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The Morning After

By hughdbryant
April 21, 2024 //
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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.

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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.

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An Eye for an Eye

By hughdbryant
November 5, 2023 //
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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.

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The Lawfulness of Love

By hughdbryant
October 16, 2023 //
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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.

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Reassuringly Expensive?

By hughdbryant
March 8, 2021 //
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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

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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

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The Feeding of the Five Thousand

By hughdbryant
August 2, 2020 //
0

Sermon for the Eighth Sunday after Trinity, 2nd August 2020

Matthew 14:13-21 – see http://bible.oremus.org/?ql=463368596

When I saw that the Gospel reading for today was the story of the feeding of the 5000, my first reaction was to be very pleased. Everybody knows that story, and there are lots of things that you can say, that it illustrates, about Jesus and his teaching. It’s in all the gospels, but in St Matthew’s version, which Gail has just read for us, we have the least detailed version. For example it does not talk, as some of the other gospels do, about Jesus getting the people to sit down in groups of 50. 100 groups of 50 people – that really brings home the scale of the feeding problem.

There are lots of things that you can talk about. Bishop Jo, in her sermon for today, which you can see on YouTube, (see https://youtu.be/EqGmtC-Rlio) concentrates on Jesus’ order to the people to sit down. She spends quite a lot of time on the theology of sitting down, and also how to tell people how to sit down. Apparently when she and her husband Sam Wells were working in the United States, at Duke University in North Carolina, he got taken to task for saying to people, ‘Please sit down’, which apparently is not sufficiently polite. In the southern States the correct thing to say is, ‘You may sit down’. Sitting down and taking it easy for a moment has its benefits.

And then again, you can make a lot out of Jesus looking up to heaven, blessing and breaking the loaves of bread, (and, presumably, doing something similar with the fish), and then distributing them; it certainly could remind you of Holy Communion, and perhaps is supposed to be a sign that Jesus was pointing forward, towards that sacrament.

We use the expression ‘to break bread together’ as a shorthand for having a meal, and I have heard preachers deliver long and abstruse analyses of the menu on the shore of the Sea of Galilee that day; that Jesus was handing out fish and chips, or rather, not literally fish and chips, but the Palestinian equivalent.

It’s interesting that there has been some fuss on social media recently because Mr Rees-Mogg, the MP, has a sister, who rejoices in the name of Annunziata, who has been giving advice to poor people about the virtues of making their own chips as opposed to buying them ready-made. It doesn’t touch on the question whether poor people, or indeed any people, should be eating chips, especially these days, in the light of the Prime Minister‘s campaign for the people to lose weight.

As some of you know, two weeks ago I ceased to be the general manager of Cobham Area Foodbank, after seven years, right back to the foundation of the Foodbank. I still have a tendency to see things relevant to food banks in all sorts of different contexts.

So obviously, Jesus feeding the 5000, in fact feeding them with something that Burger King used to refer to as a Fish King, a piece of fish in a burger bun, (or anyway wrapped in bread) – which was much loved by my children when they were little – that reminds me of all those times when I had to answer questions about what food people should donate to the food bank.

A Fish King from Burger King

What do poor people eat? Well, I would explain that the Foodbank gives out a nutritionally balanced parcel intended to sustain a family until the next time that the Foodbank opens. In our case this was one week. It is not the case that we just provide pasta and beans and other cheap things, because, as I tried to explain, the Foodbank clients, poor people who can’t afford to buy food, are human beings.

They are not a special breed of people who only live on pasta and beans. They are human beings just like you and me. So the real answer to the question, ‘What shall I give to the Foodbank?’ is not what’s cheap, but rather, “What would you like to eat?” And what would you think would be good to eat and nutritious? You don’t live on baked beans all the time – or at least I really hope that you don’t – and it’s the same with food bank clients. They need a variety of things. They need protein, even if it comes in tins.

Well I could have gone into great detail about that, and compared Annunziata Rees-Mogg’s recommended diet for poor people with what a food bank actually provides, noting on the way that Jesus followed the same principles as our Foodbank. ‘Man shall not live by bread alone’ – because, He provided some fish as well.

But the thing is that I bet that none of you actually think of this story as being just about all those rather abstruse points. Indeed I get a bit fed up when I hear sermons which don’t deal with the obvious things which I think leap out of stories in the Bible.

