. But the high priests were concerned that Peter and John were giving credit to Jesus in a blasphemous way. But they insisted that it was Jesus who was the divine agent and it was the sick man’s faith in Jesus which had brought on his healing.

Let’s go back a minute to the question of the morning after the morning after the morning after the night before. Nothing was the same after Easter. Whom could you trust? There were so many people claiming that they were the true believers, that they had an inside track to understanding the story of Jesus.

So let’s look at the first letter of John, the first ‘Epistle General of John’ as the King James Bible puts the heading. It’s possible that the John who wrote the letter was the apostle, or certainly was the same person who wrote Saint John’s Gospel. Although he would have had to be pretty old, it’s not impossible. Some scholars do think that all three of them are the same individual.

Again we are in the world of the very early church, and it’s clear that in that world it was commonly expected that the end of the world was round the corner, and all the references to salvation and eternal life referred to a last judgement at the bar of heaven which was just about to happen. All the more reason, the early Christians felt, to be sure that you were a true believer, that you were one of the people who were truly saved, the elect.

And this is what the letter, John’s first letter, is all about. In one of my Bibles there’s a sub-heading describing the letter as a ‘recall to fundamentals’. It begins with these words: ‘It was there from the beginning; we have heard it; we have seen it with our own eyes; we looked upon it, and felt it with our own hands; and it is of this we tell. Our theme is the word of life. This life was made visible; we have heard it and bear our testimony; we here declare to you the eternal life which dwelt with the Father and was made visible to us.’ Do you remember the beginning of St John’s Gospel? ‘In the beginning was the word’. And it is all about love. The ‘word’ is Jesus, and Jesus is love; and the key to being saved is whether you are ‘in Christ’, which is a rather mysterious expression which is generally reckoned to mean whether Christ is in you.

In John’s First Letter there are a series of illustrations of what it means to be in Christ and to be in the light of Christ. ‘A man may say I am in the light; but if he hates his brother, he is still in the dark.’ Only the man who loves his brother dwells in the light. And then this great passage that we had read to us as the second lesson, contrasting two examples, one, the greatest example, that greater love hath no man…, And we ought to lay down our lives for one another, the supreme sacrifice; and the other, because we can’t be in a position to offer a supreme sacrifice every day, the everyday salvation, the everyday expression of love, which you will remember from the sentences before the traditional Holy Communion service, ‘Whoso hath 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?’ If a man has enough to live on, and yet, when he sees his brother in need, shuts up his heart against him, how can it be said that the divine love dwells in him? That’s how it works. God is love.

God is love; God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. If we are in Jesus, in the Son, we are in love, love is in us; and the test of that is how we show that love. Let us love our brothers and sisters, let us love our neighbours. If we are Easter people, if we are like those early Christians on the day after the day after the day of the great event, what difference does it make to us? Is it still buzzing in our minds? Does it still draw us irresistibly to do things that we didn’t do before? Let us pray that it does.

Amen.

Tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Categories Uncategorized

Politics for the Doubting

By hughdbryant
April 8, 2024 //
0

Sermon for the Morning Service at All Saints Church, Penarth

On 7th April 2024

Acts 4:32-35; John 20:19-31 https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=579426284

You hear that people who go to church describe themselves as Easter people. We are Easter people. I presume that means that, as Christians, our lives have been touched by the momentous events of Easter all those years ago. It has been made a huge difference to our lives and to the way that we carry on. The biggest thing about Easter – not really an elephant in the room, but something altogether bigger – is Jesus’ resurrection from the dead.

Jesus definitely died, and he died in a way which really doesn’t leave it open to anyone to say that he wasn’t really dead. If you die by crucifixion you are most definitely absolutely dead. He was then put in a tomb which was sealed with an enormous rock and put under guard by the chief priests and the Pharisees, who had been given permission to do so by Pilate because they said they were afraid that the Christians would steal his body. So I think we can be sure that he was definitely buried in a grave which would not be easy to get at.

