Archives for posts with tag: faith

Hodge and the Nasty Bishop

September 21, 2025 //

Sermon for Morning Prayer on the Feast of Matthew, Apostle and Evangelist, 21st September 2025, at St Dochdwy’s Church, Llandough, and St Augustine’s Church, Penarth

2 Corinthians 4.1-6

1 Therefore, since it is by God’s mercy that we are engaged in this ministry, we do not lose heart. 2 We have renounced the shameful things that one hides; we refuse to practise cunning or to falsify God’s word; but by the open statement of the truth we commend ourselves to the conscience of everyone in the sight of God. 3 And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing. 4 In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. 5 For we do not proclaim ourselves; we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as your slaves for Jesus’ sake. 6 For it is the God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness’, who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

Matthew 9.9-13

9 As Jesus was walking along, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth; and he said to him, ‘Follow me.’ And he got up and followed him.

10 And as he sat at dinner in the house, many tax-collectors and sinners came and were sitting with him and his disciples. 11 When the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, ‘Why does your teacher eat with tax-collectors and sinners?’ 12 But when he heard this, he said, ‘Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. 13 Go and learn what this means, “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.” For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.’

Last Saturday I was in London at Southwark Cathedral. Actually it wasn’t just because I wanted to make friends with their relatively new but already fairly famous cathedral cat, Hodge – named after Samuel Johnson’s cat. Hodge arrived after their definitely famous Doorkins Magnificat died in September 2020. Doorkins got a beautiful funeral at the Cathedral, which you can still see on YouTube [https://youtu.be/sdCtdqmdgtI?si=o6h6htHMFt6xoTn5], led by the previous Dean, Andrew Nunn.

Incidentally I am on another catty mission, which perhaps some of you could help me with, maybe even come with me, to our own cathedral in Llandaff, where I would like to meet the new cathedral cat there, called Frank. Frank is a black cat and so is Hodge. Anyway, I was delighted to meet Hodge during the day I was in the Cathedral.

But really, the reason why I was there – with your support, because very generously our Ministry Area paid the registration fee – was to attend the ‘Festival of Preaching’ which was held that day, organised by the Church Times, with the help of the current Dean of Southwark, Mark Oakley, and the vicar of St Martin in the Fields, Sam Wells, both of whom I’m sure you will have come across on ‘Thought for the Day’ on Radio 4 if nowhere else.

The theme of the day was ‘preaching truth to power’. The keynote speaker, who also led Holy Communion and preached, was the Bishop of Washington DC, Mariann Edgar Budde.

You will remember, I am sure, that she is the bishop whom President Trump criticised for being ‘nasty’ when she used her sermon at the National Cathedral, in a service for the presidential inauguration, to implore Donald Trump to “have mercy upon” immigrants and LGBTQ+ individuals.

I’ll read you what was in the Guardian, 22 Jan 2025, under the splendid headline,‘Trump criticises ‘nasty’ bishop ….’. The Guardian’s Anna Betts wrote:

‘[S]he made headlines for urging Trump during her sermon to show mercy to “gay, lesbian and transgender children” from all political backgrounds, some of whom, she said, “fear for their lives”.

‘She also used her sermon to ask that Trump grant mercy to families fearing deportation and to help those fleeing war and persecution.

‘She emphasised the contributions of immigrants, telling the president: “The vast majority of immigrants are not criminals,” adding that they were “good neighbours” and “faithful members of our churches, mosques and synagogues, gurdwara and temples”.

“Our God teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger, for we were once strangers in this land,” she said. [Exodus 22:21, et al.]

This is not the first time that [Bishop Mariann] has called out and clashed with Trump.

During Trump’s first term, [Bishop Mariann] published an opinion piece in the New York Times. In the June 2020 article, she expressed outrage over Trump’s appearance in front of St John’s Episcopal church in Washington DC, when he held up a Bible for a photo after federal officers used force to clear a crowd of peaceful protesters demonstrating against the death of George Floyd.

[Bishop Mariann] wrote that Trump had “used sacred symbols to cloak himself in the mantle of spiritual authority, while espousing positions antithetical to the Bible that he held in his hands”.’

Nasty bishop indeed! I remember watching on TV as Bishop Mariann preached at the inauguration service and being very stirred by how she had indeed spoken truth to power. It’s a challenge that has faced Christians ever since the earliest days when Jesus was with his disciples. Today we celebrate his calling one of them, Matthew, but the story comes with an important challenge to Jesus, about the people he associated with.

‘Sitting down at meat with publicans and sinners’, if you’re old enough to remember how the old Bible used to put it. Because I was brought up a Methodist, I assumed that this was theological authority for taking the pledge, that anything to do with pubs and their landlords – publicans – was reprehensible, and Jesus was being challenged for associating with pub landlords, I thought. Disappointingly, our modern translation says they’re not pub landlords but tax gatherers; still bad guys but possibly less reprehensible. After all, you might be able to avoid going to the pub, but not the taxman. Death and taxes, you know.

Jesus emphasised the need to engage with these unsavoury citizens and not just people who were on his side. He was there for people who had not seen the light. That’s what Paul is on about as well. In a hostile environment ‘we do not lose heart’, he says. ‘…by the open statement of the truth we commend ourselves to the conscience of everyone in the sight of God. … even if … the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ’.

Nasty people doing nasty things and wrongly accusing good Christians of being nasty. How do we manage this conflict? How do we speak truth in the face of powerful opposition?

Coincidentally, while I was in Southwark Cathedral, not far away a huge demonstration was going on, led by the man who calls himself Tommy Robinson, addressed by Elon Musk by video link on giant screens telling people to be ready to fight; wrapping themselves in Union Jacks and blaming anybody who did not look like them – they were all white – for anything that wasn’t going well in their lives, and shouting that the country was going to rack and ruin.

They didn’t want immigrants, they didn’t want black people, and it would seem they weren’t very keen on the law, because unfortunately there was considerable violence against the police. I came across numbers of them at London Bridge station on my way home. They were scary. They were nasty too. I could see black people on the platform looking nervous. Fortunately there were policemen around and no trouble actually ensued, but the whole atmosphere was menacing. Theirs was another kind of power. How would you speak to people like this, to them, to the power of the mob?

Really it was a world away from the civilised discourse at the front of the nave of Southwark Cathedral which I had just come from. Hanging from the ceiling of the Cathedral was a huge installation of paper doves, each one inscribed with a prayer for peace. The only noise, when it came, was the music of the hymns that we sang and the anthems sung by the choir.

Elon Musk’s participation in the fascist demonstration, by video link, demonstrated how that malign power of the extreme Right had crossed the Atlantic. It was somehow fitting that we had another American to show us how she had, with God’s help, stood up against it. No prizes for knowing which was the nasty American last Saturday.

I have no easy solutions to lay in front of you, but one message which came loud and clear was that it is very important that we should not just shut ourselves in our churches with our heads in our bibles, however faithfully, and not realise the need to engage, the need to preach truth to power.

There is such a lot going on in the world today which would not have gladdened the heart of Jesus. Our voices in the churches, speaking truth to power, need to be heard. We are specially praying today for the situation in the Middle East, for the release of hostages, for the cessation of violence, for the provision of enough food and water and the reconstruction of houses.

There is going to be a vigil of witness led by ++Cherry at the Senedd on Wednesday at 12.30. If anyone else would like to go, I will be going along with Jimmy and Susannah, and would be very happy to give lifts if anyone needs one. We are planning a vigil for peace in this Ministry Area also, on 5th October in the evening, at All Saints.

Jesus first, then his disciples, and then his ‘meta-disciple’, Saint Paul, his second-order disciple, the great theologian, all knew the importance of preaching truth to power. Let us pray that we are given the Lord’s help and encouragement in continuing that important work. Amen.

Hugh Bryant

Tags Andrew Nunn, Anna Betts, Archbishop Cherry, BBC Radio 4, Bible, Bible upside down, Bishop of Washington. DC, Black Lives Matter, Cathedral cats, Christianity, Church Times, Dean of Southwark, Donald Trump, Doorkins Magnificat, Elon Musk, Exodus 22.21, faith, Festival of Preaching, Frank the Cat, Gaza, George Floyd, Good neighbours, Hodge, immigrants, Jesus, LGBTQ+, Llandaff Cathedral, London Bridge Station, MariannEdgar Budde, Mark Oakley, Middle East, Nasty lady, National Cathedral, New York Times, politics, Preaching Truth to Power, president trump, publicans and sinners, Sam Wells, Samuel Johnson, Senedd, Southwark Cathedral, St John's Episcopal Church, St Martin in the Fields, St Paul, The Guardian, Thought for the Day, Tommy Robinson, Union Jack

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The Pleasant Plant, the Stinker and Dietrich Bonhoeffer

By hughdbryant

April 13, 2025 //

Sermon for Evensong on Palm Sunday 2025

https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=611300034

Two vineyards. Two stories about vineyards at the start of Holy Week. You might think that we are being exposed to, talking about, another temptation involving wine, but that’s not it. The two vineyard stories in Isaiah and St Luke’s gospel.

