Archives for posts with tag: Church of England

An High Priest and Two Churches

March 15, 2015 //

Sermon for Evensong at Charterhouse for the PBS Meeting, 14th March 2015

Exodus 1:22 – 2:10; Hebrews 8

The Catechism in your Prayer Books comes after the various baptism services and before the confirmation service. In my Prayer Book, it begins on page 289. It is described as ‘An Instruction to be learned of every person before he be brought to be confirmed by the Bishop’. ‘Learned’ means ‘learned by heart.’

It was, apparently, one of the traditional curate’s tasks to coach the children in learning the catechism so that they could recite it. In the confirmation service, at the beginning the bishop reads a preface, which says, ‘.. the Church hath thought good to order, that none hereafter shall be confirmed, but such as can say the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Ten Commandments; and can also answer to such other Questions, as in the short Catechism are contained: which order is very convenient to be observed..’

The ‘short Catechism’! These children – maybe some of them as young as ten years old – had to be word-perfect on pages 289 to 296 of their Prayer Books. Well, before we grind to a halt in awe at the brilliance of our ancestors in their childhood years, I would just say that I think the Catechism is still very useful, not for use in school detention, as a point of reference about our faith. As with everything else in the Prayer Book, it sums up in beautiful language, and very clearly, all the elements of the Christian faith: the Creed, belief in Father, Son and Holy Ghost and in the death and resurrection of Christ; the Ten Commandments, ‘the same which God spake in the twentieth chapter of Exodus’, the Law given to Moses, the Lord’s Prayer; questions and answers about the sacraments, that is, what we are doing when we are worshipping in church.

‘What meanest thou by this word Sacrament?’

‘I mean an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace given unto us, ordained by Christ himself, as a means whereby we receive the same, and a pledge to assure us thereof.’

You can just hear a ten-year-old saying that! But it is the essence of worship.

Today’s lessons take us from the birth of Moses, to whom God spoke, and to whom God gave the Law, the Ten Commandments, who was from the tribe of Levi, the tribe of priests. He was a priest of the order of Melchizedek, the mythical high priest, king of righteousness, king of peace; ‘without father, without mother, without descent: having neither beginning of days nor end of life, but made like unto the Son of God’. That’s Hebrews chapter 7. We go from there, from the birth of Moses, to the new high priest, the new high priest of the order of Melchizedek, Jesus Christ. ‘We have such an high priest, who is set on the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in the heavens.’

So in this part of our time of reflection in Lent, as we come to the fourth Sunday in Lent, we are being encouraged by our Bible reading to think about what it is to worship, and what it is to be a priest, to recognise Jesus as our high priest.

Nowadays we think of a priest as somebody who leads worship, who preaches sermons and acts as a sort of managing director of the management of a church. But in the time of Moses, a priest of the order of Melchizedek was an intermediary, was a mediator between man and God. He was the only one allowed to enter the holy of holies, the inner sanctum, the inner sanctuary in the Temple. The high priest was the only one qualified to encounter God face to face.

Now, the God which we worship with the help of Jesus is not so fierce. He does not demand blood sacrifices. We are able to come to God through grace, through His free gift of love, not through His weighing our merits or pardoning our offences.

But who are we, in this context? This afternoon, this little band of the faithful has a label. We are members of the Prayer Book Society. We are Christians. We are Christians who like to worship, and whose Christianity is informed by, this great and ancient book, the Book of Common Prayer.

But it is our Christianity that is informed by our love of this book, and informed by this book itself. It’s not the case that we are here because we share the love of stamps or Jaguar cars, or some other passion: the London, Midland and Scottish Railway, in my case. We are here as Christians. We are here because we want to worship God, in Christ, and we want to spread the Good News of Christ because we are Christians, and because He commanded us to do so.

The Prayer Book comes into it because we believe that the Prayer Book gives expression to our faith and shape to our worship in a better way than any other liturgy that we know. But it’s not a question of entertainment. The difference between going to see a play of Shakespeare and saying the service, or singing the service, at Evensong or at Mattins, or at the Lord’s table in Holy Communion, is that one is entertainment – maybe edifying, but it is entertainment nevertheless – and the other is worship, is bringing ourselves to God in praise and prayer.

Just as belief in God and in Jesus Christ as His Son has lasted for over 2,000 years, and still seems to be a very lively belief in many parts of the world, for the last 500 years the Book of Common Prayer has been the blueprint for worship in England and Wales. The PBS exists to keep that tradition going.

But where is our faith going to take us in the future? Is there a specifically Prayer Book dimension to this which will keep us together and do the Lord’s work at the same time? We’re not a very big band of people here in the Guildford Branch of the Prayer Book Society. Although it’s fair to say that there are quite a number of loyal members who don’t turn out for our services and meetings, even so we are rather a select band.

Apparently, according to Church of England research which I learned about at the Diocesan Synod last Saturday, if you define a country parish as a parish which has fewer than 10,000 residents in it, over 60% of the churches in England are in ‘country’ parishes. No doubt most of us here in Guildford Diocese live in country parishes, if they are defined in that way, strangely enough.

So if the Prayer Book Society, Guildford branch, was a country parish, with a small congregation, what should we be doing in order to do the Lord’s work in such a parish? At the Diocesan Synod last weekend, I learned that Archbishop Justin has set up working groups among the bishops ‘to grow and enhance the quality of the Christian witness’ in this country, and we were treated to a couple of case histories where churches, which had had rather small congregations and appeared not to be going anywhere, had been turned around and revitalised, and were now giving a much more dynamic witness to their faith in Christ.

Holy Trinity Claygate did a ‘Church-planting’ exercise in East Molesey. 40 people from Claygate have transferred to St Mary’s, East Molesey, along with a dynamic young curate, Revd Richard Lloyd – who, incidentally, was once Chaplain here at Charterhouse. Where there was once a band of about 40 rather elderly people and a large church building to keep up – a gentle air of genteel decline – now, there are still those faithful old people. But there are also about 150 people who have joined the church subsequently. Not just elderly people, but people of all ages, parents and children. And there is another church, All Saints, Weston Green, where again there is new growth, new people are joining the church, and the church is getting involved in more and more things.

In one instance, the relaunch of the church had a lot to do with introducing modern forms of worship, directly appealing to younger people. But in the other, when I looked at the church’s website, at first I wasn’t sure whether I was looking at the right church. They looked pretty normal, pretty standard.

They too had made an effort – a successful effort – to attract younger people. But their view was that it wasn’t the type of services that was keeping the young ones away – it was the time of the Sunday morning service. This was because a lot of the children were attending sports training sessions – mini Rugby in Cobham, for example – at exactly the same time as the Sunday service and Sunday School in church. What was the solution? They switched their family service to 4 o’clock in the afternoon, and made it a weekly service. But the actual liturgy was pretty standard. There has been no rush to wildly evangelical services, led by music groups with guitars. But the people are coming.

So what’s the X Factor? For both these churches, it was the fact that they formed several little groups of people who looked outside at their local communities, and did something practical to get involved. For example, the local food bank. Did you know that there are now 40 food banks in Surrey? Most of them have been started by local churches. Or Citizens’ Advice, or job clubs for people looking for work. Or groups who drive people to hospital and doctors’ appointments. There are lots of ways for members of the congregation to engage with their local community. If you think of Jesus’ great commandments, (which were, of course, just repeating what Moses had said), to love God and love our neighbours as ourselves, our worship is loving God, and our getting out into our local communities and doing some practical good is the Good Samaritan bit.

I pray that this congregation, this branch of the PBS, will thrive and grow. It will grow through your efforts as members of the PBS, helping churches all through our Diocese to worship regularly in Cranmer’s way – remember that Evensong is the fastest-growing service in the C of E – and helping to witness to our faith, by our practical love for our neighbours.

Tags All Saints Weston Green, Archbishop Justin, Book of Common Prayer, Catechism, Charterhouse, church, Church of England, Churches Together, Creed, Evensong, Holy Trinity Claygate, Lord's Prayer, mattins, Moses, Prayer Book Society, Rev Richard Lloyd, sacrament, St Mary East Molesey

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Bishop Andrew and the Meaning of Faith

By hughdbryant

March 1, 2015 //

Sermon for Evensong at St Mary the Virgin, Stoke D’Abernon, on the Second Sunday of Lent, 1st March 2015

Genesis 12:1-9, Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16

Yesterday morning, along with Beryl Jones and Godfrey from St Mary’s, Robert Jenkins and the other ministers from St Andrew’s, together with their churchwarden Dr Moni Babatunde – and about 991 others – it was our privilege and our joy to attend the Service of Inauguration of our new bishop, Bishop Andrew, at Guildford Cathedral.

The process is called ‘inauguration.’ Just as we are no longer supposed to think of bishops as ‘princes of the church’, so we don’t talk about them being enthroned any more, but just ‘inaugurated’.

Bishop Andrew had to declare his loyalty to the inheritance of faith professed by the Church of England, the ‘faith uniquely revealed in the Holy Scriptures and set forth in the Catholic creeds, which faith the Church is called upon to proclaim afresh in each generation.’ That is in the preface to the Declaration of Assent, which is read by the Dean. She went on say, ‘Led by the Holy Spirit, it has borne witness to Christian truth in its historic formularies, the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, the Book of Common Prayer and the Ordering of Bishops, Priests and Deacons.’

If you want to look at the ‘historic formularies’ which are referred to, then look at p.584 (and following) in your little blue Prayer Books, where the historic form of service is set out – although I’m disappointed to tell you that we didn’t follow that, but instead it was a more modern version. Do look at the wonderful lesson in the Prayer Book, from 1 Timothy, setting out all the qualities which a bishop needs – ‘.. not greedy of filthy lucre..’ and so on. The 39 Articles are there too.