And then on the third day, as we celebrated last Sunday, the stone had been rolled away, the grave was empty, and Jesus had somehow risen from the dead. He saw Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James and Joanna, and perhaps other women who had gone to the tomb to dress the body, who all went to tell the disciples. They were not believed initially. ‘The story appeared to them to be nonsense.’

Some versions of the gospel add that Peter took it on himself to rush back to the tomb, and he found it empty and realised what had happened. But the other disciples were sceptical until Jesus appeared to two people on the way to Emmaus and they brought the news back to the disciples. And then Jesus appeared to all of them in the way that we had described to us in Saint John’s Gospel just now. On the first day of the week; when the doors of the house were locked; somehow Jesus got in and stood among them, giving them a chance to touch him and realise that he wasn’t a ghost.

And Jesus stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you.’ That’s one thing that you will miss this morning. We only share the peace when we’re having holy communion. I’m afraid we’re not doing that today. But this is where sharing the peace comes from. It’s a way of reminding ourselves of that appearance among the disciples, appearance by the risen Lord, Jesus resurrected from the dead.

They saw and they believed. They didn’t know how he had been resurrected, but they had no doubt that he had been. And then along came Thomas, officially known as ‘Thomas the Twin’ but known almost universally afterwards as ‘Doubting Thomas’. Because Thomas just couldn’t believe that Jesus had risen from the dead. Then we have this really powerful story, which I think really appeals to lots of us – it certainly appeals to me – showing how Thomas came to believe, because he saw and touched Jesus, in a way which I think we can all understand. He almost stood for Everyman at that moment. He could be any of us.

And then Jesus said this marvellous thing. ‘Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.’ That means all of us. We haven’t seen Jesus. We haven’t touched him. But to a greater or lesser extent, we Christians all believe. We believe that he rose from the dead. That makes a huge difference.

If you accept that this is possible, that that happened, that there is a life after death, that is going to make a big difference to you. But it probably isn’t going to make as much difference as it did to the disciples who actually saw him and touched him. They didn’t have any doubt. They believed.

So what effect did it have on them? One effect, one major effect, was what we have heard described in our reading from the Acts of the Apostles, that ‘those who believed were of one heart and soul’ and ‘no one claimed private ownership of any possessions. There was not a needy person among them,’ for ‘as many as owned lands or houses sold them’ and brought the proceeds of what they sold to be put into the common fund.

It looks like an early form of communism: at which point some of you may start to fidget and mutter about not mixing politics and religion – but perhaps another way of looking at it is to compare this passage with some of the Sermon on the Mount: that Jesus seems to have been talking in a utopian way, not a practical way. Turning the other cheek; not going for an eye for an eye but loving your enemies: just not practical, you might say. Just as you might well say that although a form of communism looks to be ideal, our experience in the last 2000 years has told us that it’s just not practical.

Perhaps meeting Jesus risen from the dead had made the disciples feel that they could do anything, that they could ignore practicalities and just go for whatever was the best and most ideal thing. What do we, 2000 years later, we who have not seen and yet have come to believe, are we able to do idealistic things? Maybe looking again at Thomas we might have to admit that although we do believe, perhaps our belief is not as strong as Thomas’ became – once he had touched the Lord.

Maybe we do still have a few doubts, and therefore to some extent in our lives we still play safe. So although living in a commune and sharing everything sounds great in some ways, we are cautious about throwing caution to the winds and selling up. But there is something there. There is definitely something which we could say. In the context of the extreme difference between rich and poor that the neoliberalism of the last 40 years or so, has produced, the emphasis on individualism, that everyone has the seeds of their own success in them, all you have to do is to get on your bike, as one of the politicians said at the time, all that is beginning to ring rather hollow, because just like the commune which the apostles operated, it doesn’t really work. It doesn’t make us love our neighbours or, increasingly, love God.

So now in this Easter season, when we are Easter people, let’s think hard about what that really means and whether we can say, ‘Lord I believe; help thou mine unbelief’[Mark 9:24]. That still means we believe, and it still means we can do something to show that we believe. Tomorrow it will be the Festival of the Annunciation, the angel announcing to Mary that she will be the mother of the son of God. The Bible lesson will be the Magnificat, which is arguably one of the greatest revolutionary texts in all of literature.