The obvious thing, that you would notice when you read it for the first time, is that Jesus somehow managed to feed 5000 people – or actually more than 5000 people, because it says that it was 5000 men, plus women and children – with five loaves of bread and two fish. How on earth could He do that?

I can’t honestly remember what my Mum or my Dad said in answer to that question when I first asked it when I was little, but I bet you that it had something to do with miracles. Miraculum, a Latin word – something to admire, something the be astonished at. Are we allowed to talk about miracles, or are we too grown-up? Do you believe in miracles?

When I went to Rome in October for the canonisation of John Henry Newman, I was reminded that Newman was only allowed to become a saint in the Roman Catholic Church when they had discovered and verified two miracles that he had performed, miracles of healing. Many people today do still believe in miracles. They believe in what Saint Athanasius or Saint Thomas Aquinas argued, that miracles are there to demonstrate that Jesus was not just a man like you or me, but he was also God and he had divine powers.

It’s not all straightforward. Think of Jesus being tempted in the desert, to jump down from the pinnacle of the temple for example. Satan wanted him to do all sorts of miraculous things which only someone with divine powers would be able to do. But he didn’t do it. But Jesus does go around healing people. Indeed, in this story it begins by Jesus ‘having compassion’ on the crowd and healing some people who were sick. No details. It’s just very simply said, in one word, ‘he healed’.

People say that scientific knowledge has pushed out the need for us to explain things by talking about God. CS Lewis however wrote a whole book, ‘Miracles’, against what he called the ‘naturalistic’ as opposed to the ‘supernatural’, the more-than-natural. Laws of nature, by themselves, don’t explain everything: that if nature governs everything, there is a contradiction at the heart of it. That is, who created nature? Was that creator subject to the laws of nature?

So over against that is the argument that there is more to it than what we can discover by scientific enquiry. More to it – let’s say, that ‘more’ is God. We can fairly uncontroversially define God as the ultimate creator and sustainer of life, all powerful and all knowing. Present everywhere: omnipresent.

But he could be what Richard Dawkins calls the blind watchmaker, the ultimate creator, who set the mechanism of the world in being, and then let it get on by itself. We as Christians bring up against that things such as the feeding of the 5000. We bring up the fact of Jesus Christ. The fact that Jesus Christ lived and died, in the early years of the first century of the Common Era, is very well attested in conventional history.

We can argue that the story of Jesus would not still be so well-known today and it would not be the case that the Christian religion would be growing so strongly as it is (you have to remember that growth in South America and the Far East is far greater than in the north of Europe) – Christianity would not indeed be the fastest growing religion in the world, if Jesus Christ had been just an ordinary human like you or me.

So the point of this sermon, in case you had not realised, is that the feeding of the 5000 is a miracle, and as a miracle it is a sign of God at work in Jesus.

So in a way I hope that you don’t have a Fish King from Burger King for lunch; but if you do, please do remember that a forerunner of the Fish King was Jesus’ favoured menu.

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Emily Maitlis’ Wise Words

By hughdbryant
April 10, 2020 //
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A Reflection at Easter, April 2020

By Hugh Bryant

‘The language around COVID-19 has sometimes felt trite and misleading. You do not survive the illness through fortitude and strength of character, whatever the Prime Minister’s colleagues’ll tell us. And the disease is not a great leveller, the consequences of which everyone, rich or poor, suffers the same. This is a myth which needs debunking. Those serving on the front line right now, bus drivers and shelf stackers; nurses, care home workers, hospital staff and shopkeepers, are disproportionately the lower-paid members of our workforce. They are more likely to catch the disease because they are more exposed. Those who live in tower blocks and small flats will find the lock-down tougher; those in manual jobs will be unable to work from home. This is a health issue with huge ramifications for social welfare, and it’s a welfare issue with huge ramifications for public health. Tonight, as France goes into recession, and the World Trade Organisation warns the pandemic could provoke the deepest economic downturn of our lifetimes, we ask what kind of social settlement might need to be put in place to stop the inequality becoming even more stark.’ (Emily Maitlis, introducing ‘Newsnight’, BBC Two, 8th April 2020.)

That was such a grown-up and eloquent comment on the COVID-19 plague, that my first reaction was to scratch around to see whether Emily Maitlis had been quoting some eminent philosopher or grand old man or a woman of world affairs when she introduced ‘Newsnight’ on BBC2 on Wednesday night. But my instinct was unworthy. She is a very talented journalist in her own right and those are her words.