Tonight, on the Second Sunday in Lent, we are reflecting on the nature of faith. The faith which inspired Abraham to leave his home and go off in search of the promised land, just relying on the Lord’s promise, in our first lesson from Genesis, and the great catalogue of instances of faith set out in the Letter to the Hebrews, the faith shown by a ‘great cloud of witnesses’ that it refers to in Chapter 12.

Bishop Andrew chose as his lesson, which was beautifully read by his eldest daughter Hannah, a passage from chapter 47 of the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel, which certainly those of us in my car, coming away from the service, couldn’t remember before, as it wasn’t the ‘still, small voice’ of calm, and it wasn’t the dry bones: but it was Ezekiel being walked around where the temple would be, and being shown a spring of water, which variously was a trickle, came up to his knees, and then was deep enough to swim in, which flowed out into the Dead Sea, and made the water of the Dead Sea sweet enough for fish to thrive and be caught abundantly there.

Bishop Andrew drew on that image as he outlined the task ahead of him. He had some allusions to Classical mythology as well: the story of Odysseus and the Sirens in the Odyssey, and a version of the same story in Jason and the Argonauts. The Sirens’ song was intended to draw Odysseus and his companions to their deaths on the rocks, and they were saved by the beautiful song of the singer Orpheus, which drowned out the Sirens.

For Bishop Andrew, this illustrated the need for continual work, continual strife against all the challenges which he would have to face in his ministry. As he pointed out, rotting fruit will spread rapidly and ruin all the good fruit next to it: but it doesn’t work the other way. The good fruit doesn’t neutralise the rotting fruit by itself. Something positive has to be done to get rid of the bad stuff.

In the Letter to the Hebrews chapter 11, that first line, ‘Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen’ has a rather different meaning from the ‘faith’ which the Bishop has to declare his assent to, as part of his inauguration.

We can say that Bishop Andrew shares our core Christian beliefs: he shares the specifics of belief which are set out in the creeds. But what we’re being asked to reflect on tonight is slightly different. This passage in Hebrews is a pretty philosophical passage, and it deals, not so much with the content of our faith, with what it is we believe and trust in, but instead it invites us to think about what it means to have faith. What are we doing when we have faith?

It’s drawing a contrast, which you’ll also find in Chapters 4 and 8 of St Paul’s Letter to the Romans, between what we can see with our eyes, what we can sense with our five senses, the truth of which we can witness – we were there, we saw it happen, so we can certainly say we believe in it – and the things that we can’t see, but nevertheless believe in: what it is that gives substance to our hopes and in some way provides a touch-stone, a reality check, for things which we cannot directly experience.

Some philosophers and writers have of course challenged this. H. L. Mencken, whom Alastair Cooke was so fond of quoting in his Letter from America, said, ‘Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.’ The Oxford philosopher Richard Robinson, in his book ‘An Atheist’s Values’ [Oxford, OUP, 1964] simply finds Christian explanations of faith to be ‘unintelligible’, believing something where there is no evidence for it.

The word which we translate as ‘evidence’ in this context, in ‘Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen’ in Hebrews 11:1 (KJV), something which convinces us that something is true, is something objective, it’s something outside us. It’s not a question of our being disposed to believe something, credulous. It’s what it is that makes us disposed to believe it. In Greek, the word is ελεγχος: it’s a word which means a proof, a process of putting something to the test.

I have to say that I disagree with those philosophers who say that this kind of belief, faith, trust in the reality of something which you can’t actually prove, is simply unintelligible. We believe and trust in all sorts of things every day, which we can’t prove. For example, that the sun will rise tomorrow morning, or that we will – or most of us will – carry on with our lives, and that there will be another day.

I believe and trust that some of my friends are curling up in front of the TV, and getting ready to watch Top Gear. I can’t prove it – I can’t see them. But for practical purposes, I’m quite confident that that’s what they’re doing.

You can of course object that some things are more likely than others. Some things are more believable, if you like, than others, and therefore more deserving of our faith. Can faith, our faith, pass this test?

I would suggest that our faith in God is both intelligible and intellectually respectable, because of the testimony of the actual people who were the real witnesses, which we have in the Bible, and because the history of that faith, as it has been passed down by the generations here in Stoke for the last 1,500 years, is such that, frankly, if it wasn’t true, it would’ve died out.

The thing about our Christian faith is that, although the object of it is invisible, it is real. ‘Abraham put his faith in God, and that faith was counted to him as righteousness’, St Paul writes in Romans 4. ‘Righteousness’ in Paul’s letters is what draws us closer to God. If all there were is mankind and what man can see, can perceive with the senses, then indeed, faith makes no sense. But we believe that there is more, more than we can know or perceive. Just because we can’t perceive it, it doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

Hebrews gives a catalogue, as I said earlier, of all the various heroes and heroines of faith. Look what a tremendous tradition you will be following if you join in! Bishop Andrew is saying that, if you have the faith, if you get swept up in its stream, a stream like that stream rising in the middle of the temple, in Ezekiel’s vision, then even in the barren waters of the Dead Sea, you will make a good catch.

Let us give thanks for Bishop Andrew’s teaching, and for the example of his faith. He will be a good man to watch over us – which is what a bishop does.

Tags abraham, Bishop Andrew Watson, Bishop of Guildford, Book of Common Prayer, Church of England, Dead Sea, enthronement, Ezekiel, faith, Genesis, H.L.Mencken, Hebrews, historic formularies, Jason and the Argonauts, Odysseus, Orpheus, prince of the church, Richard Robinson, Romans, Sirens, St Paul

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Lord Green’s Concert

By hughdbryant

February 16, 2015 //

Sermon for the Sunday before Lent, Quinquagesima Sunday, at St Mary the Virgin, Stoke D’Abernon, 15th February 2015

Holy Communion and Mattins – Mark 9:2-9: Evensong – 2 Peter 1:16-21

One of the nicer ways to get people, who don’t normally come to church, to darken our doors, is for there to be a concert in church. We are blessed here in Stoke and Cobham with an awful lot of good music. We have all sorts of recitals, here in St Mary’s, and down the road, St Andrew’s hosts regular concerts under the ‘Maiastra’ name.

This is where musicians who have participated in a residential master-class at Aidan Woodcock’s house, at Little Slyfield, just opposite the Yehudi Menuhin School, give a concert, led by their teacher. These are people at the beginning of their performing career, who have already graduated – sometimes more than once – from leading music schools, and have usually won some prizes as well. The Maiastra concerts – the name, incidentally, comes from a mythical Persian bird – are a real opportunity to hear the classical music stars of tomorrow, and they’re very exciting, very good.

These concerts do bring a lot of people into the church who wouldn’t ordinarily come – either because they are not local, or because they just don’t go to church. I hope that some of them, having found a warm welcome and a beautiful space, do decide to come back to worship with us later on.

So far, so good. But I had a rather disappointing exchange the other day with one of the admin staff for the master classes, who was trying to book the church for a Maiastra concert at the beginning of April. ‘How would Friday 3rd or Saturday 4th be? Would the church be free?’ Well, I was rather surprised, because of course that is Good Friday and Easter Saturday. I had to delicately remind the lady that this was Easter, the height of the Christian year, and that, I was afraid, the church was not going to be free.

‘So sorry’, she said, ‘Of course.’ She would talk to the course tutor to see whether the course could be slightly rescheduled, so as to allow the concert to take place without conflicting with Easter. Back came another email. ‘How about the Monday or Tuesday?’ Oh dear.

So I had to go back and explain that that was the Monday and Tuesday of Holy Week – all part of the most important part of the Christian year, so that you couldn’t think of having a concert in the church, unless it was a devotional performance, at all during that week.

Well, of course the concert will eventually take place at some other time. But I reflected on that a bit, in the context of our worship today, on the Sunday before Lent, when we remember Jesus’ Transfiguration. The cloud descended, and a voice said the same words as they heard when Jesus was baptised in the Jordan: ‘He is my Son, the beloved. Listen to him.’ It was a literally dazzling experience for Peter and James and John, as they accompanied Jesus up the high mountain. You couldn’t ignore that. It would be a life-changing experience.

But here’s the thing. Today, very often it would appear that people are ignoring this: that these extraordinary events no longer affect people’s lives. The nice people organising the Maiastra concert had forgotten what the main purpose of a church is. It’s not just a pretty concert venue. At the Church’s General Synod this week, one of the speakers reminded the delegates that studies had shown that, if the Church of England carries on declining in numbers at the current rate, 1% per year, overall in England (although fortunately, not in the Guildford Diocese), there will come a time, sooner rather than later, when churches in many rural parishes will be unsustainable and it will no longer be the case that the Church of England will have a parish church in every city, town and village in England.

So the Church has been embarking on all sorts for programmes of evangelisation: Messy Church, Fresh Expressions, Alpha courses, and so on. And quite a lot of it seems to be working. New people are coming to the the Church. Its interesting that it’s not always the most modern ideas which are successful in involving new people. Apparently the fastest-growing service in terms of numbers attending in the Church of England is – what do you think? It’s Evensong.

Obviously to some extent that’s influenced by the fact that cathedrals are attracting more and more people, and Evensong is seen as a quintessentially cathedral service; although of course we have lovely Evensongs here at St Mary’s every Sunday, sung just as they are in a cathedral; in fact, we sing a little bit more of the service than they do in Guildford Cathedral.