Isaiah the prophet singing for his beloved concerning his vineyard – I’m not quite sure how the genders work – the beloved having done all that is necessary to create a fruitful vineyard on a very fertile hill; he expected it to yield grapes, but it yielded, according to our translation here, ‘wild grapes’: although apparently, according to one of the commentaries which I read, the word in Hebrew literally means ‘stinkers’. Heaven knows what a grape has to be like to be described as a stinker; anyway it was not a successful planting of a vineyard. Somehow the vineyard didn’t turn out as it was intended to be.

‘What I will do to my vineyard’ – it’s quite difficult to follow who’s who in this story – it’s somebody and his beloved who builds the vineyard and then it’s me, it’s my vineyard. And because the vineyard produces stinkers I’ll dismantle it and make it a wasteland so that it’s overgrown with briars and thorns. There isn’t really some boyfriend’s Château Musar somewhere which has suddenly stopped producing decent grapes.

Similarly Jesus talks about a man turning his vineyard over to tenants – literally, farmers – in the King James Bible, husbandmen. Where have all these good words gone? I like a world with husbandmen in it. And where are the handmaidens? I ask myself. The word here is γεωργος (Georgos, which is Greek for ‘farmer’). Like a lot of names, George is derived from the Greek, so if you are called George, in Greek you are a farmer. In Jesus’ story, they were tenant farmers of some kind. And he sent members of his staff – literally, his slaves – one at a time to try to collect the rent, or a share of the produce instead, which certainly seems still to be the way that it works in the south of France even today. A friend of mine had a house there including a vineyard. He let the local cooperative manage the vineyard, in return for which they harvested the grapes and gave my friend a share in the wine produced. He took his rent in bottles.

Here, however, the parable is about wicked tenants who didn’t pay their rent and instead, eventually, when the owner sent his own son, the tenants, having kicked out his servants one by one when they called on the farmers to hand over the rent, actually killed the son. So what did the owner of the vineyard do? Obviously he evicted the wicked tenants and passed the vineyard over to other managers to manage.

Again, this is not an actual story about something that actually happened. It’s a parable and it’s very relevant to Easter. Jesus is forecasting what is going to happen, and the scribes and the chief priests, hearing him, get angry because they realise that what he is saying is directed against them, Jesus suggests that if they do behave like the wicked tenants then ‘the stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone’, and that stone will trip people up fatally, and it may fall on other people, with similar devastating consequences.

If they, the Pharisees and scribes, are builders, and if they reject a stone while they are building something, if they reject Jesus, then He will become a stumbling block for them, or even fall on them and obliterate them.

Ploughing up a vineyard. Fatal trips and falls. Being crushed by a massive boulder. I’m not sure whether, when we read these lessons in the Bible, even in the context of Lent and even as we look forward to the commemoration of the amazing events of the first Easter, even so, I’m not sure that these lessons really grab us in the way that some of the language used indicates that they are meant to.

Everyone who falls on that stone will be broken to pieces and it will crush anyone on whom it falls. And Isaiah’s friend’s vineyard producing ‘stinkers’ instead of the sweet juicy grapes that he might reasonably have expected and so getting dug up and bulldozed. These are two parables, two stories that are not meant to be taken literally, but which colourfully illustrate, dramatise, an idea or principle; and they have been chosen to be readings for Evensong today because they put you in mind of what we are going to commemorate at Easter.

Jesus is the son who is sent to the vineyard, the vineyard being the human race, the only son, who gets rejected and killed by the people who are looking after his father’s property, the vineyard, the world that his father has created. The Israelites, the Jews, were the bad tenants who threw out the only son and killed him; or rather, they would be, because Jesus is telling the story before he gets crucified.

But so what? Look, there are only 43 of us here – although that’s a really good turn-out: there are only a few thousand, perhaps, in Evensong services all over the UK. Most people couldn’t care less. Most people are snoozing after Sunday lunch or maybe having a nice walk in the park.

Even if they are vaguely aware of Easter having more to it than just a lot of Easter eggs, nevertheless there is nothing vital or urgent about it so far as they are concerned. Even if they’re going to turn up on Easter Sunday, if they are in the habit of coming at Christmas and Easter, say, (which, incidentally, if they were in the Roman Catholic Church would count as regular attendance), but even if they are really rather sparing attenders at church, or if they never come, they presumably don’t feel any compulsion, any need or anything really vital for their life today about this teaching of Jesus or this prophecy of Isaiah.

Nobody much today really thinks that because they might be descendants of the people who cast out the son and killed him, (in these terms), they should worry that a stone might be a stumbling block or that it might fall on them and crush them. It’s probably a metaphor too far, even if they do know a bit about Jesus, because the idea that Jesus would take some dreadful vengeance on people, crush them and grind them into dust, is not consistent with our picture of ‘gentle Jesus, meek and mild’, the suffering servant, who washed the disciples’ feet – as we will wash at least one of your feet, on Thursday at Holy Nativity.

What is our Lent reflection about this? I want to read you something which was written by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the great German theologian who was executed by the Nazis in the dying days of the Second World War because he was a member of the Stauffenberg Plot to kill Adolf Hitler in 1944. The church remembered the 80th anniversary of his death last Wednesday. He wrote, from prison, what he called an ‘outline for a book’, in which he tackled the idea of a world in which people do not feel they need God any more. He speaks of a God in “religion” as a deus ex machina. Literally it means ‘god from the machinery’. That’s defined in the Oxford Illustrated Dictionary as a ‘power [or] event that comes in the nick of time to solve difficulty.’ The ‘machinery’ was what they had in ancient Greek theatres, to make the actors playing the part of gods fly through the air.

Bonhoeffer felt that religious people had been seeing God in a way as a magic fixer, that “[God] must be ‘there’ to provide answers and explanations beyond the point at which our understanding or our capabilities fail.” But as scientific knowledge has increased, so people have needed God less and less. They may well feel they can get along without needing God at all.

Bonhoeffer felt we ought to accept this, that this was a sign of the world ‘coming of age’. He wrote, ‘The only way to be honest is to recognise that we have to live in the world etsi deus non daretur – even if God is not ‘there’. Like children outgrowing the secure religious, moral and intellectual framework of the home, in which ‘Daddy’ is always there in the background, God is teaching us that we must live as men who can get along very well without him’.

He went on to set out a paradox at the heart of this, which I think leads very well into our reflections for Lent. Bonhoeffer wrote, ‘God allows himself to be edged out of the world, and that is the way, the only way, in which he can be with us and help us. … This is the decisive difference between Christianity and all [other] religions. Man’s religiosity makes him look in his distress to the power of God in the world; he uses God as a deus ex machina. The Bible however [has] directed him to the powerlessness and suffering of God; only a suffering God can help.’

“[Bonhoeffer wrote that he would explain in his book] the experience that a transformation of all human life is given in the fact that Jesus is ‘there only for others.’ His ‘being there for others’ is the experience of transcendence. It is only this ‘being there for others’, maintained till death, that is the ground of his omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence.” Those are the essential characteristics of the divine, of God, of what he calls ‘transcendence’. He goes on: “Faith is participation in this being of Jesus (incarnation, cross, and resurrection).” Those are the key things about Jesus: incarnation becoming human, the cross, and resurrection. According to Bonhoeffer,“Our relation to God is not a ‘religious’ relationship to the highest, most powerful, and best Being imaginable – that is not authentic transcendence – but our relation to God is a new life in existence for others, through participation in the being of Jesus. The transcendental is not infinite and unattainable tasks, but the neighbour who is within reach in any given situation.”

We need to think very carefully about this really big mystery. On the one hand we believe in God as a kind of omnipotent father figure, but on the other we read that the first shall be last and the last shall be first. God, Jesus, is in the needy people, the ill people, the homeless people, the naked people who have no clothes.

The sky has turned darker since the joyful procession this morning on a donkey. Donkeys are great, and Jesus was on that donkey. But what else was going on? That’s for us to ponder in this week to come.

Quotations are from ‘Outline for a Book’ in Bonhoeffer, D, (enlarged edition) 1971, ‘Letters and Papers from Prison’, London, SCM Press p.380f., and from Bonhoeffer as quoted in Robinson, J. A. T., 1963, ‘Honest to God’, p36f, ‘Must Christianity be Religious?’

