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Hodge and the Nasty Bishop

By hughdbryant
September 21, 2025 //
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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

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Hope and Ash

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

Joel 2:1-2, 12-17

2 Cor 5:20b-6:10

John 8:1-11

Psalm 51:1-17  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Advent

By hughdbryant
January 28, 2025 //
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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. 

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Comfortable Words in Gaza

By hughdbryant
October 13, 2024 //
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If you come across a terrible situation, what does it feel like to the people involved? And if it is a truly terrible situation, what does God feel about it?

We hear about Joshua leading the people of Israel into the promised land, and taking over the city of Jericho, in a very theatrical way, at the blast of a trumpet. It did occur to me that the priests who blew the trumpets, and blew the trumpets continually, must have been supremely fit, because they were walking round the city and blowing their trumpets at the same time, for seven circuits of the city. I have no idea how that compares with the effort required to undertake the half marathon, but I suspect that it is in the same league. To do that, while blowing the trumpet flat out is pretty impressive.

I’m very edgy about reading Bible stories about the Israelites entering the promised land at the moment, because I can’t get away from thinking about what is happening in the Holy Land today. In a sense we are looking at the consequences of the Israelites entering the promised land all over again, in 1948, or possibly you could trace it back to the Balfour Declaration, in 1917. If you want to know more about the history, there is a very good film which we saw the other night, courtesy of Christian Aid, called The Tinderbox.

Either way, they were displacing the indigenous Palestinians and now, in the conflict in Gaza, the International Court of Justice has ruled that Israel is to take steps to avoid genocide. I was listening to the BBC Today programme yesterday morning, and I would like to read to you what I made notes of from the programme and from Jeremy Bowen’s report.

Introducing the topic, the presenter Justin Webb said,“Israel’s operation in Gaza is intended to destroy Hamas. Now the medical charity MSF says the bombardment is turning neighbourhoods into uninhabitable ruins. There are still 400,000 Palestinian civilians in northern Gaza, the UN says.” He introduced a report from Jeremy Bowen.

“JB: ‘Israel has upped the military pressure on northern Gaza once again…. Just a few miles away on the other side of the wall is Jabalia Camp, where Palestinian families were fleeing on the orders of the Israeli army. Some of them were hit by bullets.’

“A Palestinian, a woman called Manar al-Bayar, who was rushing down the street carrying a toddler, says: ‘They told us we have five minutes to leave the Fallujah school. Where do we go? In southern Gaza there are assassinations. In western Gaza they’re shelling people. Where do we go? O God! God is our only chance.’

“JB said: ’The Israelis don’t allow journalists in [to Gaza] except with the army in very restrictive circumstances.… the Israelis are doing a major military operation. They are working in virtual privacy there, secrecy. They are moving, they say, after elements of Hamas, but of course there are terrible things happening to the civilian population who have already lived under massive pressure for a year.’

“He introduced Liz Allcock, of Medical Aid for Palestinians, who said: ‘It’s been apparent for some time that this has been a deliberate systematic attempt to present an existential threat to the Palestinians, particularly in the north of Gaza, by making life unliveable but at the same time issuing these forced displacement orders, and then when people try to flee, direct targeting of those people while they are under the impression that they will be provided safe passage.”

JB asked how she could prove they were being aimed at deliberately. “After all, it’s a war zone”. She said, “When we are receiving patients in hospitals, [there are a] large number of those women and children and people of, if you like, noncombatant age, receiving direct shots to the head, to the spine, to the limbs -[which is] very indicative of direct, targeted, attack.’

JB: “At the Kamal Adwan hospital in northern Gaza, the director is posting daily updates from his intensive care unit. It is filled with wounded children on ventilators.

He says Israel is blocking fuel deliveries for his generator and bringing the hospital and its patients close to catastrophe.

JB: “On Israeli TV, … a retired general has launched an idea that he believed can finally deliver victory to Israel in Gaza. The IDF is gradually adopting some or all of this new tactic, to clear northern Gaza, known as the “Generals’ Plan”. It was proposed by a group of retired senior officers led by General Giora Eiland, who is a former national security adviser. His idea is to tell civilians to leave, and if they don’t, to impose a siege. No food or water, and treat everyone left as a legitimate target.”

What does it feel like to be a Palestinian in Gaza right now? Could it be a bit like being an inhabitant of Jericho when Joshua and the Israelites were walking round blowing their trumpets? There’s no hope. Destruction is all around you. What did you do wrong? Isn’t it striking that the voice of the woman from the heart of northern Gaza appeals to God. Only God can help.

I can’t help feeling that somehow we should not be just leaving this to God. We should be doing something to stop this killing and this desolation. We should certainly bring this to the Lord in our prayers, but also what Jesus said about the unrepentant cities should resonate with us, surely.

That’s what Jesus felt. He was looking for repentance, for the minds of the people where he had done the deeds of power, his miracles, to be changed, and for them to follow his commandment of love.

We must repent, change our minds, and change the minds of the people in those terrible places. At the very least we should be writing to our MP to join the calls to our government to stop supplying weapons to Israel.