But the fact is that we are 2,000 years away from the spectacular events of Jesus’ time here on earth. It was relatively easy, when compared with our position, for the disciples to go out and spread the Gospel. As St Peter said in his second letter [2 Peter 1:16], they’d ‘been eyewitnesses of his majesty’ – they had seen Him, they’d witnessed the miraculous things that happened; and the inner circle, Peter and James and John, had even seen a foretaste of the Resurrection. The transfigured Jesus was like the resurrected Jesus. It was a glimpse into the future.

As a matter of intellect, as a matter of rational reflection, that’s still tremendously important, even 2,000 years later, even today. For us as Christians, as practising Christians, it’s something we couldn’t even think of ignoring. We have to react. We have to come and worship, and say prayers, and give our sacrifice of praise.

But what about the people who don’t get it? The people for whom church really doesn’t figure in their lives? St Paul has something to say about that in his second Letter to the Corinthians. ‘If our gospel be hid’ – if our Gospel is veiled, if our Gospel is obscure – St Paul says that it is ‘hid to them that are lost’, who are ‘on their way to perdition’, as one translation puts it. ‘Their unbelieving minds are so blinded by the god of this passing age, that the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the very image of God, cannot dawn upon them and bring them light.’ [2 Corinthians 4:3f]

It’s an easy thing to understand. If you are doing well, having a nice life, enjoying good things, you probably don’t feel there’s anything much missing in your life: that’s one kind of distraction. If you are somebody who comes from a home where nobody ever went to church, and you go to school and study at university among people who see a scientific explanation for everything; who don’t need, or feel they don’t need, any kind of reference to God, the Gospel will be veiled from you.

Later on in his second Letter to the Corinthians, St Paul says this. ‘No wonder we do not lose heart, though our outward humanity is in decay, yet day by day we are inwardly renewed. Our troubles are slight and short-lived; and their outcome an eternal glory which outweighs them far. Meanwhile our eyes are fixed, not on the things that are seen, but on the things that are unseen: for what is seen passes away; what is unseen is eternal.’ [2 Corinthians 4:16f]

I think that’s a very good message for us. We can’t see, in the same way that the disciples saw. That unseen reality, that inner spiritual reality, the working of God, is what is permanent and unchanging. It’s just as good now, as it is was 2,000 years ago, as it was in the time of St Paul.

Jesus’ injunction to us Christians was to ‘go and teach all nations, teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you.’ So what is it that we should do? I’m not really qualified to tell you a whole lot about Fresh Expressions of Church or Messy Church – although I can tell you that our Messy Church, run by Churches Together, attracts big numbers of children and their parents each time – but what I think is important and perhaps may open the idea of the Kingdom to more and more people – is the idea that we get over and over again, from Archbishop Justin and Archbishop John Sentamu, that we should be as the Lord intended us to be, and that we should live our lives in such a way as to promote human flourishing: flourishing, ευδαιμονία, something more than just passing your time without hurting anybody, something more than just keeping your nose clean: but instead actively looking out for ways to go the extra mile, to do the better thing.

It’s perhaps a bit unfair to single out anyone, particularly in the last week, for examination against that kind of background, but I can’t help thinking we will all have been a bit challenged by the sad story of the Revd Lord Green, the retired boss of HSBC, who has preached sermons and written books, preaching the virtue of observing the very highest moral standards.

But unfortunately at the same time, his bank was offering to clients a very aggressive form of tax avoidance. When I worked in the City, we were brought up to distinguish, reading the fine print, between tax avoidance, which is legal, and tax evasion, which isn’t. But this now seems to be a place where simply following the letter of the law isn’t enough. The Christian way, the Gospel way, is in fact not only not to evade tax, but also not to avoid it either. It’s rather bad luck, I think, on poor old Lord Green that in his part of the City – as indeed in my part of the City when I was there – nobody told him that the rules had changed, and he perhaps never appreciated that simply observing the law wasn’t necessarily sufficient in order to demonstrate the light of God.

Because, you see, when you do get to be able to see the light, then you will be like the Good Samaritan. You will be actively looking out for people you can help, rather than just sticking to the letter of the law. Let us pray that we will see that light: that the light will shine on us: and if we’re not transfigured, let us pray that we are at least transformed.

Tags Archbishop of Canterbury, Church of England, concerts in church, Easter, good friday, Guildford diocese, holy week, john sentamu, Lord Green, maiastra, Transfiguration

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Apocalyptic Growth Strategy

By hughdbryant

November 17, 2014 //

Sermon for Mattins on the Twenty-Second Sunday after Trinity, 16th November 2015, at St Mary the Virgin, Stoke D’Abernon
Daniel 10:19-21, Revelation 4

At the end of St Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus says to His disciples, ‘Go ye therefore and teach all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.’

People are always telling us that we’re doing rather a bad job of making disciples of all the world. Because in the UK at least, the churches are declining in numbers. According to statistics that I was reading, the Church of England is losing 1% of its members each year at present.

But Canon Giles Fraser in an article yesterday [‘Loose Canon’, The Guardian, 15th November 2014, http://gu.com/p/43bvq%5D pointed out that about a million people go to a Church of England church every week. That compares pretty well with quite a lot of other important organisations.

Compared with the total membership of the Conservative Party, which is 134,000, with the Labour Party, 190,000, and the LibDems at 44,000, as Giles Fraser says, if you add all the political parties together and even throw in UKIP, you still don’t have half the number of people who go to church. He adds, ‘More people go to church on a Sunday than go to Premier League stadiums on a Saturday.’

I bore that all in mind as I went to the St Andrew’s PCC ‘away-day’ yesterday. This was set to consider a Church of England statistical study called ‘From Anecdote to Evidence’, [The Church Commissioners for England, 2014, http://www.churchgrowthresearch.org.uk ] which had identified all the various things which made for growing churches rather than declining ones.

Incidentally, you’ll be very pleased to know that as far as I can see, St Mary’s does have ingredients identified in the study for being a successful church. There’s a emphasis on having young people and children (we’ve just had a great family service with nearly half those attending being kids or young parents); on having a clear mission and purpose; and on having strong leadership. I think that St Mary’s does meet the criteria identified.

I was intrigued because this week, now at Mattins and tonight at Evensong, there are lessons from the Book of Revelation which offer a counterpoint to the Church statistical study.

This morning there’s the vision of heaven – ‘a voice which said to me, Come up hither, and I will show thee things which must be hereafter.’ This was a vision of a throne in heaven, and a figure on the throne surrounded by 24 elders – a vision of God.

And this evening, going backwards, the lesson is from the beginning of the Book of Revelation, introducing John’s vision, John’s ‘apocalypse’, as it’s called. Αποκάλυψις, ‘Apocalyse’, is the Greek word for ‘revelation’ – lifting the veil, revealing what is hidden underneath.

I don’t think that the Book of Revelation is meant to be taken literally, but it does contain a lot of powerful metaphorical images, covering a world which is way beyond our comprehension. We can’t know what, in Revelation, is in any sense ‘true’, but I think we can agree that there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be as good a description as any other, more prosaic, description of a heavenly world there might be.

Revelation Chapters 2 and 3 – your homework before lunch today – contain the passage which I think is directly relevant to the question what makes a good, effective church. John reports that Christ appeared to him and instructed him to write letters to seven early churches. In each letter Christ, though John, identifies particular characteristics which marks out that church, and which distinguishes it in good and bad ways. It is a sort of early Ofsted report.

So the church at Ephesus is noted for its love; the church at Smyrna for being long-suffering; at Pergamum for not denying their faith; at Thyatira, there is love, faithfulness, good service and fortitude; at Philadelphia, he writes, ‘Your strength, I know, is small, yet you have observed my commands and have not disowned my name.’

He lists their faults as well. He writes to the church at Sardis, ‘though you have a name for being alive, you are dead. Wake up, and put some strength into what is left,..’; and to the church at Laodicea he writes, ‘I know all your ways; you are neither hot nor cold. How I wish that you were either hot or cold!’

Those early churches, which had been started by St Paul or by others of the Apostles, were being assessed by Jesus Christ, through the mystic seer John, for various aspects of their faith. Were they keeping fast to the true faith, or were they in error?

There’s not much about falling numbers – except perhaps the call to wake up at Sardis. There’s not much organisation theory: what the proportion of young people in the congregation is, whether they are open to new ideas and new types of worship, whether they give new people responsibility for church activities. None of those techniques seem to have worried the earliest churches.

In the church research document ‘From Anecdote to Evidence’, the work is prefaced by St Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 3:6, ‘I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God made it grow’. God made it grow. I can’t help feeling that, certainly in the early history of the church, whether the church prospered or not had nothing much to do with the management skills of the early ministers.

The biggest break that the early church had, of course, was in the fourth century, when on the eve of the battle of the Milvian Bridge, the Roman emperor Constantine had a vision of Christ telling him to paint the sign of the cross on his soldiers’ shields, and he would win the battle: and they did, and they won the victory. It doesn’t sound a very Christian story; but there it is.

As a result, Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. All of a sudden, Christianity stopped being more or less a secret sect of small cell churches subject to persecution, and became the Catholic Church, the church throughout the world.

Huge growth; but nothing to do with management skills or growth strategies. If we look at where the church is growing in the world today – and Christianity is the fastest-growing religion of them all, today – in Africa, in South America, in China, in Russia – there is still huge growth: and I wonder what it is that is bringing that growth, at the same time as the Church of England is gently and gradually declining.

I think that a clue may be in today’s lessons. You may say that the pictures of heaven and the pictures of the Almighty which are in the Book of Revelation are too far-fetched to be anything other than picturesque stories. ‘Immediately I was in the spirit, and behold a throne was set in heaven, and one sat on the throne. And he that sat was to look upon like a jasper and a sardine stone: and there was a rainbow round about the throne, in sight like unto an emerald.’