Tags Adolf Hitler, Chateau Musar, Christianity, deus ex machina, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, donkey, Evensong, faith, Hebrew, Holy Nativity Church Penarth, holy week, Honest to God, Isaiah, Israelites, Jesus, King James Bible, Lent, Nazis, Palm Sunday, Pharisees, religion, St Luke, Stauffenberg Plot, vineyard

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Temptation in the House of Louis Jadot

By hughdbryant

March 10, 2025 //

Sermon for Evensong on the First Sunday in Lent, 9th March 2025

At St Peter’s Church, Old Cogan

Jonah 3

Luke 18:9-14

https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=608348962

Last Wednesday, Ash Wednesday, I did some shopping in one of our local supermarkets. I accidentally walked down the aisle containing wine and beer, and stumbled across Beaujolais Villages from one of the finest Burgundy producers, rather curiously marked as ‘clearance’ – at less than half the normal price.

Now on the first day of Lent this was rather a challenge. Could I resist buying it at less than half price? On Ash Wednesday it was the start of Lent, and one of the things which one is supposed to do is to give things up, to fast. What was I supposed to do about this wonderful wine bargain?

At the same time I was starting to think about this service, and what I would say to you in my sermon. I looked at our Bible lessons prescribed for today, and came across the third chapter of the little book of Jonah.

A little like Louis Jadot’s fine Beaujolais, the passage chosen wasn’t quite what I had expected. That was nothing about the whale. If I asked you what you associate with the name of Jonah, I would be mighty impressed if the name ‘Nineveh’ was on your lips instead of something about a whale.

Our lesson today tells you about Jonah going and uttering a prophecy to the people of Nineveh who have been misbehaving in a sinful way, telling them that God had warned that they would come to a bad end if they did not mend their ways. The ruler of Nineveh told the people to put on sackcloth and ashes, to put on visible signs of repentance, and to turn back to the true God. But you have to know that this is Jonah’s second go at this task from God. The first time around, when God was telling him to give this bad news to the people of Nineveh, he ran away, bought a passage on the ship and then, as a result of the ship being caught in a storm, he drew the short straw and was chucked overboard so as to lighten the load on the ship and to save it from being overwhelmed by the waves. And he was eaten up by a whale.

At this point when I am talking about the book of Jonah, as an ancient maritime lawyer I always use the opportunity to mention this as an early instance of the legal doctrine of general average, an “extraordinary sacrifice made to preserve the safety of the ‘maritime adventure’”, as the Marine Insurance Act1906, which is still good law, puts it; although general average doesn’t involve chucking people over the side as opposed to cargo or the ship’s tackle, of course, or making a special payment for services to prevent the ship being lost. So I won’t mention that particularly here but rather we should concentrate on Jonah’s encounter with the whale.

I’m not sufficiently up on marine biology to be able to express a view on how plausible this is as a literal account, but I think it is fine as a colourful illustration of how God might intervene to persuade somebody who was a bit reluctant. Jonah having been spat out safely, as you are, if you’re eaten by a whale, after three days, he was indeed persuaded, and he went and undertook his task. He told the people of Nineveh how awful they were, how they needed to change their ways, to repent: a bit like what we are supposed to do in Lent, I suppose.

You can see why Jonah was reluctant. Being the bearer of bad news is never a popular thing to do, especially when you are speaking truth to power. It’s something we’ve noticed in recent days in the way in which our various leaders are not telling President Trump what time of day it is.

Not but what Jonah, no doubt emboldened by his whaling experience, did deliver his message to the people of Nineveh, and he received a reception which was entirely different from what he had feared. God had noticed the fact that the people of Nineveh had changed their ways, and he did not punish them.

So – what should we do? How should we change our ways in the 40 days leading up to Easter? What about fasting? Well, another thing to put into the mix is that we mustn’t crow about whatever it is that we do do; so if you are able to write a cheque for an eye-watering amount of money to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, say, or even, maybe, for the Penarth Ministry Area, such that you make that gift instead of treating yourself to a holiday in Gstaad for skiing, you mustn’t talk about it. You mustn’t crow about it. Think about the Pharisee and the publican. All you should do is to ask the Lord for forgiveness because you are a sinner. Whatever sins you have committed, you just say, quietly and privately, ‘Have mercy on me, a sinner.’

I guess that bears on how you should conduct yourself at charity auctions. Maybe you will have to appoint a proxy to bid for you next time you are minded to go and support Welsh Rugby at some appropriate dinner or other, but I leave that to your discretion.

What about that Beaujolais? Well I offer this as a true story which may or may not inspire you. I know that I am very bad at giving things up, but equally I’m not sure that my giving things up really has any benefit to anybody else except possibly me. But I am enormously comforted by a verse in Isaiah about fasting. Let me quote it to you.

‘Is not this the fast that I choose: to loosen the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin?’ (Isaiah 58: 6,7)

Now I do think that that is more my kind of fast. So what I usually do – and I am going to do it this Lent – is, every time I eat out, (and that includes pies on the motorway), I will keep a note of what I spend; and at the end of Lent I will look at all those bills and work out what it would have cost to invite another person to join me each time: an absent guest, if you like. I will tot up the cost of the absent guests and I will give that to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Maybe that’s a sort of fast that you could undertake too.

Oh – and, yes, about the Beaujolais. I bought three.

Amen.

Hugh Bryant

Tags Ash Wednesday, Beaujolais, Bible, faith, fasting, General Average, God, great fish, Gstaaad, Isaiah, Jonah, Lent, Louis Jadot, Marine Insurance Act, Maritime adventure, Nineveh, Penarth Ministry Area, Pharisee, president trump, Publican, Sinner, UNHCR

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Advent

By hughdbryant

January 28, 2025 //

Sermon for Mattins on 1st December 2024, the First Sunday of Advent

Advent Reflections

https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=605091724

Isaiah 51:4-11

Romans 13:11-14

We have lit the first Advent candle and begun the new church year with the beginning of Advent. The word ‘advent’ means coming, or ‘coming towards’ somewhere. It is from an old Latin word.

It is supposed to be a penitential season in the church’s year, although probably not quite as serious as the period of Lent. Not for the first time you get the slight feeling that in the church we are sailing against the wind so far as the rest of society is concerned. If you watch ITV and pay any attention to the adverts, essentially the thing that we are coming towards is definitely Christmas, and it’s not a thoughtful time at all except to the extent that you may have to spend a bit of time with your diary making sure that you’re in the right place at the right time for all the Christmas parties and, particularly at Christmas, that you haven’t left any of the family out. But that’s not really what the Christian tradition is all about. The ‘coming’ in Advent is the coming of Jesus, and there are really two comings, coming in the sense of his incarnation, becoming a man, being born in the manger Christmas is one coming.

But there’s also be an idea of the end time, of Jesus’s second coming, and you can see from our readings today in the lesson from Isaiah a prophecy addressed to the people of Israel looking forward to the Messiah, the great saviour who would take them out of captivity, effectively for a second time. The prophet reminds them of the escape from Egypt, the parting of the waters and the entry into the promised land. Isaiah is saying that God can do this again.

And then in Saint Paul’s letter to the Romans he reflects the belief which was common among the early Christians that the end time, that the second coming, and the time of judgement, was just round the corner. Obviously we realise that that’s not the case, and if there is to be an end time of this type, we don’t know when it will be.

St Paul nevertheless makes a good point in saying that we should always live our lives as though we would be hauled up before the judge eternal in the next day or so. There is a sort of tension here. For all the last 2000 years we have recognised that the Messiah has come, at Christmas time, but still we are waiting, waiting for him to come again.

In our church in Wales there is a difference in the holy communion service compared with our brothers and sisters in England. In England the church says, ‘Christ has died, Christ is risen,’ and then, ‘Christ will come again’. The church in Wales, perhaps more realistically, says, not, Christ will come again, but, Christ will come in glory. What we can reflect on is that looking towards this second coming, whenever it may be, isn’t just a question of our hanging around aimlessly, as somebody put it that I read recently, this time of waiting is not devoid of meaning, like time spent waiting at a bus stop.

This ‘in-between time’ is a time for the church to proclaim the gospel to every nation, to make sense of the present, while never giving up the hope that God’s Messiah, Jesus, will have the last word. We have to acknowledge that, in a very real sense, we do still need salvation. There is still an awful lot wrong with the world, particularly today when we see the terrible wars that are going on in Gaza, Ukraine and south Sudan.