Her words are among the most apt and most challenging words in the torrent of verbiage which the first week of lockdown has produced. I can’t really get excited by this procession of metropolitan sophisticates discovering the joys of birdsong and blue-skies-without-aeroplanes, empty roads and silence.

I’m sure there is a place for all those good things, but somehow I don’t think that, when this is all over, historians will look back and celebrate stumbling prose about the unaccustomed joys of birdsong. Instead our generation will be judged on how we dealt with this ‘health issue with huge ramifications for social welfare, [or] …welfare issue with huge ramifications for public health’, as Emily Maitlis so eloquently put it.

It seems extraordinarily apt that Emily Maitlis said what she did on the eve of Maundy Thursday. For Christians, Maundy Thursday is the day when they remember Jesus washing the disciples’ feet. The son of God, arguably the most important man who has ever lived, doing the same sort of thing that a care home worker does, washing the dirty bits, becoming a servant. As we have seen in this COVID-19 plague, the sort of thing that Jesus was doing can become very dangerous. So dangerous that only people who don’t matter are put in the line of risk. Only the expendable ones, although nobody spells this out. As Emily Maitlis said, the bus drivers, the shelf stackers, nurses, care home workers, hospital staff and shopkeepers. The government has advertised jobs in the new Nightingale Hospital at the Excel Centre including receptionists at £37,500 per annum, when at the same time nurses and doctors, after years of training, start at less than £25,000.

Somebody will say that the market justifies this, that there are fewer people willing to be receptionists in the Nightingale hospital than there are willing to be doctors and nurses in that dangerous place. Therefore by the inexorable laws of supply and demand the willing, the brave, are worth less than those in short supply. Put that way, the proposition looks quite indefensible. How could the market, even if it is correct in identifying shortages in that way, be the only guide to the value of these vital people’s work?

But wait a minute. How does the market account for the fact that there is a shortage of doctors and nurses, tens of thousands of doctors and nurses? Either the market is not functioning properly, as their value is not rising to reflect their scarcity, in which case all these political statements based on “realism” and “the market” are not true, or the market as an index of value is not actually accurate. Either way there is a glaring injustice. As Emily Maitlis put it, ‘… what kind of social settlement might need to be put in place to stop the inequality becoming even more stark?’ How are people to be valued in future?

Christians have a number of pointers in front of them, particularly at this time in Holy Week and Easter. So much of what Jesus did and said was counterintuitive and back-to-front. Before he was born, when an angel announced to Mary that she would be the mother of the Messiah, what she said, “My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my saviour…’: this speech, this aria, this canticle, is one of the most subversive, even one of the most revolutionary, passages in the whole of literature. ‘For he hath regarded the lowliness of his handmaiden’. God chose an ordinary young girl; he selected her knowing that she was one of the little people. ‘He that is mighty hath magnified me’. The omnipotent, the divine, the greatest power, has chosen me, small and insignificant, and made me great.

‘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.’

This is what God is doing. This is the implication of his having chosen someone not special, just an ordinary girl; but having chosen that person to be the mother of the divine incarnation, God with us. God in human form. She wasn’t in any way rare or perfect or uniquely suited to this job. She was just an ordinary girl from a humble background. God’s choice implies a direct challenge to the value system that we have had and we have in our world today. The Magnificat shows up and challenges head-on the great divide in our society between the rich and the poor, between the great and the little people.

That was before Jesus was born. The Magnificat points to how he is going to operate. It points forward to the Sermon on the Mount, the longest sustained piece of counterintuitive argument that you are ever going to come across. The Beatitudes: ‘blessed are the – poor: blessed are the meek. Not ‘blessed are the people in large houses riding about in Lamborghinis’. (See Matt. 5,6 and 7 http://bible.oremus.org/?ql=453535527)

In one sense I disagree with Emily Maitlis. She says, ‘And the disease is not a great leveller, the consequences of which everyone, rich or poor, suffers the same.’ I know – indeed I passionately agree with – what she means. But in one important sense, there is equality. We are all – wherever in the world we come from – we are all creatures of God, made in His image. The virus is not a leveller, as Emily Maitlis rightly says. It affects all humans – and, unfortunately, tigers too.

Where it does not level us is shown by what happens when the virus has struck someone. Then it depends where you are and how wealthy you are, either as an individual or because you belong to a rich society, whether you will get full treatment. Even so, so far we have not yet discovered a cure, so even with the best treatment in an intensive care unit in a European or American or Far Eastern teaching hospital, you may still die – but you will be made as comfortable as possible, and you will have the very best chance of survival.