’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.’ [Luke 1]

Maybe Thomas was on to something. No doubt about it.

Tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Categories Uncategorized

An Eye for an Eye

By hughdbryant
November 5, 2023 //
0

From a Sermon for All Saints and All Souls, 5th November 2023

By Hugh Bryant

I think we need to give some time, as Christians, not only to the Saints and to the souls of our faithful departed, but also to all the other people who have died and tragically are still dying today, in circumstances where we need to cry out to the Lord and pray for his comfort and relief.

Until a month ago if I had been preaching this sermon, I would’ve mentioned first the war in Ukraine, and indeed I still do so. We will pray for a just and peaceful outcome to that terrible conflict. The same is true of the conflicts in Syria, Yemen and the Sudan.

But I suppose that, particularly as it is happening in or near to places we read about or have made pilgrimages to in the Holy Land, the conflict that is uppermost in our minds today, and which is exercising us so much, is the tragic conflict in Israel and Palestine, and particularly in Gaza – and in the area just outside Gaza where the conflict began, with the terrible attack on the people in the kibbutz and the music festival, by Hamas.

There are saints and souls here as well. In our Old Testament lesson some of us will probably have been moved by the thought that our reading comes in the middle of a passage in Isaiah [chapter 66] where the prophet sets out a vision of the new earth, of the new Jerusalem, of God’s holy mountain; a vision perhaps of heaven. A vision of the promised land, where God’s chosen people will come ‘on horses and chariots’, (and also on ‘dromedaries’, you’ll be pleased to know.) They will come ‘to my holy mountain, Jerusalem’, says the Lord.

But what is happening in Israel and Palestine does not look like what is supposed to be happening on God’s holy mountain. There are Christians caught up in this as well. Admittedly the number of Christians living in the Holy Land has diminished greatly, but there are Palestinian and Israeli Christians as well; and Saint George’s Cathedral in Jerusalem. What do the Christians say? What would Jesus say?

In all the discussions about whether there have been breaches of international law there is a key concept, we are told, which is ‘proportionality’. In self defence, is the response proportional? It sounds very like what Jesus was talking about in the Sermon on the Mount. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.

Scholars have told us that the principle of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, which comes in Exodus chapter 21, Leviticus 24 or Deuteronomy chapter 19, means not that there is carte blanche to take revenge without restraint but that, just as in international law, any retaliation must be strictly in proportion, so only one eye for one eye and only one tooth for one tooth.

Let us look at what has happened and what is happening in the light of that. Leave aside for a minute what principles Hamas may have followed to justify their initial attack – and of course we have heard from the United Nations Secretary General Mr Guterres and others that it didn’t come from nowhere, but only after many years of oppression of the people of Gaza.

But leaving that on one side, Hamas killed just under 2000 people, but at the last count Israel has killed over 9000 people, of whom 4000 have been children; and it is not the case that they have been retaliating just against their enemies, because it’s quite clear that only a very small minority of the people in Gaza belong to Hamas. So even according to the Jewish law as set out in Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy, the law of ‘an eye for an eye’, it looks as though what Israel has been doing is wrong. And it follows that it is a clear breach of international law. As indeed was the initial Hamas attack, because, however frustrated and oppressed the people of Gaza may be, nothing would justify the violence which Hamas meted out on seventh October.

So where are the saints? What should we, as Jesus’ saints, say? Jesus had an answer. As reported in Saint Matthew’s Gospel chapter 5, Jesus said, ‘You have heard that it was said, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. But I say to you, do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also… And again, you have heard that it was said, you shall love your neighbour and hate your enemies. But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.’

Just imagine what might happen if Israel adopted that strategy! They would no longer be trying to annihilate Hamas, and if so, Hamas would surely no longer want them to be erased from the earth – it would no longer be an eye for an eye. The Good Friday Agreement shows that it can happen.

So when we pray for all saints and all souls, let us pray also that Jesus’ message, the message of love and peace, will finally be listened to, and that there will be peace in the Holy Land.

Tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Categories Uncategorized

The Lawfulness of Love

By hughdbryant
October 16, 2023 //
0

Sermon at Evensong on 15th October 2023 at All Saints Church, Penarth

Bible readings referred to:

https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=564029064

Writing a sermon this week has been a challenge. In the face of the terrible events in Israel and Palestine, it doesn’t seem right for me just to give you a more or less academic, measured exposition of two Bible lessons, coupled with some observations on the words of the psalm, unless that analysis and exposition in some way bears on how we as Christians should respond to the crisis in the Middle East.

I am not going to add much to the huge number of more or less wise words which have been written or said by commentators, journalists and scholars, who all know far more than I do. 

But starting with our Bible readings; how can a sentence such as the beginning of our new Testament lesson, “See what love the father has given us, that we should be called children of God”, say anything about the bestial violence perpetrated by Hamas and the disproportionate retribution meted out by Israel? I honestly think that the only thing we can say is that two wrongs do not make a right. But that doesn’t take away the wrongness of either of the wrongs.

I suggest that there will be no chance of restoring peace unless the parties understand where the actions being taken are supposed to lead. What is the ultimate objective? Granted, of course, that Israel has the right to defend itself, what should that mean, precisely? Does the objective justify breaking international law? Cutting off fresh water, food and power, and forcing the civilian population of an area to leave, are said, by representatives of the United Nations, of the World Health Organisation and of the EU, to be breaches of that law.

Everybody can trade historical references. Moses leading the Jews into the ‘promised land’. The Balfour Declaration in 1917, according to which there would be created a national home for the Jews in Palestine, on the express understanding that no harm would be done to the indigenous inhabitants, to the Palestinians, by the arrival of the Jews; the creation of the state of Israel, following a revolt against British rule, carried out by what we would regard as a terrorist organisation, the Stern Gang, in which Yitzhak Shamir, who became the prime minister of Israel, figured prominently, in the end of the 1940s; The Six-Day War; the Yom Kippur War; the Camp David agreement; the two state solution; they are all earnestly rehearsed by somebody or other in relation to this crisis.

Not all – not many – Palestinians are terrorists; they don’t all belong to Hamas. Not all Jews are Zionists, supporting the occupation of settlements on the West Bank in contravention of United Nations resolutions. 

But the world stands by. 

What does it mean for a government to say they ‘stand with’ Israel? Does it mean that they turn a blind eye if the international law against making war on civilians is ignored? They are happy to condemn Hamas for exactly the same crime, for that is the nature of Hamas’ terrorism, that they made war on civilians.

So what does St John say in his first letter? He says that ‘everyone who commits sin is guilty of lawlessness’, and that ‘sin is lawlessness’. It’s not specified in the Greek text which law is being referred to, just ‘law’. The New English Bible dares to say that it is the law of God. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength. And thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. 

That is the essence of the law of God. But it doesn’t actually say that here. It just says that committing sin is to be lawless, is to break the law. So that could also be the law of man, including international law. So you could say that, according to St John’s first letter, a lot of what is going on in the Middle East, on both sides, is sinful.

But, as the editor of the Church Times, Paul Handley, says in his editorial this week, ‘The conventions of war are fictions. They apply a veneer of civilisation to violence, but they lure people into the confused business of judging relative guilt and innocence. There is, of course, no difference between an infant in Kibbutz Kfar Aza, stabbed to death by a Hamas militant, or an infant in a flat in Gaza City, killed by a retaliatory Israeli missile strike.’

Our psalm today is that wonderful vision of God knowing every bit about us, even before we were made, and saying that we are “fearfully and wonderfully made”. But looking at what’s going on in Gaza, and just outside, that isn’t really the psalm that we would choose.“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” – Psalm 22, seems much more apt. But, maybe, there is still ground for hope. 