The world hasn’t faced up to the fact that as well as wars and civil strife, there is a huge gap between the haves and the have-nots, between the rich nations of the northern hemisphere and the global South, that means that there is a huge pressure of migration because people may be fleeing not only from war but also because they can’t make a living and they are moving towards the places which are richer and more likely to give them the means to sustain themselves.

I watched Angela Merkel, the former German chancellor, being interviewed by the BBC’s Katya Adler – It’s a very interesting interview which you can catch up with on iPlayer [https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0025gqj] – and it was really interesting that Dr Merkel identified the biggest problem facing civilisation nowadays as the gap between the rich and poor. If you fix that, there will be far less need for people to migrate, quite apart from all the other benefits that will flow through having a fairer world.

So we must be awake. We must think and do whatever is needed so that our world looks more like a place where the Messiah has already arrived and less like a place which badly needs him to come again.

Having said that, I should just share with you that when I was doing my reading in preparation for this sermon, I managed to find one scholarly reference which might tend to suggest that people who see Advent as being just a jolly run up to Christmas might have some historical justification.

The liturgical scholar Benjamin Gordon Taylor wrote this. ‘Although in historical terms the most recent of the seasons to emerge……, the origin of advent is not clear. It had a penitential character in the middle centuries of the first millennium which may have been linked to epiphany baptism, but neither this nor the alternative view, that it represented a Christianising of the pagan winter fast, can be certain. Contrary to its modern acceptance as the beginning of the liturgical year, Advent may in earlier times have struggled against a persistence in Rome to see Christmas in this role; certainly the emphasis on penitence in Gaul and Spain was contrasted in Rome by a focus on the joyful expectation of the coming of Christ.’ Clearly we are the spiritual successors of the Romans here.

And he goes on to say, ‘Advent has a rich potential for reflection on powerful themes in the economy of salvation, for example the first and second comings of Christ and, traditionally, the four last things: death, judgement, heaven and hell. And earlier emphasis on penitence, although not universal, tends to be downplayed.’

So I think we have scholarly endorsement: it’s okay to enjoy the Waitrose ad, provided you don’t forget all those people who couldn’t afford even to go to Lidl and, more importantly, provided you do something about it.

Tags Advent, Angela Merkel, Benjamin Gordon Taylor, Bible, christmas, Church in Wales, Egypt, faith, Gaza, God, hope, Isaiah, ITV, Jesus, Katya Adler, Latin, Manger, Messiah, Romans, South Sudan, St Paul, Ukraine

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The Fall and the Freebie

By hughdbryant

February 19, 2024 //

https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=575175148

Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7; Romans 5:12-19

The first Sunday in Lent, in preparation for the great Easter climax: a time of spiritual reflection, renewal, fasting. We are preparing for the events which revealed God’s love for humanity. God’s love, indeed, for fallen humanity, we often say. and that’s what our Bible readings this afternoon are about. The lesson from Genesis is sometimes described as the story of the Fall, and Christ’s passion and death, followed by his glorious resurrection, described in terms of sacrifice and redemption, salvation. Salvation for fallen humanity.

We know these stories. We know the story of Adam and Eve, and we know Paul’s famous passage contrasting Adam, who brought sin into the world, with the free gift, the grace of God, in giving us Jesus Christ. and I’m sure that as you’ve heard the lessons, as they were beautifully read just now, even if you aren’t word perfect in your memory, they were pretty familiar.

But in the spirit of Lenten reflection, perhaps not in a full-on 40 days in the wilderness sense, but nevertheless, in the hope that it makes you quietly go away and think about this, let’s have a closer look at the Fall and the ‘free gift’.

Let’s look at the Fall. What did Adam and Eve do wrong? I remember when I first heard this bit of Genesis, where God tells Adam that he can eat the fruit of all the other trees, but not this funny tree called the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; I wondered what its fruit looked like. It’s one clue that this is not meant to be a scientific explanation of anything, that one of the key elements is that there is this mysterious tree. It’s not just a plum tree or an apple tree.

But then again, what is wrong? What is wrong with getting to know the difference between right and wrong? The idea seems to be that, before the Fall, before the act of disobedience, humans, or at least the first humans, Adam and Eve, didn’t know the difference between right and wrong. They were in some kind of primordial innocence – but they were immortal, or at least that seems to be the implication, because the threat that God makes is that if they disobey him and eat the fruit of the tree of good and evil, “you shall die”. Later on in Genesis, it says, “you shall get your bread by the sweat of your brow until you return to the ground, for from it, you were taken. Dust you are, and to dust you shall return.” You will remember that phrase from the Ash Wednesday service.

But why should it be a bad thing to know the difference between good and evil? And is there any obvious link between acquiring an innate moral sense and becoming mortal? Without wanting to sound flippant, I do think that this is a fairytale. Or perhaps, to put it more positively, it’s a myth, a story told to illustrate a point. So I suppose the attractiveness of it, why it is such a compelling story, is that indeed, we are very drawn to sympathise with Eve. As the serpent says, “when you eat of the fruit of the tree, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.“

The woman saw that “the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise”.

What on earth is wrong with any of that? The only thing you can find in the text is that God told them not to do it. You might say that there was more to it. There was a suggestion that, as a consequence of them doing it, they would become mortal.

Alternatively, (and I think this comes out from Saint Paul’s discussion that we will go on to look at in a minute), it’s not that they will become mortal, so much as that God will kill them. There will be a death penalty for their disobedience. They were always mortal, because that’s the nature of being human: but if they disobey God, God will punish them, he will inflict death upon them. Perhaps that is closer to the true meaning.

It’s all painfully like stuff we remember from childhood. ‘Why do I have to stop throwing bread rolls at my brother when we are having our breakfast?’

Answer, ‘Because I told you not to.’

‘ Why not?’

‘Because if you carry on doing that, you will get a thick ear.’

The way that this is written, makes us realise that it isn’t the ability to tell wrong from right that is the problem – that ability is always a good thing – but it’s how Adam and Eve acquired this ability that got them into trouble.

The important thing is that they disobeyed God. They went off in another direction away from where God had directed them. The problem is not that they knew the difference between good and evil, but that they had become estranged from God. They had ploughed their own furrow; they thought they knew better than God what to do. That is why it is described as sin. What Adam and Eve did was sinful. Sinfulness isn’t necessarily doing something which is morally wrong, so much as becoming cut off from God.

That’s what Paul picks up on in his letter to the Romans. ‘Just as sin came into the world through one man, and death came through sin’, is what he says, not ‘bad things or doing bad things’ came into the world – and incidentally, St Paul seems to be a bit shaky on gender equality, because he only seems to blame Adam, whereas it looks as though the Fall was proximately caused by Eve: anyway, we’ll leave that for another day.

St Paul sees the Fall as alienation from God, as sin, not just doing bad things. He repeats what Genesis says about the consequence of sin being death. I can’t help feeling that perhaps Paul reasons backwards from Jesus’s rising from the dead, from Jesus‘s resurrection, from his conquering death, as it is sometimes called, to infer that mortality was the consequence of sin, that alienation from God, disobedience to God, made one mortal.

That seems to be the logic, although I have to say, it’s one part of these passages that you either believe or not, because there’s nothing you can do to prove or disprove whether God made previously immortal people into mortals.

Be that as it may, Paul contrasts the idea that Adam brought sin into the world – and as Paul says he is not treating Adam as a particular person, but, as the lesson says, “Adam, who was a type of the one who was to come“, or, as another translation [NEB] puts it, “Adam foreshadows the Man who was to come”– either way, it was not particularly Adam – or Eve – who was responsible, but mankind in general going away from the commandments of God.

The Greek word for sin is άμαρτια, which means missing the mark, shooting, and missing the target; Paul then goes on to talk about the effect of what he calls “the law“, that sin existed before the law, but until the law came along, you couldn’t measure how much sin there was. He means law in the sense not of statutes passed by government, but the Jewish law, which is intended to give direction, how to comply with God’s commandments.

So, if you disobey the Jewish law, which is in the first five books of the Old Testament, and summed up in the 10 Commandments, then you have broken the law, not in the sense of being a burglar or a murderer, (although if you were one of those, you would be contravening some of the 10 Commandments) – but more importantly, you are committing sins, things which drive you apart from God.

So Paul contrasts the beginning of sin, the Fall, the fall from grace, by Adam, the prototype man, he contrasts that with God’s gift, his grace, his free gift, to fallen mankind, in giving us his son, Jesus Christ.

Paul contrasts judgement following one trespass, which brought condemnation, and the free gift following many trespasses, which brings justification.