If on the other hand Coronavirus strikes and you are in a refugee camp on the border of Syria, in Jordan perhaps, or if you live in the slums of Calcutta or Bombay, or in many parts of Africa, there are far fewer doctors, far fewer hospitals, and no money or National Health Service to pay for your treatment. In the USA, except in one or two enlightened states such as Massachusetts, unless you can afford to buy expensive health insurance, no-one will treat you.

But perhaps the reason why this is so wrong, and why this is a ‘health issue with huge ramifications for social welfare’, is that there is no good reason why some people should be so much better off than others – or rather, that so many people should be so much worse off than the fortunate few. Why should there be any entitlement in an accident of birth? Rich and poor, G7 or Third World, we are all susceptible to COVID-19. But if we are all liable to suffer, should we not all share the means of salvation?

Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, spoke recently about the objective of the Good Life (with a capital G and L) being, not, as theologians and philosophers from Aristotle to Thomas Aquinas have argued, ‘human flourishing’ (ευδαιμονία) but rather, the objective, the objective of the Good Life, is to be safe. Safe. Safe from harm. Safe from disease. Safe from hunger.

Again, Christians can turn to the teaching of Jesus. Think of the Great Judgment in St Matthew chapter 25 (from verse 31), the division of the sheep and the goats, the saved – the ones who are safe – and those condemned to eternal damnation. Hunger. Thirst. Disease. They are at the heart of it. What did you do for them? No suggestion that some hungry people, or thirsty people, or poorly people, might deserve to be safe, to be saved, more than others. Absolutely not. Jesus says that He is in all of us, however lowly.

Again, just as God chose the humble Mary, so ‘the righteous will [say]…, “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and fed you, or thirsty and gave you drink, a stranger and took you home, or naked and clothed you? When did we see you ill or in prison, and come to visit you?” And the king will answer, “I tell you this: anything you did for one of my brothers here, however humble, you did for me”. (Matt. 25:37-40, NEB). (Jesus would surely have wanted to be explicitly gender-neutral if he had been saying this today, and would surely have said, ‘anything you did for one of my brothers and sisters here, however humble, you did for me.’)

So at this Easter time, when we remember Jesus’ amazing self-abasement, his humbling himself to wash the disciples’ feet, and then his enduring the most terrible torture and death – being the most important man on earth, but beaten and strung up to die with common criminals, as a common criminal, because that was actually his rank, his lowly position in society – and then rising in triumph, leaving the empty tomb: when we reflect on that extraordinary sequence of events, the Triduum, the Three Days, we can realise that there is an alternative. There is an alternative to the dominion of the market. There is an alternative to people who know the price of things but not their value. The fact that Jesus beat death – and that must be about the most counterintuitive thing he ever did – has given us hope: the ‘sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life’. And that is for everyone, for everyone who could possibly catch COVID, wherever they are and whatever flag they fly.

Emily Maitlis concluded, asking ‘what kind of social settlement might need to be put in place to stop the inequality becoming even more stark’. That is the most important thing we have to do when the medical campaign against COVID-19 has been won. It is a huge challenge: but Jesus has given us hope, hope that we can do it. The Easter message is one of hope, and of salvation, that we can make that Good Life, where all people, everywhere, are safe.

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Brexit, Prophecy and Theology

By hughdbryant
August 26, 2019 //
0

Sermon for Evensong on the Tenth Sunday after Trinity, 25th August 2019 – Prophetic and Theological Considerations in the Brexit Debate

Isaiah 30:8-21; [2 Corinthians 9] – see http://bible.oremus.org/?ql=433650150

The first part of the Book of the Prophet Isaiah, sometimes known as ‘First Isaiah’, (because scholars think that there were three prophets whose work is collectively known as the Book of the Prophet Isaiah), ‘the first book of Isaiah’, was written in the 8th century BCE. It’s been pointed out that that century was one of the pivotal points in the history of modern civilisation.

It was the time when the Homeric legends, the Iliad and the Odyssey, were first being recited by travelling bards; in the British Isles, Celts, refugees from mainland Europe, were pouring into Cornwall; Egypt was where the most sophisticated culture was, and Assyria (Syria, roughly) was the most powerful imperial power. It was a time of religious stirrings. Zoroaster was born in Persia in about 650BCE. The Upanishads were written in India probably between c. 800 BCE and c. 500 BCE. It was the time of Confucius and Tao in China.