Recent history has at least two wonderful examples, where people who were mired in conflict, bitterly hating one another, and committing atrocities, found ways to bring about peace; in apartheid South Africa, and in Northern Ireland during the time of the troubles. In Northern Ireland they made the Good Friday agreement, and in South Africa, Nelson Mandela got Archbishop Tutu to run the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Just as Saint John says, “What we will be has not yet been revealed“, rather in the way that St Paul said, in his first letter to the Corinthians, that, although today we see ‘as through a glass, darkly’, then we shall see him face-to-face: so John also says, “We must not be like Cain who was from the evil one and murdered his brother…. We know that we have passed from death to life because we love one another”. Can we bring love back to the Middle East?

The former Israeli ambassador in London, Mark Regev, was interviewed on Newsnight by Mark Urban. When asked how he would justify invading Gaza and killing civilians as well as Hamas fighters, he said, ‘What else would you do? If the world sees that Hamas can attack Israel and Israel does nothing, Israel will no longer be safe’.

But what if there was truth and reconciliation? What if Israel made Gaza something other than a giant prison camp; what if the Palestinians were able to travel freely and engage in economic activity without restraint? Then surely Israel need no longer feel threatened by what the editor of the Church Times describes as ‘a young Gazan man, brutalised from childhood by the deprivations inflicted by Israel and infected by the murderous ideology of the Hamas organisation’.

Then I believe we could have sure and certain hope, that we will see the present things as sinful as they are; hope that we will see ourselves as the Lord sees us, and that peace will come again through the lawfulness of love. 

Let it be so: Lord, hear our prayer.

Tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Categories Uncategorized

Reassuringly Expensive?

By hughdbryant
March 8, 2021 //
0

Sermon for the Third Sunday of Lent, 7th March 2021

John 2:13-22

‘My house is the house of prayer – but you have made it a den of thieves.’ The story about Jesus turning out the moneychangers and people selling animals and birds for sacrifice in the temple is one that we are all very familiar with, probably particularly the ‘den of thieves’. But you’ll realise that the version of the story which was our gospel today doesn’t actually contain those words, ‘den of thieves’. The ‘den of thieves’ version appears in all in all the other gospels, in Matthew, Mark and Luke [Matt. 21:12-17, Mark 11:15-17, Luke 19:45-48], but not in St John’s Gospel, which we read from today.

Here in St John’s account, Jesus ejected from the Temple all the various people selling things there, saying, ‘…you must not turn my father’s house into a market’ [NEB]. In St John’s Gospel, the people that Jesus kicked out of the temple were not thieves, but were simply people running a market, a shop – the word in Greek, το εμπορίον, is the same as our ‘emporium’ – running a shop in a place where they should not have done. Maybe that can give us an idea what Jesus thought about commerce and places of worship. So how should the church interact with the market?

I went once to a very interesting seminar on charity fundraising, and one of the speakers was the Revd Dr Sam Wells, whom I’m sure a lot of you will have heard on ‘Thought for the Day’ in the morning. He is the vicar of St Martin in the Fields in Trafalgar Square.

Sam Wells’ contribution to the seminar was all about the commercial activities of Saint Martin in the Fields. For example the church runs, and charges for, concerts, and they have a big restaurant in the crypt in the basement. Dr Wells was robustly in favour of his church’s commercial activities because, he said, it made it possible for them to do more charitable things than if they just had to rely on what people put in the collection plate. And I’m sure no-one thinks that St Martin’s is a den of thieves!

Perhaps we get a better idea what Jesus was driving at from the context of the story in the Bible. In St John’s Gospel this story of the cleaning out of the temple comes at the beginning of the gospel, immediately after the story of the turning of water into wine at the wedding in Cana in Galilee. In the other gospels the story comes right at the end just before Jesus’ trial and crucifixion.

Whereas, in the other three gospels, the ‘cleansing’ of the temple was taken as a provocation by the Jewish authorities, leading on to Jesus’ trial, in John’s account the emphasis is much more on the bit about rebuilding of the temple in three days, looking forward to Jesus’ resurrection after three days, with a sort of pun on the word ‘temple’, so that it’s not only the building, but also the physical body of Jesus, and his resurrection – the quintessential sign of his divine nature – that they are talking about.