‘Justification’ is a technical term in the Bible. It means being on good terms with God. Sometimes theologians translate it as being right with God, so as to pick up the connotation of justice; but it is more like what an engineer or a carpenter, or a toolmaker, might understand as justification: bringing a work piece into alignment with another work piece, justifying that piece with its intended place.

You adjust something so that it fits.

It’s that kind of relationship that St Paul is talking about here: not a question of being acquitted in a court of law. This all comes in the context where Paul has introduced the idea of “justification through faith“. The idea that you’re not put right with God by doing good deeds necessarily, although good deeds are a good thing to do anyway, but that you depend on God’s generosity.

He is not so much rewarding us as being gracious to us, giving us what is translated as a “free gift” It’s a Greek word, which is translated as a free gift, but it also really means a ‘gifty thing’, a δωρημα as opposed to a δωρον. It’s the essence of generosity, the essence of giving, rather than just a particular present. And that squares again with the idea that we are being put right with God, being brought into adjustment, into a good fit.

Just one more puzzle, before I leave you to carry on musing on these really rich passages with so many things to ponder over. That is the consequence of the free gift. Saint Paul says that those who receive the free gift of righteousness are saved. They “exercise dominion in life” it said in our lesson, through that one man, Jesus Christ. It’s the conquest of life over death. We have the gift of eternal life. That’s what salvation is.

You need to go on and do some homework and read the 15th chapter of Saint Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians to give you more detail about what eternal life is and how it works. Jesus showed that it is possible, by himself rising from the dead. St Paul gives you some very believable analogies to explain in more detail how we can expect eternal life to come about.

So those are some ideas which you might want to reflect on as you begin your journey into Lent this year. All the Fs, the Fall and the Freebie, the Free Gift.

And just one more thing, for those of you who have been tackling me about this. What am I going to do by way of giving things up for Lent? I like to follow an idea which a former Lord Mayor of London had a good few years ago, called the absent guest scheme.

Whenever I go out for a meal or some other refreshment, I keep a note of the bill and then, at the end of Lent, I calculate what it would’ve cost to have had another person present at each of these occasions, an ‘absent guest’. I tot up what the total cost of the absent guests would have been and give it to my chosen charity for that Easter.

This year I will be giving it, I hope, to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, UNRWA, for their work in Gaza.

Tags 1 Corinthians 15, 10 Commandments, Adam, Ash Wednesday, Bible, Easter, Eve, faith, Freebie, Genesis, God, Jesus, Jews, Justification, Moses, New English Bible, Pentateuch, Resurrection, Romans, salvation, Sin, St Paul, The Fall, UNRWA

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The Theology of Baked Beans and Sausages

By hughdbryant

March 7, 2020 //

Sermon for Evening Prayer on Saturday 7th March 2020 for the Prayer Book Society Guildford Branch, at the Founder’s Chapel, Charterhouse

Jeremiah 7:1-20; John 6:27-40 (see http://bible.oremus.org/?ql=450504242)

And Jesus said unto them, I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on me shall never thirst.

I want to speak to you not just about the bread of life, but also about baked beans and sausages. At the same time we can’t ignore that it is the end of the first week in Lent.

The baked beans and sausage, you might be a bit surprised to hear, bring into consideration two theologians, one ancient and one modern, and the bread and the Lent give us a topical Christian context for that food, which is, fasting.

And I suppose that the other ingredient which I need to work in is some reference to our beloved Book of Common Prayer, and the theological developments which Cranmer was influenced by in writing it.

The first thing to reassure you about is that there is no command to fast in the Gospels – except that Jesus said that he did not come to abolish the Law of Moses, but to fulfil it. So the days laid down for fasting in Leviticus, for example on the Day of Atonement, mean that it’s not strictly true that there’s no Biblical justification for fasting.

As you will know, the Reformation, which greatly influenced Cranmer, was led certainly by Martin Luther in Germany but also by Zwingli and Calvin in Switzerland.

Diarmaid MacCulloch has written, ‘It was a sausage that proved to be the rallying-cry for the Swiss Reformation.’ A Zurich printer, Christoph Froschauer, with Zwingli and 12 of his followers in Zurich sat down on the first Sunday in Lent in 1522 and ate two large sausages. Zwingli followed up by preaching a sermon in which he argued that it was unnecessary to follow the church’s traditional teaching about not eating meat during Lent. It was a human command introduced by the Church, which might or might not be observed, but which ‘obscured the real laws of God in the Gospel if it was made compulsory’. [MacCulloch, D., 2003, Reformation, London, Allen Lane, p139]. Cranmer and Zwingli are supposed to have met, and the Swiss reformer is thought to have influenced the English archbishop.

So that’s the sausage. In the Reformation context, according to Zwingli, fasting is not divinely ordained. It’s up to you.

Not but what by the time of the Second Book of Homilies, published in the Church of England in Queen Elizabeth’s time, in 1563, whose author was Bishop Jewel, there was a published sermon – a Homily – called ‘Of Fasting’, Homily number 16. The Homilies were intended for the use of vicars who were not good at preaching, so they didn’t make any theological mistakes. We tend to think of a ‘homily’ as a short sermon – the sort that the vicar doesn’t get into the pulpit to deliver, but perhaps hovers invisibly on the chancel steps for; something like Thought for the Day in size and weight. Not so in 1563! ‘An Homily of Good Works and of Fasting’ is in two parts, the first being about fasting, and in the modern edition which I have, it occupies 8 ½ pages of very dense small type!

Some of the early Christian Fathers such as Irenaeus or Chrysostom or Tertullian or Gregory the Great all debated how long a fast should go on for. The possibilities included one day, as on the Jewish Day of Atonement, or 40 hours, mirroring Jesus’ 40 days in the wilderness, or indeed 40 days of fasting.

The ‘Annotated Book of Common Prayer’, edited by the Revd John Henry Blunt, published in 1872, which I’m very fortunate to have a copy of, says this.

‘The general mode of fasting seems to have been to abstain from food until after 6 o’clock in the afternoon and even then not to partake of animal food or wine. Yet it may be doubted whether such a mode of life could have been continued day after day for six weeks by those whose duties called upon them for much physical exertion… and although it may seem at first that men ought to be able to fast in the 19th century as strictly as they did in the 16th, the 12th, or the third, yet it should be remembered that the continuous labour of life was unknown to the great majority of persons in ancient days, as it is at the present time in the eastern church and in southern Europe; and that the quantity and quality of the food which now forms a full meal is only equivalent to what would have been an extremely spare one until comparatively modern days.’

The Victorians were too busy safely to fast, and their meals were cuisine minceur by comparison with the groaning boards enjoyed in olden times. Think of what we know of Henry VIII’s diet, or Sir John Falstaff’s. Having a rest from eating was probably very good for them, and there was no risk of starving. Come the industrial revolution, however, and meat and two veg in the works canteen was all you might have. If you gave that up, ‘night starvation’, as the Horlicks advert used to warn, was a real possibility unless you had some nourishment at least.

But it’s at least arguable that Jesus, in our lesson from St John’s Gospel, wasn’t talking about the ins and outs of fasting. [6:27] ‘Labour not for the meat which perisheth, but for that meat which endureth unto everlasting life, which the Son of man shall give unto you..’ This leads up to one of the great ‘I am’ sayings in St John’s Gospel, ‘I am the bread of life’. Just as the name of God as He spoke to Moses in the Old Testament was ‘I am’, so in these sayings, Jesus is using the same form of words, giving a sign of his divine nature. And we are no longer thinking about whether or not to eat a sausage. This is spiritual, divine food, ‘meat which endureth unto everlasting life’.

And that, you’ll be amazed to know, brings us to baked beans, and to our second theologian. He is Jürgen Moltmann, the great German theologian, some time Professor of Systematic Theology at the University of Tübingen. (That is the same university at which Pope Benedict taught, once upon a time.) Moltmann is in his 90s now, and so it was a great honour for me to attend his lecture this week at Westminster Abbey, called ‘Theology of Hope’. This was the title of one of his famous books.

Prof. Moltmann comes originally from Hamburg. His excellent English still has the same accent that I know so well from my friends there in the shipping world. He was a boy when Hamburg was bombed, bombed by us, when there was the terrible ‘fire storm’ about which Kurt Vonnegut and others have written so eloquently. Moltmann was conscripted into the German army, and on Monday night he told us he had carefully learned two words of English, which he used when his platoon encountered the British Army for the first time. They were, ‘I surrender’. He told his audience that the abiding memory of his time as a prisoner of war was baked beans – which like all boys, he liked, and I think he still likes, very much.