E. H. Robertson has written, ‘Over the whole world the spirit of God stirred the spirit of man. In Judah and Israel, four men spoke in the name of the living God, …’ [ Robertson, E. H., Introduction to J.B. Phillips, 1963, ‘Four Prophets’, London, Geoffrey Bles, p. xxv] These were the four prophets, Amos, Hosea, Isaiah and Micah. Just as in the middle of the 19th century it was a time of revolutions, and the end of the 20th century it was the beginning of the digital age, this, in the 8th century BCE, was another turning point in human history.

The spiritual narrative of this historic period was supplied, in Israel and Judah, by the four prophets.The great historical event in this period was the fall of Samaria in 732BCE, when the whole of the Northern Kingdom, Syria and Israel was depopulated and turned into Assyrian provinces. It was a great shock to the people of Israel left in the Southern Kingdom, Judah. Her prophets, particularly Isaiah, were finally listened to. ‘The general line taken by the prophets was, trust in God and keep out of foreign alliances.’ [Robertson, p.xxvi]

Our lesson tonight from chapter 30 of First Isaiah is exactly on this point. The prophet is saying that God has told him to tell the Israelites not to make an alliance with the Egyptians. But he complains that they are not taking any notice. How does God communicate with us?

I heard on the radio an absolutely fascinating programme about the fire in York Minster [http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0007pws]. This year, of course, we have had the terrible fire in Notre Dame in Paris, but in July 1984 there was a terrible fire in York Minster, which destroyed the roof of the south transept and caused extensive damage to the magnificent mediaeval Rose window.

Just before the fire, a new Bishop of Durham had been consecrated, David Jenkins. He was an academic theologian in the liberal theological tradition; in other words, he did not hold with a literal interpretation of everything in the Bible. Indeed, he went as far as saying that he didn’t think that the Virgin Birth necessarily literally took place.

When he was consecrated as Bishop of Durham, in York Minster, there was an outcry from some parts of the church; today no doubt it would have been a ‘Twitter storm’, protesting that Bishop Jenkins, Prof. Jenkins, was flying in the face of the traditional beliefs of the church over the previous 2,000 years. Some people went as far as to say that the fire in the Cathedral, in the Minster, which was attributed, by the surveyors who came to examine the wreckage, most probably to a lightning strike, that it was an ‘act of God’, literally, in that God had struck the Minster with lightning and set fire to it, as a way of showing His disapproval of the preferment of David Jenkins to the bishopric of Durham.

Isaiah was prophesying to the Israelites in the Southern Kingdom, Judah, against their making an alliance with Egypt. Judah heeded the prophecy, and did not make an alliance with Egypt. The Israelites were able to build the Temple and live in peace for nearly 100 years.

Now we are perhaps at another pivotal time in history – well, certainly in the history of this country; and perhaps if one includes as a key element in this current historical perspective the rise of populism, this pivotal time affects not only our country, but also the USA and Italy at least. We are noticing changes in our society as a result; there have been increases in nationalism and xenophobia, (with an unhealthy interest in where people have come from), leading to opposition to immigration, which also involves a ground-swell of racism.

In the British manifestation of this wave of populism, in the Brexit debate, there is also an emphasis on sovereignty – ‘take back control’, they say – as well as all the other features of populist politics. So in relation to all this, is there an Isaiah out there speaking to us? A prophetic voice, guiding us in relation to this turbulent time? And if there is, are we listening?

We look at some of the prophetic utterances in the Bible, and wonder if they might also be talking about our present age. Last week’s Gospel reading for instance, in which Jesus asks, ‘Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three. They will be divided father against son and son against father. ..’ [Luke 12:51f.]

Dare I say that Brexit has had very much the same effect? Friends have stopped speaking to each other. Families are divided. Literally billions have been spent on preparing for something which there is no agreement about, either within our population, our Parliament or with our European neighbours; at the same time our hospitals are desperate for resources, our schools, similarly, have often not got enough money for books, and our local authorities can’t afford to fill the potholes – and that’s not saying anything about the need for housing or the closures of our fire stations.