And in the first chapter of Revelation, ‘I turned to see whose voice it was that spoke to me, and on turning I saw seven golden lamp-stands, and in the midst of the lamp-stands I saw one like the Son of Man, clothed with a long robe and with a golden sash across his chest. His head and his hair were white as white wool, white as snow; ..’

‘Look, he is coming with the clouds; every eye will see him … “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the ending, says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty’.

Now we may well not believe that God is a man with a big white beard in heaven, (which is above the clouds). We may well decide that that is just a picturesque metaphor: but I think we do still find great significance in ‘I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending’.

The point about an ‘apocalypse’, a revelation, an unveiling of ultimate truth, is that we are confronted by God. Perhaps the reason that our church here at home is not growing as fast as in the other places in the world is precisely because people’s eyes are closed to God: they are not seeing the revelation; they don’t see what its immediate importance could be.

Many people, I think, would agree that there is a God, in the sense that there is somebody or something which made the world, a creator. But a lot of people, I think, today, don’t give it much more thought than that. Perhaps people no longer really worry about the story of Jesus Christ. They rule out the possibility of His resurrection from the dead.

People in England are conveniently blind to the way in which, in many other places in the world, the Good News of Jesus, the story of His life, death and resurrection, still has legs, still has huge power, because it is an indication that the God which Revelation portrays, the God, the Lamb on the throne of heaven, (however picturesque these images are) still has power, has significance, today.

These revelations are revelations that God does care for us. The fact of Jesus, the fact of His time with us, is in itself a revelation, it is an uncovering of the deepest truth.

Perhaps these days you need to be ‘strangely warmed’, like John Wesley, or to be ‘born again’ at a Billy Graham meeting. Perhaps not: but once you have ‘got it’, once you have realised what the revelation of Jesus Christ is, then your life will be changed, and there will be no danger that you will drift away from the church.

Let us pray that we will all be given that revelation: that in the church, those of us who are tasked with preaching and evangelism – as John in Revelation puts it, those of us who are ‘in the Spirit’ – surrounded by the Holy Spirit – let us pray that we will be able to bring a vision of heaven, a vision of the Son of Man, the Son of Man who was at the same time the Son of God, into our lives, so that we can no longer just take Him or leave Him.

Tags 1 Corinthians 3, africa, apocalypse, Apollos, china, church growth, Church of England, Conservative Party, constantine, early churches, ephesus, from anecdote to evidence, Giles Fraser, αποκαλυψις, jesus christ, john of patmos, labour party, laodicea, libdem party, loose canon, milvian bridge, pergamum, philadelphia, premier league, revelation, Russia, sardis, south america, truth, UKIP

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Authority and Power

By hughdbryant

September 28, 2014 //

Sermon for Holy Communion on the 15th Sunday after Trinity at All Saints’, Ockham, 28th Sept 2014
Ex. 17:1-7, Phil. 2:1-13, Matt. 21:23-32

‘Have you got a licence for that thing?’ I remember, when I was a graduate trainee, having a conversation with another trainee, visiting our office from Germany for a few months, who pointed out that, whereas In England everything is permitted, everything is authorised, unless it is forbidden, in Germany it is safer to assume that things are not allowed unless they are specifically permitted. Incidentally it used to be that way round in the golden age of the railways here too; coaches were designated ‘smoking’ rather than ‘non-smoking’.

I think that Jewish practice in the Temple around 33AD was closer to the German model which my friend described than to what we’re used to. ‘Have you got authority to preach in the way you’re doing? – to carry out miraculous healing, and so on?’ I suppose you might get a similar sort of reaction if a speaker prophesying the end of the world on Speakers’ Corner suddenly popped up in St Paul’s Cathedral. ‘Is he properly authorised?’ people would ask.

Authorised. I’m not sure that the concept of authority hasn’t sometimes brought its own problems. The whole question, to whose authority one defers, can be fraught with difficulty. In the time of the Reformation, Catholics were outlawed because it was feared that they owed allegiance to the Pope rather than to the King or Queen.

Both the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England are built on the concept of authority, on the apostolic succession, so-called, from Jesus’ Great Commission in Chapter 28 of St Matthew’s Gospel, where Jesus said to the disciples,

Full authority in heaven and on earth has been committed to me. Go forth therefore and make all nations my disciples…

So every ordained person is ordained by a bishop, who in turn is in a line of ordination which, the church says, it can trace back to the disciples, or specifically to St Peter.

People who were against women’s ordination tried to say that the apostolic succession was just from male disciples (although there were female disciples like Dorcas or Lydia very early in the church). The idea of ‘authority’ wasn’t at all helpful.

Authority isn’t all bad, however. There was a very happy event in the Church of England at Evensong in Guildford Cathedral on Friday, when our new Bishop of Guildford, who will actually be installed and will start work officially in February, was introduced to us. He is Bishop Andrew Watson, who is currently the Bishop of Aston – you know, as in Villa – in Birmingham – the suffragan bishop, as it’s called, the number 2 bishop in that diocese.

So very soon we will have a Bishop of Guildford again, and the service, when he is inducted, will use the idea of apostolic succession to confer authority on him, that he is in the tradition of ordination starting with Jesus’ first disciples.

In our lesson from St Paul’s Letter to the Philippians, St Paul gives advice to that very early church in Philippi on how they should conduct themselves as Christians.

They should be modest and look out for each other, selfless in their desire to put others’ interests first. Because, St Paul said, Jesus was ultimately modest in the same way: he ’emptied himself, in the form of a slave’, even though he was ‘in the form of God’, so that, even though demonstrating utter human weakness, Jesus gained the highest status in the Kingdom of God.

Something which, in the Old Testament, in the book of Isaiah, was supposed to be an attribute of God, that

… at the name of God, every knee should bend (Isaiah 45),

has now been refocused by Paul to be about Jesus: that in heaven at least, Jesus would have authority, would command respect. That is the authority which is said to come down to a new bishop, and indeed in his first words to us, as he anticipated receiving his new authority, Bishop Andrew did seem to show real modesty. We will pray for a continuing welcome for him and his family.

If there was at least one happy authority-event this week, in Bishop Andrew being announced as bishop-designate for Guildford, there was unfortunately also an unhappy one. This is our Parliament’s vote to wage war yet again in Iraq, against the background of the continuing crisis involving Islamic State in Iraq, Syria and perhaps wider in the Arab world.

Yet again we are seeing pictures from aircraft, or from cameras in the noses of UAVs, so-called drones, unmanned aerial vehicles, which show a building in black and white, perhaps with a few small stick men outside it, and perhaps with the odd vehicle coming in and out: then the target designator places a cross on the building in the picture, and seconds later, you see cataclysmic explosions, after which the building is obliterated. And, of course, so are the people.

We have heard here, and also in the context of the conflict in Palestine, in Gaza, that what is called ‘collateral damage’ occurs, that when bombing and shelling takes place, you can’t guarantee to hit only combatants, only soldiers. You may risk hitting innocent civilians as well. The Third and Fourth Geneva Conventions are clear that you are not supposed to shoot if there is a risk that you will hit non-combatants – even when they are human shields. Sadly, this is a provision of the Geneva Conventions which has been observed in the breach recently.

There is a huge contrast between this military might – ‘shock and awe’ – and the way that Jesus went around, emptying himself, taking the form of a slave, not deploying overwhelming force. I’m worried that, by going to war, we are deploying overwhelming force, but we are not persuading anybody, we are not changing hearts and minds.

But I know that there are other arguments along the lines that it is necessary to go to war because there is no other way of preventing genocide, which the IS, the so-called Islamic State, is threatening against anyone who does not subscribe to their version of Islam.

But who has authority in this? The pilot of a Tornado will say that he is acting under orders. His orders come from the military hierarchy, who are in turn ordered by Parliament. Where does Parliament’s authority come from?

‘From the will of the people’, you might say. But as the Scots proved, there is democracy and democracy. They had an 80+ % turnout. I’m not sure what the equivalent at the last General Election was, but it was far less. Instead would anyone seriously say now that he had authority from God to take a particular line? There are no easy answers, but it does seem to me that the same question could be asked today as the Jews asked Jesus all those years ago:

By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority?

Tags apostolic succession, Aston Villa, authority, Bishop Andrew Watson, Bishop of Guildford, Church of England, collateral damage, disciples, Dorcas, Evensong, Geneva Convention, Iraq, Islamic State, jesus christ, knee bow, Lydia, non-smoking, Parliament, railway, Roman Catholic, Syria, Tornado, UAV

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Was Jesus really the Messiah?

By hughdbryant

September 1, 2014 //

Sermon for Evensong on the 11th Sunday after Trinity, 31st August 2014, at St Mary the Virgin, Stoke D’Abernon

Acts 18:5 – When Silas and Timothy arrived from Macedonia, Paul was occupied with proclaiming the word, testifying to the Jews that the Messiah was Jesus.

Who was right? Was Jesus the ‘Messiah’, the chosen one of God, the King, enthroned in the kingdom of God, or not? Jews and Moslems both recognise Jesus as a prophet, but neither accepts that Jesus was himself divine. Therefore they have both regarded Christianity as a challenge to the orthodoxy of their true religion. In places, Islam is doing this right now. Before Mohamed came along, the Bible is full of conflicts between the Jews and Jesus, and later between the Jews and the disciples.

On Jesus’ cross, Pilate had a sign fixed up in three languages, ‘This is the king of the Jews’. For the Romans this was ironic. They could not understand why it was so contentious among the Jews for someone like Jesus to be their king. Since it was clear that the Jews did reject Him – demanding His crucifixion and freedom for the acknowledged criminal Barabbas instead – the distinction of kingship was ironic at best.