So if the sausage in our baked beans and sausage is redolent of the Reformation, and the creation of the Book of Common Prayer, so the baked beans lead us to Jürgen Moltmann, and his Theology of Hope. What is this hope?

Moltmann saw, and still sees in the world today, great challenges in our life. They represent death, or even separation from God, which is another way of describing sin. Climate change, the destruction of God’s creation; nuclear war, where the use of nuclear weapons would end the world as we know it, because no-one could survive the nuclear winter. Division and separation among peoples instead of unity and co-operation; the erection or rebuilding of borders in contravention of God’s creation of all peoples as equals. The end time – what will happen when we die?

Maybe it’s not fanciful to say that this, this climate of despair, is somewhat reminiscent of Jesus being tempted in the wilderness. Lent is the right time for this kind of reflection.

Moltmann has argued that we should not despair or become nihilistic in the face of these challenges. Whereas we are often encouraged to have ‘faith’ when we have to confront these existential threats, Moltmann has suggested that what we really need, and what really reflects the presence of God in our lives, is hope. Hope, rather than faith.

For example, in the committal prayer at a funeral, the body is buried ‘in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life’. You might think that what you need at that end time, at the end of life, is faith, a strong faith. But Moltmann says no, not faith, but hope is what we need. The fact, the great revelation, of Jesus’ life on earth gives us the grounds for hope. It is more than a bare belief, more than blind faith. If I hope for something, I reasonably expect that it will be possible. It’s more than an intellectual construct.

So there we are. Baked Beans and Sausages. Should we abstain from bread, or meat, or drink? Certainly not from the Bread of Life. But if even our spiritual bread is disappearing, overwhelmed in the apocalypse, in what looks like the end time, then what? 500 years ago Zwingli said, don’t stop enjoying your sausage – give thanks to God for his bounty. In the smoking ruins of that great city of Hamburg at the end of WW2, Moltmann discovered Baked Beans, and with them, divine hope. I hope that that will give you some food for thought this Lent.

Tags 1522, 1872, Annotated Book of Common Prayer, apocalypse, baked beans, Baked Beans and Sausages, Bishop Jewel, Book of Common Prayer, bread, British Army, Calvin, Charterhouse, Christian, Christoph Froschauer, Chrysostom, Church of England, climate change, Cranmer, cuisine minceur, day of atonement, Diarmaid MacCulloch, Early Christian Fathers, existential threats, faith, fasting, fire storm, God, Gregory the Great, Hamburg, Henry VIII, hope, Horlicks, Irenaeus, Jürgen Moltmann, Jesus, Jewish Law, Kurt Vonnegut, Lent, Leviticus, Martin Luther, Moses, nuclear war, nuclear winter, Pope Benedict, Prayer Book Society, Queen Elizabeth, Reformation, Rev John Henry Blunt, Second Book of Homilies, Sir John Falstaff, st John's gospel, Switzerland, Tübingen, Tertullian, theologians, Thought for the Day, Victorians, Zwingli

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

By hughdbryant

April 22, 2019 //

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags beatitudes, Bible, Book of Common Prayer, Christianity, Christians, church, Creed, crucifixion, Easter, eucharist, faith, God, Golgotha, gospels, heaven, Hebrews, holy communion, Jesus, last judgement, Last Supper, Magnificat, Paschal Mystery, religion, Resurrection, Romans, sacrifice, salvation, sheep and goats, Sin, St Mary Stoke D'Abernon, St Paul, The Guardian

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Add Faith

By hughdbryant

February 17, 2019 //

Sermon for the Third Sunday before Lent, 17th February 2019

Jeremiah 17:5-10; 1 Corinthians 15:12-20; Luke 6:17-26 – see http://bible.oremus.org/?ql=417352294

I have to tell you that, when I read the Bible lessons for today, my sermon pretty much wrote itself. That’s because today we are given a sort of potted guide to several key points in our Christian religion. It’s a different angle on some of the most important things we say in the Creed. See if you agree.

Yesterday we had our Marriage Enrichment day, for everyone who is going to get married at St Mary’s this year – I don’t know whether it was Godfrey’s cunning plan, to schedule it nearly on St Valentine’s Day, or whether it just came out that way. Be that as it may, I had a sneak preview when I was helping to set up the lantern slides for it.

I was impressed by one slide which listed ‘Six Topics’ – actually with an exclamation mark, ‘Six Topics!’ in a marriage. They were Money, Time, Sex, Children, Communication and Difficult times/Conflict (which is really two topics, but never mind). But the interesting bit was that on the side of the picture, alongside the list of the six (or seven) topics, was, in big handwritten style, ‘+Faith’, you know, the word ‘Faith’ in big swirly letters, with a plus sign in front of it. Add faith.

That’s the point of lesson number one today, our Old Testament lesson. Add faith. ‘Cursed are those who trust in mere mortals … whose hearts turn away from the Lord.’ But ‘Blessed are those who trust in the Lord. … They shall be like a tree planted by water … in the year of drought it is not anxious, and it does not cease to bear fruit.’ If people didn’t get so bogged down in everyday life, if they didn’t forget to think of God, perhaps to say their prayers a bit, and to read their Bible, things would go better. God will be with them in the difficult times.

But what is the faith which you need to add, for a successful marriage – or, following the prophet Jeremiah, for a fruitful life?

You could just say to our wedding couples – and have we got anyone here this morning who went to the course yesterday? Or was it enough to be going on with? Anyway, you could just say to them, ‘Pay attention to the words of the Creed. I believe …’ – I believe: in what? What do Christians believe in?

Incidentally, I think it’s important not to get too stuck on saying ‘I’. ‘I believe’. It may be more honest to say, ‘We believe. We.’ There may be some less important things that we struggle with, but we can say the Creed all together, if we say ‘we’, and if we mean, ‘This is what Christians as a body subscribe to – and I’m in that group.’ It need not mean that, in order to belong to the church, you have to believe in every detail. You can just be happy to belong.

So back to the question, what do we believe, as Christians? What is our faith? Our other two lessons, from St Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, and from St Luke chapter 6, will give us some more important pointers.

You’ll note that, although we’ve just done our marriage enrichment course, the lesson from 1 Corinthians isn’t the normal wedding one, ‘Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become a sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal’. Oh, all right, ‘… if I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not love’. It’s ‘love’ in a wedding, not charity. But we’re not doing that bit. We’re looking at the fifteenth chapter, about the resurrection of the dead. That, that’s a key point in Christian faith. Faith in the resurrection, in life after death. Starting with Jesus himself, and then growing into what in the funeral service we call the ‘sure and certain hope’ of eternal life. We often have 1 Corinthians 15 at funerals. We have it because St Paul really goes into this key bit of faith, faith in eternal life, in a resurrection of the dead.

St Paul’s letter reads a bit like the transcript of one side of a telephone conversation. We can’t hear exactly what the Corinthians were saying: but it’s pretty clear that some of them were poo-pooing the possibility of life after death. St Paul points out the logical implications of that. If there is no chance of resurrection, then the whole basis of our faith, our belief that Jesus was raised from the dead, would be contradicted. So one of the key points in Christian faith is a belief in life after death – and in particular a belief that Jesus was the first one to be resurrected.

It’s such an extraordinary thing, so contrary to all the laws of nature, that it is difficult to believe. So St Paul goes on, after the passage which we have read today, to tackle the question not just that the dead are raised, but how they are raised. It can be your homework today. Read the rest of chapter 15 of 1 Corinthians. Even if you are a Darwinist, there’s nothing in it to upset your scientific understanding. I won’t spoil it.

So in our first two lessons we see two pillars of our Christian faith, that you need faith, if your life is going to be fruitful – that you shouldn’t try to ignore the Divine – and that our Christian faith is centred on Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. It is a sign, a vital sign. We believe that the empty tomb was real. And then, we believe in what Jesus’ death and resurrection meant, in who Jesus really was, and in what he did. That Jesus is God, God with us. But note that as St Paul says, if that really is too much to stomach, then you need to know what it is you are dismissing. You can’t have Jesus without His resurrection. Without it, he’s not God.

And then in St Luke’s Gospel we go on to hear what the effect of Jesus, the effect of His coming, is, and what it still can be. Our lesson is St Luke’s version of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus’ great statement of what you must do, if you really follow His teaching. First of all he states how contrarian, how back-to-front, Christianity is. Basically in those days, just as it is today, people tended to equate material success and prosperity with virtue. You couldn’t live in such a lovely house; you couldn’t really have such a nice car, unless you were basically doing the right thing, unless you were a good person. Scruffy people must really be pretty useless, you’re tempted to think. No wonder they’re living in damp rented flats if they only bothered to get one GCSE – in some non-subject or other. Feckless.