Is this another time when a prophet might say that God is punishing us, or that He may punish us? Revd Dr Jonathan Draper, the General Secretary of Modern Church (which used to be called the Modern Churchmen’s Union), who was the Dean of Exeter, in his conference speech in July, has tried to identify the theological aspects of the Brexit debate. I’ll put a link to his paper on the website with the text of this sermon. [Published written version: https://www.dropbox.com/s/5ees6m98pb25bh9/theology%20after%20brexit%20-%20final.docx?dl=0 – version as delivered: https://www.modernchurch.org.uk/2019/july-2019/1494-how-theology-has-failed-over-brexit]

He says, ‘Our national so-called ‘debate’ on Brexit has exposed deep, damaging, and shocking divisions: divisions that cut across families and friends, divisions that have exposed the raw experience of some of being entirely left out and ignored by the political and ecclesiastical ‘elite’, divisions that pit one part of the nation against others. Without even leaving, a deep and disturbing vein of xenophobia and racism has been exposed and even normalized in our public life.’

He goes on. ’Dr Adrian Hilton wrote ‘A Christian Case for Brexit’ on the website christiansinpolitics.org.uk. … His …. reasons for why Christians should want to be out of the EU [are], he writes, ‘about liberty, democracy, transparency, accountability, and the right to sack those who rule over me’.’ As Dr Draper points out, these are not theological reasons. There is nothing in the Bible to support these reasons.

In relation to the various things we have identified in the Brexit debate, it seems doubtful whether the ‘Christian case’ would in fact elevate ‘liberty, democracy, transparency, accountability, and the right to sack those who rule over me’ over such things as loving one’s neighbour – who, as the Good Samaritan found, might not be of the same nationality – and that anyway there is ‘no such thing as Jew and Greek’ in the Kingdom of God (Galatians 3:28) [https://biblehub.com/kjv/galatians/3.htm]- that nationality is not something which mattered to our Lord; and that political power, democratic or otherwise, wasn’t very important either, in the context of the Kingdom. More important to love (and therefore obey) the Lord your God. ‘Render unto Caesar’, indeed; but in those days democracy was practically non-existent.

Another theologian, Dr Anthony Reddie, has pointed out ‘a rising tide of white English nationalism’ and ‘the incipient sense of White entitlement’; that participants in the Brexit debate seem to have emphasised White English interests to the exclusion of other races and nationalities. Dr Reddie feels that the churches should be speaking out against this. He asks why the churches have not ‘measured Brexit against the standards of justice and equality’, loving God and loving neighbour. Dr Reddie also argues that churches ought to consider ‘not just the rights and wrongs of Brexit, but what it has done to us’. [Quoted in Dr Draper’s written text]

Dr Draper goes on to consider the theology of incarnation, of being the body of Christ, Christ incorporated in His church. It isn’t an individualistic thing. He quotes John Donne’s poem, ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’:

Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thy friend’s
Or of thine own were:
Any man’s death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind,
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; 
It tolls for thee.

He also says this.

‘This is not an argument for saying that we ought to stay in the EU. It is an argument for saying that a Christian theology of the Kingdom of God, being all one in Christ, drives us away from things that divide us and towards things that bring us together. … The impulse to unity ought to be strong for Christians. Walls, barriers that divide, theologies that exclude, have no part of the Christian vision.’

Where do we as a church stand in relation to the concept of human rights, for example? Our own MP, who is now the Foreign Secretary, has recently campaigned to abolish the Human Rights Act. This is something which our country adopted by signing up to a European convention – a convention which was actually drafted by English lawyers. Although the European Court of Human Rights is not an EU institution, it is seen, mistakenly, by some Brexit supporters as interference in our country’s sovereignty by the EU. What do we as Christians have to say about this? Surely, at this pivotal point in our national life, it is too important for us to stay silent. How does Brexit square with Jesus’ great human rights challenge at the end of St Matthew’s Gospel? Dr Draper, [in the version of his paper that he delivered], quoted it in this way.

“Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you? And the king will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me’. [Matt. 25: 37-40]”

He went on.

‘And let’s not spiritualise this either. To feed the hungry is a political act; to welcome the stranger is a political act: enacting, embodying the Christian faith is a political act. And sometimes that means not just praying for everyone but taking sides.’

That’s what Dr Draper said to the Modern Church conference. I don’t think Isaiah would have kept quiet either: but would we have heard him?