Jesus himself was clear that He was the Messiah. He did not contradict Peter when Peter worked out for himself that Jesus was the long-awaited King [Matt. 16]. But what was coming was not an insurrection against the Romans, but something much more important.

Jesus said to his disciples, ‘There are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom’ (Matt.16:21-28).

The ‘Son of Man’ is Jesus’ way of referring to himself, as Messiah, chosen one of God. Jesus repeated what the prophet Daniel had written in the Old Testament [Daniel 7:13], ‘I saw in the night visions, and behold, one like the son of man came with the clouds of heaven, and came to the Ancient of Days, and they brought him near before him.’

Was Jesus saying that the end of the world was just about to happen? Because if so, He seems to have been wrong. After all, 2,000 years later, we still pray,

‘Lord of all life,
help us to work together for that day
when your kingdom comes
and justice and mercy will be seen in all the earth.’

[Common Worship, Services and Prayers for the Church of England (2000), London, Church House Publishing, p197 – Holy Communion Order One: Eucharistic Prayer E]

I always pray that prayer very fervently. I feel that we need justice and mercy to be seen in all the earth: because, in so many places, there is no justice and mercy.

We have only to think back over the last week’s news. Are Islamic State, ISIS, full of ‘justice and mercy’? Is there justice and mercy for the poor people in Africa with Ebola? Would the children in Rotherham, who suffered abuse for so long and who were not taken seriously by the forces of law and order, did they receive any ‘justice and mercy’?

It doesn’t look as though Jesus got this right, on the face of things. Surely if the Son of Man had come in power with his angels and set up His kingdom, the Kingdom of God, then surely in the words of the Book of Revelation, ‘… there [would] be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither [will] there be any more pain.’ (Rev.21:4)

But, because it was Jesus who said it – and it seems unlikely that he was mistakenly reported, because three of the Gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke, have Him saying almost identical words – just because Jesus Himself did say this, it must be reasonable to assume that he wasn’t just mistaken, just because the end of the world didn’t in fact happen during the lifetime of any of His disciples – but rather we ought to look at the possibility that it doesn’t mean what it seems to at first sight. It doesn’t literally mean that Jesus was saying that the Kingdom of God was synonymous with the the end of the world, and that that End Time was about to happen, in the early years of the first century AD.

We have to acknowledge that the early church did think that was what Jesus was saying. St Paul’s teaching about marriage, in 1 Corinthians 7, where he seems to suggest that it’s best to remain celibate, although ‘it is better to marry than to burn’, reflects the idea that the earliest Christians had, that the Apocalypse was really imminent: think of Jesus’ teaching about signs of the end of the world in S. Matthew 24, and parables like the Ten Bridesmaids – ‘Keep awake, therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour’. Of course as well as the early Christians, other prophets of doom have been forecasting the end of the world ever since – and no-one has got it right so far. It must mean something else. One alternative, of course, is that the Jews and the Moslems are right, and Jesus was just a prophet, nothing more.

Even in today’s world, with all its tragedies and strife, is it still possible that the Kingdom of God is with us? I believe that for us too, even 2,000 years after Jesus, heavenly things do still happen.

In among the unheavenly things which I mentioned from the news this week, in the Middle East, in Africa with Ebola, and nearer to home in Yorkshire, I truly had a heavenly experience – yes, ‘heavenly’ really is the right word – when I went to the Proms on Friday. I heard Mahler’s Symphony, No 2, the ‘Resurrection’ he entitled it. In the 5th movement, the mezzo, the soprano and the great chorus of two choirs, over 200 singers, sing:

Oh believe, my heart, oh believe:
O glaube, mein Herz, o glaube

Oh believe, my heart, oh believe:
nothing is lost for thee!
…

Oh believe, thou wert not born in vain,
neither hast thou vainly lived, nor suffered!

Whatsoever is created must also pass away!
Whatsoever has passed away, must rise again! [Must rise again!]
Cease thy trembling!
Prepare thyself to live!

[From ‘Des Knaben Wunderhorn’: Friedrich Klopstock (1724-1803) and Gustav Mahler (1860-1911), translated by Ron Isted]

Imagine what an uplifting, amazing moment it was. Huge forces – the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, with 65 string players, 26 brass players, 17 woodwinds, 7 percussionists, the mighty Willis organ of the Royal Albert Hall, and two choirs with over 200 choral singers as well as the two soloists: and in the audience a full house, a complete sell-out, all 6,000 seats and promenade spaces taken.

And they raised the roof. Resurrection. It felt as though it was really happening there. Wonderful. Suddenly it gave me a clue about Jesus’ really being the Messiah, the King.

Resurrection, Jesus’ resurrection, was the coronation, as it were, of Jesus coming into His kingdom. The disciples did live to see it. Indeed they didn’t ‘taste death’ beforehand. In a real sense, the King had arrived. His resurrection was his coronation.

If it had been the end, the end of everything, then there would be nothing more to say. But it wasn’t the end – and clearly Jesus’ coming into His kingdom wasn’t a cataclysmic revolution. The perfect world pictured in the Book of Revelation didn’t miraculously come about.

We must remember what St Paul said, in Romans chapter 7. ‘The good which I want to do, I fail to do; but what I do is the wrong which is against my will.’ [Rom 7:18, NEB]. Even that saint, Saint Paul, fell prey to temptation.

That was because God has not abolished good and evil. God’s kingdom on earth is like any kingdom, in that there are crimes as well as good deeds. God is not a sort of puppet-master who controls all the people, stopping them from doing harm. We believe that God is omnipotent, all-powerful, so He could control everyone, could, theoretically, make us into robots. But He plainly hasn’t done.

Instead He has shown us, by giving us His only Son, that He cares for us. His kingdom is real. Even so, even in God’s kingdom, we still have to choose the right and the good over the bad. We still need to pray; and our prayers are answered.

But we do also have a sense, a belief, as Christians, in a Kingdom of God in the other sense, of a life after death, a spiritual realm at the end of time: strictly beyond our powers to imagine or describe it, but maybe along the lines of the vision in Revelation chapter 21. We can’t say what it is precisely, but we may be able to say what it does – that it takes away pain, sorrow, crying, even death.

God’s kingdom involves an End Time, as well as a Kingdom on earth. In one sense the End Time is ours personally, in our death. In another, there will be, Jesus has taught us, a Day of Reckoning, when, in the words of Matt 16, ‘He will give each man the due reward for what he has done’.

Then at that End Time – and at any time, in fact – we will need to be ready, for Jesus may be there, and He may say to us, ‘I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me.’ [Matt. 25:35f] We know what we have to do. It is the King who has commanded us.

Tags Acts of the Apostles, Barabbas, BBC Proms, Church of England, Common Worship, crucifixion, Des Knaben Wunderhorn, Ebola, end time, eschatology, gospels, ISIS, Islamic State, Jews, kingdom of God, Klopstock, last judgment, law and order, life after death, luke, Mahler, Mark, Matthew, Messiah, Mohamed, Peter, Pontius Pilate, Resurrection, Resurrection Symphony, Romans, Ron Isted, Rotherham, Royal Albert Hall, Silas, St Paul, Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Timothy, Willis organ

Categories Uncategorized

Resurrection and Sacrifice

By hughdbryant

April 20, 2014 //

Sermon for Easter Day, 20th April 2014
Acts 10:34-43, Colossians 3:1-4, Matt. 28:1-10

When David Cameron published an article in the Church Times (which of course was widely quoted in the Telegraph and other less specialist newspapers than the Church Times), there were lots of people who said how good it was that the Prime Minister had said publicly that he was in favour of the Church of England and that the C of E should stick up for itself more.

Mind you, said the Prime Minister, he didn’t actually go to church very often, and his Christian faith ‘came and went a bit,’ he said. He did remind me a little bit of the caricature figure in WW2 dramas signing up for army service, where the recruiting sergeant asks what his religion is, and he mumbles, ‘Agnostic’, whereupon the sergeant writes down ‘C of E’.

On Thursday there was a big service at Guildford Cathedral for the renewal of vows of all the people in ministry in the Diocese. The Bishop of Dorking, giving the sermon, said that the Prime Minister’s article had been ‘somewhat surprisingly good’. Somewhat surprisingly. His caution might be explained by the comments on the Prime Minister’s article which had been made in various quarters, which tended to focus on the question how Mr Cameron’s Christianity didn’t seem to extend to making sure that people in Britain are not starving and going to food banks.

All this doesn’t take away the fact that the Prime Minister thought that it was important enough, in his busy life, to affirm his Christian faith in a public article. So for that much, I think we must be grateful.

Never mind the Prime Minister; Christianity has been getting a better and better name this year with the advent of the new Pope and the new Archbishop of Canterbury. Both of them are seen as very good adverts for the faith: very good examples of what it is to be a good Christian.

Today on Easter Sunday they reckon that 1.3m people will go to church in the UK. This really isn’t very many, out of the roughly 70m people who live here. So even if the Prime Minister, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Pope are all valiantly pointing up the importance of Christianity, the message doesn’t really seem to be getting through to that many people.

Does that mean there’s something wrong with that message? Our lessons from Acts and St Matthew’s Gospel have the key things. Jesus went about doing good, teaching and healing, but he was arrested and condemned to death as a troublemaker – a freedom-fighter, a terrorist (because always remember, one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom-fighter). He was put to death publicly in the cruellest fashion, being crucified. And He rose again from the dead.

The Gospel story is the most important bit. The story of the empty tomb, of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. I would risk saying that, unless there had been a first Easter Day, and unless there had been a resurrection from the dead, we would not be here, celebrating Jesus and worshipping God in the way that we are today.