But Jesus says that if you’re poor, or hungry, or sad, it’s not a question of blame. There’s no such thing as the deserving – or undeserving – poor. They are ‘Μακαριος’ in the Greek, blessed. That’s what the poor are, what the hungry are. Jesus turns things upside-down. This passage of ‘beatitudes’, blessings, ‘Blessed are the .. [whoever it is]’, runs into the really revolutionary bit, ‘Love your enemies, turn the other cheek, lend without expecting to be repaid.’ Don’t rush to judge someone – it could be you next. All those great, generous ideas – but the problem is that no-one really follows them. Because people say that just as resurrection can’t be real, in real life turning the other cheek is a lovely idea in theory, but it can’t be practical.

But what Jesus is advocating is a bit like what St Paul was saying about resurrection, about life after death. If you’ve got no faith in it, you’ve thrown the baby out with the bathwater. If you make faithful-sounding noises, if you tell everyone you’ve been saved, but you still think that rich people must somehow be better people, and poor people must really be a bit useless, a bit feckless – if being saved doesn’t make any difference to what you do, to how you treat people, then Jesus is there to tell you you’re just not getting it yet.

This is a neat way for me to round off what I’m saying. Godfrey and I are going to be running a Lent Bible study course, and the theme is going to be exactly what our Gospel today was about – the Beatitudes. I do hope you will come. We’ll have a session in the daytime and a session in the evening. I hope you will feel blessed at the end of it – and that you will see that being blessed isn’t the same as being comfortably off. You will need to add faith.

Tags Acts of the Apostles, beatitudes, Bible, blessings, Christianity, Christians, Creed, faith, God, Jesus, marriage, poor, Resurrection, rich, sad, St Paul

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Wisdom and Faith

By hughdbryant

August 5, 2018 //

Sermon for Evensong on the Tenth Sunday after Trinity, 5th August 2018

Psalm 88, Job 28, Hebrews 11:17-31

I’m going to cheat, ever so slightly, tonight: because the text that I want to talk about isn’t actually part of either of our lessons this evening. But it does come in the Book of Job, a bit earlier than our first lesson, which was from chapter 28. This quotation is from chapter 19: and it is

‘For I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth’.

You can probably hear it, as one of the arias, ‘airs’, as he called them, in Handel’s ‘Messiah’. I know that my redeemer liveth. It does lead into our two lessons, which are about different ways of knowing things.

The first lesson, from the Book of Job, is all about wisdom; the value of wisdom, how difficult it is to come by, but how important it is: and the second lesson, from Hebrews, is all about faith; trusting that something is the case, believing in something. Hebrews tells how faith can make you a hero, and how the various stars of the history of the Israelites had faith in things, and did remarkable deeds as a result.

Let’s look first at wisdom. What does it mean to be wise? This has connotations of good judgement, discernment and fair-mindedness. I think these days that we often tend to concentrate not on what would be wise in certain circumstances, but rather, on what would not be wise. You know: we tend to say, for instance, ‘If I need to go home from here, I could go in the golf buggy. But it wouldn’t be wise.’

The idea of wisdom is that it’s the sort of knowledge which leads to a successful outcome. Knowing what is likely to turn out well, and having the good judgement to choose that course of action rather than anything else.

Another thing that wisdom is bound up with is understanding. If you understand something properly, then probably you will deal with that thing better, more effectively, more correctly. In the Book of Job, Job has three dialogues with his so-called ‘comforters’, his friends, Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar, candid friends who hold up a mirror to him, he having suffered unjustly. He’s not done anything wrong, but terrible things have happened to him. They try to help him to understand what has happened to him. For some reason God has caused it.

One thing that’s different between the world of Job and our world today is that we don’t tend to look for a divine cause for everything that happens. Obviously, as Christians, we believe that God is the ultimate creator and sustainer of our life. But I’m not sure that we would see Him at work taking sides, if you like, lifting up some people and casting down others. I think these days we tend not to think of God in that way, because it tends to lead you into the possibility that God is not a good and loving god, but that He may in certain circumstances be a vengeful and cruel god.

I think we tend to say that things just happen; perhaps, tying them a little bit to somebody’s conduct: ‘If we carry on polluting the atmosphere, then global warming will happen much more quickly’, say. Of course, if you were in an Old Testament frame of mind, you could cast that discussion in terms of breaking the Covenant to look after God’s creation on our part, and God inflicting punishment accordingly.

But I’m inclined to think that’s not a common view these days, even among people who do think about God and believe in Him, because in a way it makes God out to be not necessarily a loving god. And it’s interesting to see how Job thought of wisdom in this context.

‘… the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil is understanding.’

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart.., and so on, is, I suppose, what ‘the fear of the Lord’ means – although it’s odd that it should be fear and not love. Maybe a better word would be ‘respect’. You can have loving respect for God.

I think that’s pretty good, even in the court of the philosophers. What is it, to be wise? It’s not something you can just acquire, as the lesson says. And it’s not something you can buy, or learn, like riding a bike. There has to be some sort of guarantor, that what we think may be true, is true. That could be God.

The point about having God in the background, underpinning our knowledge and understanding, is that otherwise, we might never agree on what is wise. What is it, to know that something is a good idea? It might be a good idea for me; but it might not be a good idea for you.

In Handel’s ‘Messiah’, that line from Job, ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth’, actually points to the Messiah, the Saviour of Israel, to Jesus. The air goes on, ‘For now is Christ risen, the first fruits of them that sleep.’ Händel’s librettist Charles Jennens quoted 1 Corinthians 15:20 as well as the Book of Job.

But in the context of Job himself, another way of putting what he says is, ‘I know that my vindicator lives’. He has been unjustly condemned. Poor old Job is suffering all sorts of indignities, trials and torments. And he has done nothing to deserve it. So what he really needs is somebody to speak up for him in a persuasive way, an advocate, a ‘vindicator’: somebody who can prove that he is not a guilty party: somebody to show everyone what the true position is.

But here’s the problem. It’s not necessarily the case that we will all agree about things that we say we ‘know’. I might say that I know that something or other is a good thing. But that doesn’t necessarily make it a good thing – and you might disagree with me. We sort-of think that, if you say you know something, if I know that such-and-such is the case, then it must be true. Really? Well, just saying it tells you that that’s not necessarily right.

Maybe faith can add another angle on this. This whole topic is what’s called epistemology, the philosophy of understanding, what it is to understand something, what it is to know something, what it is to perceive something. And faith is in this area. In the Letter to the Hebrews, you find this wonderful catalogue of heroes in Bible history, doing heroic things because of their faith. By faith they did such-and-such. I think we’re meant to distinguish faith from knowledge – although that may not actually be a real distinction.

At the beginning of chapter 11 of the Letter to the Hebrews, there’s a definition of faith. ‘Faith gives substance to our hopes and makes us certain of realities we do not see’, (NEB), or ‘faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen’, according to the King James version.

I’ve been beginning to think about how I’m going to explain God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit to my little grandson Jim. Jim is 19 months old, so his capacity for philosophical reasoning is probably a bit limited, at least for now. But I think it’s a good thing for me to start thinking about how I will be able to explain these things in terms that Jim can understand.

So much of our understanding of God, so much of our religion, involves things we cannot see. In some ways it would be very handy if, in the same ways as with the ancient Greeks, our God periodically came down from heaven and appeared among us: and of course 2,000 years ago, that’s exactly what happened. But these days we are challenged by how to explain that we believe in something, we trust something to be true, that we can’t see and we can’t prove the existence of – at least in the same way as we could prove whether I’m wearing pink socks.

It’s not just religious things: there are a lot of things where in order for our lives to just carry on normally, we need to have faith. I have faith that I will get up next morning and that there’ll be another day. But there’s no way I can prove it. Anything involving the future involves faith. If I turn the ignition key of my car, I have faith that it will start up and go. But I don’t know.

There are some similarities with what Job was talking about. He was praising the idea of wisdom. It was a gift beyond price, unable to be found anywhere specific. If you had wisdom, then you would make fewer mistakes. You would be able to discern the right thing to do.

But if you have faith, it takes it on a further stage. If you believe and trust in something or in someone, depending on how inspiring that figure is, how compelling they are, you will be inspired, you will be able to rise to the highest challenges. Just as with wisdom; you won’t be able to prove it, but it will be real for you. If you have faith that something is the case, then for you, that is reality.

But there is an extra factor in this, both where wisdom is concerned, and also with faith. And that is, that it isn’t just a question that if I do the right thing, it will make me more successful; or if I have complete faith in, say, a particular diet, then I will achieve spectacular weight loss – well, actually , there may be better examples that you can think of – but the idea, the point, is that wisdom and faith, in this context at least, involve something extra, someone extra: they involve God.