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‘The nature of God’s relationship with humanity’ – the mysterious unity of the death and resurrection of Jesus

By hughdbryant
April 22, 2019 //
4

‘To be a Christian is to be attentive to signs of God’s action in the world, and this is especially true in Holy Week and at Easter when – the faithful believe – Jesus by his death and resurrection revealed the nature of God’s relationship with humanity.’ Sometimes one finds profound theological statements in unlikely places. That sentence was from the first editorial in the Guardian on Wednesday 17th April. It is perhaps a slightly different way of putting the profound words ‘God so loved the world that He gave His only son …’

The three hours’ devotion service on Good Friday is concerned with sacrifice, about Jesus’ sacrifice, his terrible suffering and death. The service is unlike any other one in our Christian year. What makes it special is that we try to get really close to Jesus in his last hours, to understand what happened to him and what he did; as we often say in a theological context, to walk alongside him, or maybe rather to have him walk alongside us, in his time of trial.

To say the service is unlike any other one is not quite right, because every time we celebrate Holy Communion we remember Jesus’ sacrifice – ‘in the same night that he was betrayed, he took bread, and when he had given thanks to thee, he broke it and gave it to his disciples… and likewise after supper he took the cup; and when he had given thanks to thee, he gave it to them, saying, Drink ye all of this, for this is my blood of the new covenant’. The heart of the Eucharist service is a memorial of the Last Supper, before Jesus’s crucifixion and death. I’m not in any way trying to take away the significance of the holy Eucharist, but I am saying that the Good Friday service takes you further and takes you deeper in understanding, or rather, shall we say, in appreciating, what Jesus went through.

What I am going to try to do now is to address that question of understanding. I hope that you will more fully appreciate what Jesus suffered, what he went through; and to some extent you will understand why, at least in the historical sense of who did what to whom.

I’m not going to touch on the mechanics of the crucifixion or the literal historical data; what I want to concentrate on is trying to explain it. Why did Jesus have to die?

Perhaps today it’s more a question ‘Why did He die?’, not necessarily why he had to die. You could say, following the words of the Creed, that Jesus’ death was for us – ‘who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost and the Virgin Mary and was made man, and was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate’. Jesus himself said that ‘greater love hath no man than that he should lay down his life for his friend’. (I am quoting from the Book of Common Prayer, 1662, and the Authorised Version of the Bible, 1611, so it is necessary to point out that ‘man’ means ‘human being’). Or again, we hear that Jesus is the ‘propitiation for our sins’, making up for what we have done that is sinful.

There is a powerful romantic theme that occasionally people do heroic things where they suffer in somebody else’s place. St Paul, in his letter to the Romans [5:7-8], contrasts what you might call ordinary heroism, risking your life or even losing your life, to save someone else whom you might not know particularly well, but have nothing against, and what Jesus appears to have done, which is to give his life not for just anybody but for people who definitely don’t deserve it, who are sinners.

We don’t really talk about ritual sacrifice much these days. The idea of going to a temple and slaughtering some animal to give it ritually to God is completely alien to us in our modern world. But I think we know how it was supposed to work: that nobody could measure up to God’s perfect standard, and to the extent that you fell short – an example of falling short would be Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden – to the extent that you fell short you had to ask God for forgiveness, to make it up to him, to turn away God’s wrath.

This is allied with the idea of the Last Judgement, either at the end of the world, (if we can imagine that), or at the end of a person’s life. And again, although we couldn’t really describe with any certainty what to expect at that End Time, as it is called, there is a very common idea that there will be some kind of last judgement; and indeed in the Bible at the end of St Matthew’s Gospel there is a picture of the last judgement, the division of the sheep from the goats. ‘The Son of Man shall come in his glory and all the holy angels with him. Then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory and before him shall be gathered all nations. And he shall separate them one from another as a shepherd divideth the sheep from the goats’ (Matthew 25:31-32). In that context, Jesus is taking the punishment that sinful man would otherwise deserve.

But there is a little question mark. It is easy to miss this, but particularly in the context of this very solemn, contemplative service, when we are trying to get as close as we can to follow in Jesus’s footsteps on the way to the place of the Skull, Golgotha, where he was crucified, the little niggle, if you like, is quite a major issue in fact. It is this. God gave his only son. What does the word ‘gave’ mean, here? God is, after all, the creator and sustainer of everything and

everyone. Did He give his only son over to be hurt, to be whipped, to be insulted, to be humiliated, to be tortured and ultimately killed in the most bestial way? Because if he did that, how can we say that God is a loving God, that God wants the best for all of us, and if there is evil in the world, it has come in against God?