The way that the first three gospels look at it, they emphasise the den of thieves, the corruption, the cheating; but in St John’s Gospel Jesus simply says you mustn’t be running a shop, any shop, in the temple. There is no suggestion in John’s account that the shopkeepers were ripping people off. It was just that commercial activity wasn’t appropriate in the temple.

If Jesus’ saying about pulling down and rebuilding the temple in three days was a metaphor, a metaphor for his own death and resurrection, was the chucking out of all the paraphernalia of animal sacrifice perhaps not also a metaphor, a metaphorical way of showing that God no longer needed to be appeased, bought off, by being given the carcasses of poor innocent dead animals and birds?

If we see God in that light, instead of a God to be feared, who has to be bought off by sacrifices, Jesus’ message is that after him, divine retaliation and retribution will not be the way forward, but that forgiveness and hope are the ways of the kingdom.

I don’t think we should picture the Temple with any old shops in it – surely these were special shops, just selling what you needed for the worship in the temple. It wasn’t a question of opening a branch of Marks & Spencer in a side chapel of the temple.

But even so, Jesus was passionately opposed to having those shops in the Temple. For him I think it was the whole question of values, and possibly false values, implicit in the idea of markets. Are markets really the only way which we have to reach a fair assessment of the value of something? Do you value things only because they have a certain value in the marketplace?

Take footballers, for instance. Footballers are exceptional in all sorts of ways, but one of them is that leading footballers have a very visible price tag. They are bought and sold almost like a commodity. We are not quite back in the world of the slave trade but, you know, people refer to each of the stars by reference to the cost of their last transfer. We say that a player ‘cost £20 million’. One of you, I’m sure, will be able to tell me immediately what David Beckham’s last transfer cost or what some of the current stars have cost their clubs. The other side of this, of course, is that when a footballer gets near the end of his career, he will get a free transfer. But – does that mean he’s not worth anything at all any more?

Is it right to value something or somebody highly only because they have a big price tag? Surely we’re not really talking about those kind of deals. Granted there are silly prices for exceptional things like football transfers, but still, surely it is all right to buy and sell ordinary things honestly for fair value. Or all right, provided you don’t have your shop in a place of worship.

Jesus doesn’t appear to have anything against people earning money, after all. There’s the story about the labourers in the vineyard (Matt. 20:1-17), getting the daily rate for the job irrespective of whether they have worked all day or just in the last hour. The argument was about how much they should be paid, not whether being paid at all was the right thing.

Because Jesus said that, if the one who works just for the last hour gets paid the same as the one who worked all the day, it shows that in his Kingdom the first shall be last and the last first – and so market values don’t work in heaven.

So what about the here and now? How should we value someone? Do I hear 1 per cent, for a nurse or a doctor? Or 40 per cent, for Dominic Cummings? What would our Lord say? What price would he put on those NHS angels?

But even though we might well say that doctors and nurses are worth more than any footballer, we need to remember the eternal truths about this. In this week’s Church Times, Dr Cally Hammond, the chaplain of Gonville and Caius, says, ‘Our relationship with God is not a financial transaction.’

She is surely right. You can’t buy your way to heaven in the Temple gift shop. Perhaps heaven is, like Kronenbourg – you know, ‘reassuringly expensive’. Or maybe not.

Hugh Bryant

Tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Categories Uncategorized

Uncomfortable Words

By hughdbryant
November 17, 2020 //
0

Commentary on ‘Identities are reduced to politics’ by Angela Tilby, Church Times, 6th November 2020: https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/198908

Hugh Bryant

Angela Tilby has written about being made to feel uncomfortable. She says, ‘We are all gradually being persuaded that to make anyone feel “uncomfortable” is tantamount to a hate crime’.

What she is talking about is not comfort in the sense of warmth or a nice armchair. The contrary – what it is to be uncomfortable, in the sense she intends – is the opposite of being ‘comfortable in one’s own skin’; and that ‘skin’ is not the characteristic of an individual but of a group, of ‘class, colour, ethnicity, or religion’.