In Job’s world, the fear of the Lord is wisdom, and in the context of the Letter to the Hebrews, in the light of Jesus, faith makes it possible for us to be heroes, to do things which by ourselves we would never be able to do.

I know that my Redeemer liveth.

I know it. It’s wise to believe it. I do believe it. I have faith.

Tags @babyJim, ancient Greeks, Charles Jennens, faith, Handel, Hebrews, Israelites, Jesus, Job, Messiah, Wisdom

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The Damsel and the Mite

By hughdbryant

July 1, 2018 //

Sermon for Holy Communion on the 5th Sunday after Trinity, 1st July 2018

2 Corinthians 8:7-15, Mark 5:21-43

You might wonder what the connection is between our two lessons today. The first one is from St Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians, which you might think was more apt for one of those Sundays when we review our giving to the church and our stewardship, and on the other hand, the passage in St Mark’s Gospel, the two miracles of Jesus, healing the woman with the unstoppable haemorrhage, who just touched the edge of his coat, and Jairus’ daughter, one of Jesus‘s greatest miracles, where he raised a little girl from the dead. We know that story so well, but not in the words that Godfrey read. I don’t remember Jesus saying, ‘Little girl, get up’ – although that is what the Greek literally says. The words I remember are so much more mighty and memorable.

And when he was come in, he saith unto them, Why make ye this ado, and weep? the damsel is not dead, but sleepeth.

And they laughed him to scorn. …

And he took the damsel by the hand, and said unto her, Talitha cumi; which is, being interpreted, Damsel, I say unto thee, arise.

‘Damsel, I say unto thee, arise.’ Not ‘Little girl, get up’. Now that’s a proper miracle, in proper miracle words. Just imagine what it must have been like

if you were Jairus or the damsel or the damsel’s Mum, indeed everyone around. She wasn’t just some little girl. She was the damsel, the damsel in Mark’s Gospel.

Anyway, I’m not really going to talk about the gospel today. Because I’m sure you’ve heard loads and loads of sermons about that lovely passage in St Mark’s Gospel about the raising of Jairus’ daughter and the healing of the woman with the haemorrhage; the key point about both stories being the importance of having faith. To the woman who touched his cloak he said, ‘Daughter, your faith has made you well,’ and to Jairus, when people were saying it was too late, that his daughter had died, Jesus said, ‘Daughter, your faith has made you well,’ and to Jairus, ‘Do not fear, only believe.’ They both had trusted in the power of God.

No, what I want to have a go at this morning is to look at what St Paul says in his Second Letter to the Corinthians, where he is trying to get some funding for Christians in Jerusalem, who are hard-up, from the relatively well-off people in Corinth. This was like us in wealthy Surrey putting together a collection for a parish in the East End of London or in down-town Sheffield.

I think that it’s very interesting to see what St Paul was writing – or actually dictating to his secretary, because that’s how he worked – at the very earliest times in the history of Christianity. These letters to the Corinthians are usually dated by scholars at around 50AD [CE], so less than 20 years after Jesus was crucified. It is reckoned that only the letters to the Thessalonians are earlier. So we are getting a glimpse into the life and concerns of the earliest church. And St Paul is banging on about people upping their planned giving! Clearly, some things haven’t changed. But I’ll let Stephen Chater speak to you quietly about whatever St Mary’s needs.

The interesting things about what St Paul was saying here are precisely how sensitive he was, and how he recognised how tricky it is to reconcile money matters with faith. There are churches who preach a ‘prosperity gospel’. According to that idea, if you are wealthy, it is because you are blessed – and conversely, if you are faithful to the church and give generously to it, then God will reward you, and make you rich.

I doubt whether any of us here would believe in that sort of thing. And neither does St Paul, here. What he does say is that he wants the Corinthians not only to talk the talk, to ‘excel in everything—in faith, in speech, in knowledge, in utmost eagerness’, but also to walk the walk, in giving – the word in Greek is χαρις, from which we get our word ‘charity’. It’s also the word for ‘grace’, and indeed the words of ‘The Grace’, ‘The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit’ come from the end of this very same letter.

And ‘grace’ has another connotation, a ‘free gift’. In St Paul’s letter to the Romans, chapter 6, and in the letter to the Ephesians chapter 2, salvation, eternal life, is said to be the gift of God, not something people can earn through doing good works. It is a χάρισμα, which means a free gift, given by χαρις, grace, generosity. These are all related ideas. So what St Paul is asking the Corinthians to do is to be generous. Give a free gift – this isn’t a payment for services. Paul says, You’re not obliged to give; I’m not ordering you to do it. He says in v 8, ‘This is not meant as an order; by telling you how keen others are I am putting your love to the test.’ [NEB translation].

St Paul says that although Jesus was rich, he became poor. Actually that seems a bit unlikely. Jesus was, at least on earth, a carpenter’s son. He was a sought-after preacher, a rabbi. But I doubt whether he was like some of the telly-evangelists in the USA today, who are pretty well-heeled, as I understand it.

That’s true in parts of Africa too, incidentally. We had an interesting visit from a clergyman, a bishop’s chaplain, from the diocese of Owerri in Nigeria, with which St Andrew’s Oxshott, or rather Revd Canon Jeremy Cresswell, their previous vicar, had links. This chap fully expected to be kept in some comfort wherever he went. His reasoning was that, as Christ’s representative, people in the church should accord him respect and provide for his needs generously. I see that Godfrey is making notes here … But unfortunately, I think it only works for vicars in Africa …

I don’t know whether St Paul knew Jesus’ story of the widow’s mite, which is recorded in St Mark’s and St Luke’s Gospels (Mark 12: Luke 21). His Letters to the Corinthians were written before those Gospels; but his point in his Letter, which he spells out in the next chapter (2 Corinthians 9:6) where he says, ‘God loves a cheerful giver’, is very much along the same lines as Jesus’ teaching about the widow’s mite. What she gave may have seemed very small, a couple of coppers only; but it was all that she had.

Paul goes on to make it plain that you mustn’t feel pressured into giving more than you have (2 Cor 8:12). He reminds the Corinthians about the story of the Israelites after they had come out of Egypt, when they were with Moses in the desert, and they started to grumble and complain that they didn’t have enough to eat.

The Lord gave them an ‘ample sufficiency’ when he dropped manna from heaven, and numbers of quails for them to eat. I’ve always wondered how that last bit worked. In the sixties you got ‘chicken in a basket’ at Berni Inns. Maybe the effect was similar. The point, though, was about the quantity. Not too much, and not too little. An ample sufficiency. That’s what the Lord gave them. So the Corinthians – and we – should give to the Lord just what we can afford, and not more.

So what is the link between those miracle stories, about the damsel, Jairus’ daughter, and the other lady with the chronic illness, and St Paul banging the tin – albeit very elegantly – but clearly twisting the Corinthians’ arms – to give generously to the church?

I would suggest that the idea might be this. When you read the Gospel stories of what Jesus did, and particularly the miracle stories, the idea is that they are revelations, revelation of Jesus’ divine nature. God, with all that God can do, in a man. That man, Jesus, healed people, even raised the damsel and Lazarus from the dead. It demonstrated that he was much more than just a young man from a humble carpenter’s shop.

On the other hand St Paul interpreted it all, and he explained Jesus’ teaching in a way that everyone, not just the Jewish people, could understand. And when you have believed the miracles, when you ‘excel in faith’, then St Paul teaches that you will want to gracious, to be generous.

St Paul was the great church planter, the original Alpha Course teacher – and he was also, effectively, the first archdeacon. Paul was totally practical about how the new churches should operate, not only in their worship and care for others, but also in the nitty-gritty of church admin. You need enough money to run the church. And then you need more, if you are going to do something for neighbours in need.

It’s teaching which is still valid today. Do please think about what you give to the church. Are you doing in practice what you say you do? Please do give -cheerfully – but don’t bankrupt yourself in the process. Be like the widow and her mite.

Oh – and you know, if your wallet is somehow empty, St Mary’s is geared up to take credit cards, even Apple Pay. God bless you – and thank you!

Tags Alpha Course, ample sufficiency, Apple Pay, archdeacon, carpenter, Charity, Christians, Corinthians, damsel, faith, χάρισμα, χαρις, Jairus, Jeremy Cresswell, Jerusalem, Owerri, St Mark’s Gospel, St Mary's Stoke D'Abernon, St Paul, talitha cumi, Thessalonians, TV evangelists, wealthy Surrey

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