As you know, sin isn’t just, isn’t really at all, a question of doing bad things. It has a very particular meaning. It is about being separated, divided off from God, cut off from God. And the ‘salvation’ that we talk about, that we believe in, the eternal life – ‘so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have eternal life’ – that salvation is coming together with God, being united eternally. So in that context how could God give his nearest and dearest over to be horribly hurt and then killed? Something doesn’t add up.

At the very least it looks as though there is a paradox. How could the good God hurt anyone, least of all his own son? And if you were concerned about that, put yourself in Jesus’ position. You would feel uniquely deserted. We will say, towards the end of this service, the terrible words of Psalm 22: ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ It’s what Jesus said as he suffered. There is no more terrible protest in the whole of literature. ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’

But at the end of the Stations of the Cross, these days the last station is usually the station of the Resurrection. These days, particularly since the Roman Catholics dusted off the old idea in their second Vatican Council in the sixties, the most important message to the world from Easter is the message of what they call the Paschal Mystery, the ‘unity of the death and resurrection of Jesus’. The Paschal mystery; the mystery is that unity, that putting together, of opposites; that everything to do with Jesus is the opposite of what you would expect.

Think of the Sermon on the Mount. Love your enemies. Turn the other cheek. Don’t retaliate. The exact opposite of the normal thing to do. In the Beatitudes, everything is back to front. ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit.’ You would have thought in the context of being close to God himself – the most theological situation you could possibly be in – that the last thing you would possibly want, in heaven with God, is to have weedy people round you who have no particular spiritual gifts. But they are blessed. ‘Theirs is the kingdom of heaven’. That’s crazy.

It’s more straightforward to understand ‘Blessed are they that mourn’. For ‘They shall be comforted’. That is a contrast, but it is an understandable one. You might hope for comfort. Jesus assures it.

But ‘Blessed are ye when men shall revile you and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely for my sake. Rejoice and be exceeding glad, for great is your reward in heaven.’ Doesn’t sound happy – but happiness is assured.

Think of the Magnificat, the most revolutionary text this side of Karl Marx. ‘He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and exalted the humble and meek. He hath filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he hath sent empty away.’ ‘The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate.’ Why don’t we sing that verse of ‘All things bright and beautiful’ any more? Mrs Alexander wasn’t saying it was right when she wrote that verse. We shouldn’t just shut it away. It’s shocking, and it’s meant to be.

There’s a sort of tension on Good Friday, there’s another sort of paradox; in a very sacramental way, for Jesus to be uniquely alive, alive in a new way that no-one had ever seen before, the opposite had to be true. He had to be very, very dead. But except in the very minimal sense that God, the creator and sustainer of all things, must be behind everything, everything that happens, I think we can explain Jesus’ suffering, not in terms of cruelty by his father, but in terms of the waywardness of sinful man.

When you look at the details of the trial before Pontius Pilate, there isn’t an inevitability about what happens. It is the active badness, the active sinfulness of the chief priests and scribes which catches Jesus. Pilate gave them a good way out if they had got carried away by the mob, by offering Jesus as the prisoner to be released in the traditional way at Passover time. But they positively chose – it was deliberate – to release the bad man and to kill off the good one. It was another paradox, and another counterintuitive.

But as you go through the Good Friday service, metaphorically walking behind the cross with Jesus, I do suggest that you can hold your head high and recognise him truly as your king, because that tomb will definitely be empty. This is Jesus working out the way to salvation: salvation, a relationship with God, a close relationship with God. That tomb will definitely be empty.

One implication of that is that there’s no need for a priest to stand between us and God. Jesus is the great high priest, who has opened the sanctuary to us. In the letter to the Hebrews [chapter 10], we will hear that the Lord says ‘I will remember their sins and their lawless deeds no more,’ and the letter goes on to say, ‘where there is forgiveness there is no longer any offering for sin. Therefore my friends since we have confidence to enter the sanctuary by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way, that he opened for us through the curtain, let us approach with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience’.

It’s not a question of buying off God’s wrath. It’s the other way round. God will raise Jesus from the dead, in the Easter morning miracle that we will joyfully celebrate. There it is. There is forgiveness and there is no longer any offering for sin. There will no longer be any blood sacrifice.

But first we must follow Jesus. To come out into his blessed light, we must follow him into the darkness.

This is an edited version of a reflection originally given by Hugh Bryant at the Three Hours’ Devotion service at St Mary’s Church, Stoke D’Abernon, on 19th April 2019.

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