Leave aside for a minute the fact that there are only a million or so of us in the UK who will bother to go to church today: if you take the worldwide figures for people celebrating Easter, it’s a very, very large number – and it is a growing number. Christianity is a very fast-growing religion: I believe it is still the fastest-growing religion in the world.

In his first letter to the Corinthians, St Paul explained the significance of Easter. St Paul said, ‘If Christ was not raised, your faith has nothing in it and you are still in your old state of sin’ (1 Cor.15:17).

Now pay attention! Resurrection from the dead, the resurrection of Jesus, is, of course, completely contrary to the laws of nature. It’s a super-miracle, the super-miracle. It is the sign, the sign by which we realise that Jesus wasn’t just a great teacher or a prophet: it’s how we know that he was God incarnate, God in human form.

I’m not going to argue here why I believe in the resurrection – which I, and you, surely do. This is, after all, a gathering of the faithful. But maybe I should encourage you a bit. It’s like adverts for Mercedes-Benz. Merc don’t need to advertise. They can sell every car they make, just by word of mouth. But they have great adverts, nevertheless. Have you seen the one with the chicken? It’s far and away the best ad on the telly at the moment. The reason they made it, and no doubt spent millions on it, was to reassure their customers: to reassure them that they have indeed made the right choice.

So maybe I should also just comfort you, in the same way, about what you already believe. There are plenty of eminent scientists who believe in the resurrection. For the atheists there is Richard Dawkins: for the Christians there is John Polkinghorne: both equally eminent scientists. Similarly in philosophy: for the atheist Daniel Dennett there is the Christian, Richard Swinburne – and Brian Leftow, another formidable logician, whose formal proofs of the existence of God were published recently [God and Necessity, ISBN 978-0-19-926335-6]. Or Roger Scruton, who plays the organ in his parish church.

If you want a good refresher course in why it’s intellectually respectable that we can believe in the resurrection, there’s the famous book, first published in the Thirties and still in print, ‘Who Moved the Stone?’ by Frank Morison. [ISBN 978-1-85078-674-0]. Morison was a sceptic who set out to prove that that resurrection couldn’t have happened, and ended up convincing himself that the weight of all the evidence went exactly the other way, and it did happen. Or of course you can read Richard Swinburne’s ‘The Resurrection of God Incarnate’ [ISBN 978-0-19-925746-1], for a heavyweight philosophy-of-religion treatment from the celebrated former Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion at Oxford.

Back to St Paul. In the lesson from his letter to the Colossians, the very short lesson this morning, he underlines the significance of Easter for us.

‘Were you not raised to life with Christ?’ he asks.

He then says, perhaps rather mysteriously, ‘You did die, and your life has been hidden away with Christ in God’. [Col.3:1,2 (NEB: my translation, resp.)]

Of course this doesn’t mean that somehow we are all ghosts. We have died in the sense that we die in baptism: we die to sin, and have new life in Christ. In that sense, we rise with him. We have been ‘raised to life with Christ.’

And we say He died to save us from our sins, to redeem us. In the words of the hymn ‘There is a green hill far away’, Mrs Alexander wrote, ‘He died that we might be forgiven, he died to make us good,’ and, ‘There was no other good enough | to pay the price of sin’.

The language is apparently language of ransom, of kidnap and ransom, even. But I think that’s not the right way to look at it. If you think of sin not so much as specific sins, specific crimes – although sin can make you do those bad things – if instead you think of sin as whatever it is that separates us from God, then Jesus’ redeeming work was really to bring us back to God, bringing us back home to the true ground of our being. In the words of the lovely prayer,

Father of all,
we give you thanks and praise,
that when we were still far off
you met us in your Son and brought us home.

Even here, where things seem to be very spiritual, very mythical, there isn’t a conflict with science. In her 2012 Gifford Lectures, Prof. Sarah Coakley looks at the idea of sacrifice, sacrifice in the context not just of religion, of Jesus’ sacrifice, or the Jewish idea of a scapegoat, but in the context of evolutionary biology. Apparently the latest analysis is that evolution doesn’t depend on the ‘Selfish Gene’, but much more on co-operation, on selfless behaviour, self-sacrifice. A defining characteristic, the real mark, of humanity is altruism, self-sacrifice, selfless behaviour. We are the most successful species, the theory runs, not because we possess a selfish gene, but exactly the opposite – because ‘greater love hath no man’ is something we can, and do, aspire to.

Professor Coakley mentions in her first lecture –
http://www.faith-theology.com/2012/05/sarah-coakley-2012-gifford-lectures.html%5D – that Charles Darwin was inspired to study biology by William Paley’s argument, that the complex workings of nature meant that they were evidence of the work of a ‘divine watchmaker’. Although the current rather fundamentalist ‘intelligent design’ movement, mainly in the USA, isn’t very believable, nevertheless there does seem to be perfectly good scientific evidence for God, as the creator and sustainer of the universe. It’s really not necessary to be an atheist if you are a scientist.

Oh – and if you want to compare and contrast Prime Ministerial words of faith, you might want to dust off Gordon Brown’s speech in 2011 about his Christian faith, which you can find on Archbishop Rowan’s website. http://rowanwilliams.archbishopofcanterbury.org/articles.php/903/faith-in-politics-lecture-by-gordon-brown.

Nothing political, honest – but Gordon Brown’s piece is head and shoulders over David Cameron’s: really inspiring stuff, not faith which ‘comes and goes’.

So I say, we should shout it from the roof-tops. It makes sense. Jesus was raised from the dead: Jesus is risen! Happy Easter!

Tags Archbishop of Canterbury, Brian Leftow, Christianity, Church of England, David Cameron, Easter, food banks, Gifford Lectures, Gordon Brown, Pope Francis, richard Dawkins, Richard Swinburne, Sarah Coakley

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Banns

By hughdbryant

March 31, 2014 //

Sermon for Holy Communion on the Fourth Sunday of Lent, 30th March 2014
Ephesians 5:8-14, John 9:1-41

Today is Mothering Sunday. At the 10 o’clock family service later on this morning, the congregation are going to be invited to take a nice little plant home to their mothers. Indeed, I think the plants are already here; so, if you are a Mum, and you think that your offspring may not be in the right place at the right time to collect a little plant for you, please help yourself!

My problem in relation to Mothering Sunday is that I can’t be a Mum – by definition – and because I am of a certain age, unfortunately my Mum is no longer with us. So when I see the children picking up their little plants and taking them off to give to Mum, it makes me feel rather wistful.

But if you slightly refocus, perhaps with the help of the little card from the Bishop’s Lent Call, you’ll see that the Bishop has suggested that this week is a week for women – not just mothers – and there are a series of stories and challenging situations which are described on each day this week. I won’t spoil it by telling you all what they are – have a look after the service.

The idea is that, leading up to Mothering Sunday, it’s suggested that we should think about issues to do with being a woman – including, of course, motherhood. Indeed, the news has had two or three challenging items in it this week, affecting women.

There was a report on the way in which various police forces investigate domestic violence. Unfortunately our own force in Surrey didn’t come out very well – but all the chief constables are going to try and improve. But perhaps the biggest family issue this week has been the beginning of so-called ‘gay marriage’ on Friday.

In very general terms, it is now the law of the land that homosexual couples, male or female, can go through a civil marriage ceremony. They are married in the eyes of the law, in exactly the same way as a heterosexual couple.

But, in general, the church doesn’t go along with it. Indeed the Council of Bishops has issued a rather fierce statement [http://www.churchofengland.org/media-centre/news/2014/02/house-of-bishops-pastoral-guidance-on-same-sex-marriage.aspx], saying that anyone who marries someone of the same sex will not be ordained, and any minister who blesses a same-sex union would be contravening church law and would be in trouble – let alone any question of actually marrying the happy couple!

At this point no doubt your eyes are all metaphorically rolling upwards, and you are saying to yourself, ‘Oh no; not again! Not more weird sex issues, drawing the church off the track, when there are so many more important things for us to worry about.’ If 25% of those who are affected by the ‘bedroom tax’ are now in debt as a result, for example, surely that is more important for Christians, who love their neighbours, than whether or not it’s OK for people of the same sex to marry each other.

I would go along with that. But it does seem to me that, as a lay minister of the church, I need to set out from the pulpit at least some reflections on the question of same-sex marriage. But it is of necessity a personal view.

I believe that the bishops’ statement on same-sex marriage was extremely unhelpful, and was unnecessary, given that, following the Pilling Report, there is a process going on within the church called ‘facilitated conversations’, which has not been completed yet.

So unless the facilitated conversation process is a sham, it’s completely wrong for the bishops to lay down the law while discussions about what the law should be are still going on. The discussions and the debate in public fall along predictable lines.

On the one hand, it is argued that it is in the nature of marriage that it is necessarily between a man and a woman. It’s certainly true that the marriage service in the Book of Common Prayer begins, ‘We are gathered together here in the sight of God …. to join together this man and this woman in holy Matrimony’ and that matrimony symbolises ‘the mystical union that is betwixt Christ and his Church’, and that the purpose of marriage is: for the procreation of children, to avoid fornication, and for the ‘mutual society, help and comfort that the one ought to have of the other.’ Only one out of three has anything about male and female.

Coupled with this is a literal reliance on Biblical texts, most notably in Leviticus, against homosexuality. Lev.20:13, ‘If a man lies with a male, as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall be put to death; … their blood is upon them.’ You will be surprised, if you read all this chapter, how many death penalties there are for various sexual misdemeanours. Never mind; people who believe that we should uphold exactly what the Bible says, in every detail, aren’t worried by that.

On the other hand, more liberal Christians point to the fact that the definition of marriage has actually changed over the years. The prohibition against a man marrying his deceased wife’s sister was abolished in the 1800s: it was once thought to be the same as incest. More recently, remarriage after divorce has been allowed in church.