In other words, it’s not a good thing to make people feel uncomfortable on the basis of those generic characteristics, of what they are, as opposed to anything which they may have done or said. Tilby says, ‘This is why I regularly feel uncomfortable at hymns and preachy prayers that glare unforgivingly at various social injustices’.

What brought me up short in her article was this reference to a feeling of discomfort at ‘hymns and preachy prayers that glare unforgivingly at various social injustices’.

This is something I have often wondered about. For instance, I have often wondered about people who profess to be Christians in positions of power, who, in the exercise their power, do things which would seem to contradict Jesus’ commandments, (usually the commandment to love thy neighbour as thyself).

A case in point, I have thought, was Prime Minister May, who is said to be a regular churchgoer, but who created and promoted a policy of a ‘hostile environment’ for intending immigrants, leading to various inhumane consequences including the EMPIRE WINDRUSH scandal. What did Mrs May do in church? Was she asleep there? I wondered. The policy which she promoted was something which hurt people, which ruined innocent people’s lives. How could a practising Christian justify doing such a thing?

What is a preacher to say? I think that Canon Tilby is really aiming not at certain hymns and prayers, but rather at what is said from the pulpit. I’m not sure what hymns she has in mind – ‘Fight the good fight’, or maybe the suppressed verse in All Things Bright and Beautiful: ‘The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate …’ It might well be uncomfortable to sing that, and it might well be uncomfortable – certainly for the rich man – to hear it. Is there anything wrong in this? Specifically, does the hymn ‘glare unforgivingly at social injustices’? If it did, I feel, contrary to Canon Tilby, that it is a good thing. The injustices deserve to be glared at.

To pray for wrongs to be righted isn’t ‘preachy’, I would suggest. If the prayer is of the ‘Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes-Benz’ type, it’s clearly inappropriate, not because it makes anyone uncomfortable, but because you can’t tell the Almighty what to do. Thy kingdom come: Thy will be done. Thy will. Or see Psalm 115: ‘Our God is in heaven; He does as He pleases’.

Some would say that this is political, and therefore to be avoided. I have to reply that Christianity – and, for that matter, Judaism – is political. The Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55), for instance, is a revolutionary manifesto in twelve sentences, and there are many other examples. Jesus would have us sell our possessions and give money to the poor: would have us welcome strangers: become servants, rather than the masters that many of us are.

It is said, however, that a Church of England congregation often represents the Conservative Party at prayer. Bishops and clergy, by contrast, tend to vote Liberal Democrat or Labour. Perhaps this is because the ministers actually read, study and inwardly digest the liturgy and Bible lessons which they lead, whereas their flock follow, if not blindly, seemingly without much appreciation that acceptable worship does not involve a prosperity gospel!

But what if light dawns, say during a well-expressed sermon, and the hearer realises that the evil which the preacher is criticising – the social injustice, even – is something in which they, the listener, are complicit? This may indeed be uncomfortable. But surely it is all right, for ‘our God is a consuming fire’ (Hebrews 12:29). Unless our devotion is tested in that fire, it may not be worth that much.

But is it a ‘hate crime’ to make someone uncomfortable in that sort of way? The essence of a hate crime, I would suggest, is to do harm to someone because he or she represents a racial or national type and for no other reason. Because someone is black, or LGBTi, say. What Canon Tilby is suggesting is that some hymns or prayers, in praying for relief from certain types of oppression or inequality, themselves oppress some people (or make them uncomfortable).

That would require the person discomfited to be in some way oppressive or otherwise reprehensible, as opposed to their doing something oppressive.

Canon Tilby mentions being a woman; but I cannot think that ipso facto she is worthy of chastisement as such – if at all. If she is being made to feel uncomfortable, it is not because of what she is, but because of something she may feel she ought not to have done – and that she resents being reminded of.

Put another way, as the Roman Catholics say, hate the sin but pardon the sinner. So a prayer or a hymn directed against social injustice is not a ‘hate crime’. It invokes the aid of the Almighty against the evil but does not condemn the person who does that evil. It is not directed against what that person is; but rather it may well call down condemnation on what they do.

14th November 2020

Tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Categories Uncategorized
« Older Entries