As the Dean of Durham, Michael Sadgrove, has written recently, ‘These changes were not changes in the nature of marriage itself, but in enlarging the scope of marriage by admitting to it people who were once excluded … But its essence is what it always was: the covenanted union of two people for life. That has not changed.’ [http://decanalwoolgatherer.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/equal-marriage-crossing-threshold.html?spref=tw&m=1
http://decanalwoolgatherer.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/equal-marriage-crossing-threshold.html?spref=tw&m=1%5D

Against this it is argued that marriage is not simply the union of two ‘people’, but it is the union of a male and a female. Even that isn’t completely clear, because there is now quite a lot of argument about what is the true nature of maleness and femaleness. There are people who have both characteristics in them.

The Church of England is entering a period when there will be ‘facilitated conversations’ with a view to trying to tease out the right position for the church to adopt. Is it right, in effect, that the provisions of the Jewish law, as expressed in Leviticus, going back 3,000 years, should decide what we do today, or should some other principles be involved?

Interesting therefore to look at our lessons today. There’s nothing actually about Mothering Sunday, or, indeed, about the position of women, the nature of marriage, or anything else which you might possibly have expected. Instead, we have this short passage from St Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. Incidentally, it’s perfectly timed, because we will be studying this passage tomorrow in the Lent course. ‘Live as children of light, for the fruit of the light is found in all that is good and right and true.’

In our gospel, Jesus says, ‘As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.’ Then he goes on to heal the blind man, so that for the first time in his life, the blind man could see the light. I can’t help feeling that shedding light on these various conundrums – about family relationships, marriage, sexuality – shedding light on them must be a hopeful way to proceed.

We have a name for this process. It’s called ‘enlightenment’. I think it might be quite useful, when looking at the various opposing views, in the context of the facilitated discussions, if the facilitator were to say to each side, ‘Is your position enlightened or not?’

What is ‘enlightened’? As so often with the meaning of difficult words, it helps to look at the opposite – here, to reflect on what is not enlightened. What is not enlightened is bigoted, not open to the light. St Paul says, ‘Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them … Everything exposed by the light becomes visible, for everything that becomes visible is light.’ So the test is, could what you are saying is right look bigoted at all?

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said to his followers, to his listeners, ‘You are the light of the world. Let your light shine before others so that they may see your good works and give glory to your father in heaven.’ The good works are all about love. ‘In everything do to others as you would have them do to you, for this is the law and the prophets,’ Jesus says in Matt.7:12 – the ‘golden rule’.

So think what it must be like if you don’t exactly fit the conventional profile: if you love somebody of the same sex. What does the golden rule say about that? We have to treat people as we ourselves would like to be treated: ‘Live as children of light.’

I pray that, as the facilitated discussions go on, we end up with a church which has room for everyone in it; and that in that church there will not be darkness, but rather there will be light. Then we will really be living ‘as children of light.’

Tags bigot, bishops' letter, children of light, Church of England, Dean of Durham, enlighten, Ephesians, equal marriage, Gay marriage, homosexual, Mothering Sunday

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That would be an Ecumenical Matter

By hughdbryant

January 19, 2014 //

Sermon for Mattins on the Third Sunday after Epiphany, 19th January 2014, at St Mary’s
1 Corinthians 1:1-9 – The Week of Prayer for Christian Unity

In Father Ted, whenever anyone asked Father Jack a question he couldn’t answer, he would say, ‘That would be an ecumenical matter’. What is an ecumenical matter, really? It means a question of the organisation, the οικουμένη, meaning the world, the set-up, of the church. We use the term ‘ecumenism’ to cover the whole question of Christian unity.

At four o’clock this afternoon I will be going – as I hope some of you will too – to the Methodist Church in Cedar Road, for the annual service, arranged by Churches Together in Cobham and Oxshott, to mark the beginning of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity.

In our first lesson today St Paul begins his first letter to the church at Corinth, addressing them all as ‘saints’, ‘saints, with all that in every place call upon the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, both theirs and ours.’

‘Both theirs and ours’ – their and our what? The modern translations, for example the New English Bible, say, ‘their Lord as well as ours.’ But the Greek says literally that Paul is writing to those who are called together in Corinth, called to be saints, with all those who call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ in every place, of theirs and of ours.

It perhaps doesn’t make a vast difference, but what it means is that there were different bodies of Christians in different places, even in the earliest days. There was a church at Corinth, and it had some distinctive features.

Well, today I shall go, I shall go back, to the Methodist chapel. I was brought up a Methodist. Both my grandpas and one great-grandpa were Methodist ministers; and indeed I worshipped in the Methodist Church, was a member of the Methodist Church, until 1996. So in some senses, going to the service this afternoon will be like coming home.

But it won’t really be, because the service this afternoon is actually going to be run by another of the churches in Cobham, which uses the Methodist chapel as their base for worship too, and that is Cobham Community Church, which describes itself as a ‘congregation of Bookham Baptist Church’. Although they don’t say so very obviously, they are Baptists.

In Cobham, Oxshott and Stoke D’Abernon there are Anglicans, Catholics, Methodists, Baptists, United Reformeds, Scottish Presbyterians: six different denominations, just in our little group of villages. This Churches Together area includes about 17,000 people, of whom about 4,000 claim to belong to one or other of the churches here.

I expect that, this afternoon, the worship may be strange – well, strange to me: and, dare I say, not something that I will necessarily find very congenial. But I’m certainly ready to be pleasantly surprised. I should say straightway that going to church is not a matter of entertainment; so to some extent it’s not relevant whether I like the worship or not.

A better question might be whether the worship is worthy; whether it is a proper sacrifice of praise: if it is a sacrament, whether it is ‘an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace given unto us’, [The Book of Common Prayer, A Catechism, p.294].

For some reason the first lesson, from 1 Corinthians, set for today in the Lectionary, stops at verse 9, and is just the opening greeting from St Paul’s letter, where he praises the Corinthians, acknowledges them to be saints, and says that they are ‘enriched by the grace of God, so that they come behind in no gift.’ They are not mere runners-up in the the race for gifts.

But if you read on, you immediately get to the passage which is much more commonly used in the context of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity: ‘Now I beseech you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that ye all speak the same thing and that there be no divisions among you, but that ye be perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgement.’ He goes on to say, ‘Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were ye baptised in the name of Paul?’

In other words, Paul started to criticise the fact that even then, the church had factions in it. I’m not sure when a faction becomes a denomination, or indeed, when a faction becomes a schism, but it does seem that, even in the very earliest church, there were differences of opinion about how best to express the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Today, as we have seen, even locally, we have a whole variety of denominations. The denominations stand for different interpretations of the gospel of Christ. Even within the Anglican church, there are a wide variety of shades of opinion about our faith. There are threats of schism, splits in the church, over the question what we should believe about human sexuality, for example.

The African Anglicans, in general, and the North Americans, are diametrically opposed, and we Englishmen try to sit on the fence. And so, each year, we embark on the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. Dare I say that I don’t think that we are approaching this question of Christian unity in quite the straightforward way that St Paul recommends?

He says, ‘I beseech you that ye all speak the same thing, and that ye be perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgement.’ But I have to confess that I don’t have the same mind and the same judgement as my friends in the Catholic Church, or my friends in the Cobham Community Church, or in the United Reformed Church. I probably do have the same ‘mind’ as my friends in the Methodist Church, because by and large they believe the same things that we Anglicans do. John and Charles Wesley were Anglican vicars till they died.

Although even saying that, an amber light goes on in my brain, because we Anglicans have such a wide variety of belief: so it might be better to say that the Methodists and some Anglicans share common ground.

Of course, historically, the two biggest splits in the church were those between the Western and Eastern Orthodox churches first of all, between Constantinople and Rome, and then between the Protestants and the Catholics. Article XIX of the 39 Articles says,

‘The visible church of Christ is a congregation of faithful men, in the which the pure Word of God is preached, and the Sacraments be duly administered according to Christ’s ordinance in all those things that of necessity are requisite to the same.

As the Church of Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Antioch, have erred; so also the Church of Rome hath erred, not only in their living and manner of Ceremonies, but also in matters of Faith.’

So said Archbishop Cranmer in 1542. It’s still officially the belief of the Church of England.

It doesn’t sound like we have followed St Paul’s instructions to the church in Corinth. But I’m bound to say, the question which occurs to me is whether it matters. Never mind, for a minute, the divisions between Christians: think about the divisions between the various religions – or certainly, the so-called religions of the book, that is, Judaism, Islam and Christianity. All of them make claims to be the exclusive way to the true God. ‘No man cometh unto the Father but by me’ [John 14:6].

The problem is that this whole area is of the highest importance. Nothing could be more important than that we correctly understand, and have the right attitude towards, God, the creator and sustainer of everything. That then leads on to the question, ‘What is true, what is truth?’ Clearly there’s room for a lot of disagreement and different understandings.

In 1834, Thomas Arnold, who became the famous headmaster of Rugby School and was at some time the Regius Professor of Modern History in Oxford and a fellow of Oriel College, wrote to the Professor of Moral Philosophy, R.D. Hampden, saying, ‘Your view of the difference between Christian Truth’ – capital C, capital T – ‘and Theological opinion is one which I have long cherished.’ Hampden had said that he made a distinction between religion, or divine revelation on the one hand, and theological opinions on the other, suggesting that Christians were in broad agreement over the first: everyone broadly recognised the basic revelation of God in Jesus Christ, but only human interpretations of divine word caused Christians to differ over the second, over theological opinion of what the gospel meant. [Catto, J., ed., 2013, Oriel College, a History: Oxford, OUP, p.336]

But of course, if you say that every word in the Bible is literally true, then there are all sorts of difficulties. You may have to believe that the world was created in 4004 BC, and that Methuselah was over 900 years old, for example. Blood-curdling consequences arise if you follow literally the prescriptions in Leviticus and Deuteronomy. A rebellious child can be stoned to death (Deuteronomy 21:18): men can be polygamous. Abraham, Jacob, David and Solomon all had several wives: slavery is acceptable (Lev. 25:44-45).

So there is in the Church of England a helpful compromise, according to which our understanding of Christian truth in the Bible can be informed by reason and tradition. But, however reasonable that sounds, not all Christians would agree.

So these days, we tend not to be so exercised about the divisions of the church. The ecumenical movement, things like the World Council of Churches, which had a general assembly recently in South Korea, doesn’t worry so much about trying to merge the various denominations together, but rather there is an understanding that all of us ‘live in more than one place at once’ as Canon John Nurser, of the ecumenical group Christianity and the Future of Europe, put it recently. [John Nurser, book review, ‘Christian unity reconsidered’, in Church Times, 17th January 2014, p. 23].

Ecumenism now works in trying to reconcile the churches, not only one with another, but also with the challenges outside. So the World Council of Churches was united in its resistance to apartheid in South Africa and the oppression of poor people in Latin America. More recently, the World Council has become concerned with reconciling lifestyles in the West with the sustainability of creation. We can all agree that we must respect God’s creation: but we may not agree on the details of how we go around it, because we are ‘differently situated’. [Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women]

It’s easy to talk about drawing a distinction between divine revelation and theological opinion; but ultimately everything comes to us the lens of our human experience. We are all different; we all have different experience. Therefore even our understanding of religious truth is likely to be different.

Actually, St Paul’s advice to the church in Corinth may be capable of a rather more mundane explanation, namely, that he thought that they had forgotten that the Gospel came from Jesus Christ, from God, and not from Paul and Apollos, or the various other preachers. Remember, said St Paul: the preachers were preaching the Gospel of Jesus; they weren’t themselves divine.

Thomas Arnold’s distinction between Christian Truth and theological opinion may not be a final answer, but I think that it is still quite a useful way for us to look at our friends in the other churches. There is a core of belief which Christians all share. But the theological interpretation of that belief, of course, goes in all sorts of different ways. We should, I suggest, not try to change each other, but simply respect each other’s differences. After all, those of us, who have experienced mergers at work, know that mergers and takeovers are very rarely an unmixed blessing.

I do hope that you will join me this afternoon at 4 o’clock. We will join with our fellow Christians from Cobham, Stoke and Oxshott, to worship God together. It will be different from what we are used to. But that’s all right.

Tags 39 Articles, Anglican, Apollos, Article XIX, Book of Common Prayer, Bookham Baptist Church, Catholics, Charles Wesley, Christian Truth, Christian unity, Church of England, Churches Together, Cobham, Cobham Community Church, Corinthians, ecumenical, ecumenism, Father Jack, Father Ted, John Wesley, Methodist Church, Oriel College, Orthodox Church, Oxshott, R. D. Hampden, Rugby School, Scottish Presbyterian Church, St Paul, Stoke D'Abernon, Thomas Arnold, United Reformed Church, World Council of Churches

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What it is to be a King

By hughdbryant

November 24, 2013 //

Sermon for Evensong at St Mary’s on the Sunday before Advent, 24th November 2013
1 Samuel 8:1-20, John 18:33-37 – What it is to be a King

‘He will take your daughters to be confectionaries, and to be cooks, and to be bakers.’ Confectionaries – from our first lesson, from the First Book of Samuel. I love the idea of one’s daughters being makers of confectionery, sweeties; Yum Yum.

But we’re not talking about the Mikado, but rather, about kings. This is the Sunday next before Advent, when we also celebrate Christ the King, so our hymns are all about crowns and kingship, and the second lesson has Pontius Pilate asking Jesus whether He is a king.

The relevance of this is in the very interesting conversation which Samuel the old prophet has with the elders of Israel, about the best form of government. At that stage in their early history, the tribes of Israel did not have an overall leader, a king. They just had their tribal elders, and they had judges. The judges did what judges do today. ‘Samuel judged Israel all the days of his life, and he went from year to year in circuit, to Bethel, and Gilgal, and Mizpeh, and judged Israel in all those places’. [1 Samuel 7:15f]

When Samuel got old, he appointed his two sons as judges under him. This is a forerunner of what we understand as the rule of law. Moses had received the law: the prophets and the judges who came after him interpreted the law and prayed directly to the Lord.

So in this discussion between the elders of Israel and Samuel, all sorts of things come up, which are still directly relevant and very topical today. You will remember the interview that the comedian Russell Brand had with Jeremy Paxman recently, when he said that he didn’t think there was any point in voting. There’s a lot of disillusionment with politics today.

It’s interesting to look at the list of things which Samuel brings up for discussion in this context. ‘You are old, and your sons do not follow in your way’. The sons were corrupt: they ‘turned aside after lucre, and took bribes, and perverted judgement.’ So the elders said, ‘We don’t want the judges any more to create policy for us: we need a king.’ I think they were proposing something like what Bismarck arranged in Germany and what Garibaldi arranged in Italy – and perhaps what the Romans did in relation to the city states of the Greeks.

Whereas in the time of Moses, the nation of Israel was made up of the 12 tribes, and there was no overall leadership, now Samuel is being asked to appoint a king, who will oversee all of them together, so that collectively they can be stronger.

Notice that there’s no discussion of democracy. Democracy came pretty late. It’s usually said that it started in classical Athens around 500BC, whereas this discussion with Samuel took place before 1,000BC. Interestingly, the ancient authors were not particularly enthusiastic about democracy. They thought it had tendencies to be populist, rabble-rousing rather than a wise way of governing.

So here the difference was between having a king, a monarchy, an absolute monarchy, and continuing in their small tribal units. The Lord told Samuel that the Israelites had rejected Him, the Lord; even though He had saved them from the Egyptians, they had turned aside and worshipped other gods.

Just as these ancient Israelites didn’t know about democracy, we don’t really know about theocracy; theocracy, which is, being governed by God. In the ancient world, nobody would do anything serious without consulting an oracle, or in the Jewish tradition, without consulting a prophet, to find out what the will of God was: whether in fact the proposed course of action was what God wanted.

The Lord accepted that the people of Israel were not going to continue to come to the tabernacle and worship in the old-fashioned way. The people of Israel were rejecting the idea of trying to discern the will of God as their main method of government. They simply wanted a king.

Today we in the west try to keep a separation between matters of religion and matters of politics or government, although the line does get blurred. In France they are very keen on saying that they have a secular state – but the state pays for the upkeep of the churches. In this country, of course, the Church of England is the ‘established’ church, the state church, and the Queen is the head of the church, so church and state are very much bound together.

God tells Samuel to warn the elders of Israel about all the things that could go wrong if they had a king over them. This is where ‘making your daughters to be confectionaries’ comes in. More seriously, he will ‘appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties … He will take the best of your fields and your vineyards and olive orchards, and give them to his courtiers. He will take one tenth of your grain, and of your vineyards, and give it to his officers and his courtiers.’ The King would lord it over the people.

Now we have Russell Brand and Jeremy Paxman agreeing with each other to turn their backs on politics. I wonder if there could be the same sort of conversation if we had a prophet today, or if Jesus himself came among us and saw how we were getting on. Would the rulers of the world today, and in particular our rulers, be guilty of any of the things that Samuel was warning about? Or does democracy tend to rule out the worst excesses of an absolute monarch? Did King John at Runnymede get it right in Magna Carta, with the separation of the powers?

With the movement to have independence in Scotland and the popularity of UKIP, wanting to pull us out of the European Union, are we yearning for an era where we were like the tribes of Israel, small, standing by themselves with no overall king?

Remember that what was wrong with the Israelites at that point was that they had forgotten that they did have a King in heaven, that God was their King, and that they were supposed to worship the one true God alone. They had forgotten that, and they were worshipping all sorts of other gods who were not real.

So then we come to Pontius Pilate’s famous dialogue with Jesus.

‘So you are a king?’ ‘Art thou a king then?
‘Thou sayest that I am a king’. You say that I am a king.

Jesus points out that if He were the sort of king that Pontius Pilate had in mind, then his followers would be fighting for Him, to stop Him from being handed over to the Jews. Instead of which, of course, His followers had melted away: none more so than St Peter.

I wonder if Prince Charles is thinking about all this. Or Prince William, indeed. What is it to be a king today? Perhaps it’s sensible for anyone who is going to be in government, in any way, to think about all the reflections which these passages produce.

The government has a balance of power with the rule of law, the judges. It’s important that judges should not be corrupt. It’s important that the rulers shouldn’t oppress the people – take their sons and put them in the Army, forcing them to fight wars. Will the government take your daughters to be confectionaries?

What is the right tax rate? One tenth of your grain and in your vineyards to go to the civil service. The best products that you make, the Rolls-Royces, the Jaguars, pressed into government service. ‘In that day you will cry out because of your king whom you have chosen for yourselves, but the Lord will not answer you in that day.’

Do we think that Russell Brand was being somewhat prophetic, and that perhaps the original conversation between God and Samuel is the one to listen to – that the best way of government is a government that listens to God and forsakes all other gods?

As Jesus said, ‘For this I was born and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.’ Let’s hope that our leaders will listen too.

Tags Athens, Church of England, confectionaries, Democracy, European Union, France, Israel, Jesus, judges, King, Moses, rule of law, Samuel, tax, UKIP

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