Because, after all, how hard is it? How hard is it to follow Jesus’s commandments? The answer is what we have traditionally called one of the ‘Comfortable Words’. ‘Come unto me all that travail and are heavy laden, and I will refresh you’. ‘For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light’.

If people really believed that, and if they did something about it, then a lot of the suffering in the world, if not all of it, would go away. Because they don’t, really they are like the cities in Galilee that Jesus condemned in frustration. Is what we do better than the genocide? What would Jesus say?

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Any Questions?

By hughdbryant
June 17, 2024 //
0

Sermon for Evensong on 16th June 2024

Jeremiah 7.1-16; Romans 9.14-26

https://tinyurl.com/5xdpyys2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Jerusalem the Golden

By hughdbryant
January 15, 2024 //
0

Sermon preached by Hugh Bryant at St Peter’s Church, Old Cogan, on 14th January 2024

Jerusalem the Golden

Isaiah 60:9-22 – https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=572149666

‘Jerusalem the Golden with milk and honey blest’. I have to share with you that when I was little and I first heard this hymn, of course I was struck by how joyful and beautiful everything in it was, but nothing was more striking to me than the fact that Jerusalem was the home of my favourite biscuit.

I’m not sure that you can get them any more, but Jacob’s Milk and Honey, in those days, was the biscuit that I really liked. It was a bit like a jammy dodger, but it was oval rather than round. ‘Jerusalem the golden, with milk and honey blest’. Whatever else this wonderful place had, it had the best biscuit. Also, of course, chapter 60 in Isaiah, which Bernard of Cluny must have had in mind when he was writing our hymn in the 12th century, originally in Latin, had some very memorable lines for a little boy, which the compilers of the lectionary have chosen to omit tonight. We have started at verse nine, but I think you ought to know what you are missing. Here is some of the beginning of chapter 60 of Isaiah.

’60 Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee.
2 For, behold, the darkness shall cover the earth, and gross darkness the people: but the Lord shall arise upon thee, and his glory shall be seen upon thee.
3 And the Gentiles shall come to thy light, and kings to the brightness of thy rising.
……..’
And then this immortal verse:

‘6 The multitude of camels shall cover thee, the dromedaries of Midian and Ephah; all they from Sheba shall come: they shall bring gold and incense; and they shall shew forth the praises of the Lord.’

The dromedaries of Midian and Ephah: dromedaries, please: not ‘young camels’ as the modern translation limply puts it. But that might have been all right when I was eight or nine years old, but what about ‘Jerusalem the golden’ today?

I wouldn’t be surprised if you had a slight feeling of unreality when I started talking about childish enthusiasms for particular types of biscuit, in the context of Jerusalem. Equally, the visions of Jerusalem shown to the Jews in Isaiah’s prophecy, on their return from exile in Babylon at the beginning of the sixth century BC, when scholars think Isaiah 60 was likely to have been written, just seem totally different from what we see today.

Jeremy Bowen, the BBC Middle East, editor, has written that, following the war of independence of Israel in 1948, and the Six Days war in 1967, ‘the Jews and the Arabs went about their business and the weight of the conflict never lifted. Israelis scrabbled to build a new state while Palestinians mourned the loss of the one they never had.’ [Bowen, J., (2022), The Making of the Modern Middle East, London, Picador; page 45].

The holy places of the three monotheistic religions, the religions of the book, so-called, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, are all in Jerusalem, right on top of each other. For as long as most of us can remember, the Holy Land has not been entirely peaceful. there have been major wars, the Six Days War, the Arab-Israeli war.

The occupied territories on the West Bank, which did belong to Jordan, were seized by Israel in 1967: the United Nations resolutions, forbidding the Israelis from creating settlements in the occupied lands, have been ignored, and there has been a constant undercurrent of violence. When Mr Guterres, the United Nations Secretary General, indicated that he believed that the trouble had not started on seventh October, he was pointing to the terrible history of violence between the Israelis and the Palestinians over many years.

Specifically in Gaza, in 2009 Israel bombed the Gaza Strip systematically over a period of 22 days in a campaign which they called Operation Cast Lead. It killed 1400 Palestinians and on the Israeli side there were 13 casualties. What is going on now is even worse.

I have been following the proceedings in the International Court of Justice, where South Africa has started a case against Israel alleging that Israel is guilty of genocide in Gaza, and that ‘provisional measures’ to preserve the rights of either party, as they are defined in the statutes of the International Court, article 41, are being sought, which would have the effect, if the parties would obey such an order, of bringing about a ceasefire.

The Israelis have sent a full team of lawyers to appear in the Hague before the court, including several leading British barristers. They say that South Africa’s claim that Israel is guilty of genocide is wrong, for three reasons. First, that under the Genocide Convention 1948, there needs to be an intention to bring about genocide. Israel has no such intention, they say. Second, the Convention requires that there be a dispute between the parties which has not been resolved, and, they say, there is no dispute in being between South Africa and Israel. And then, finally, that what Israel is doing is self defence and not genocide.

Probably the most powerful speech from the South African side was by an Irish barrister, Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh KC, who made the most powerful speech [see https://youtu.be/yhsWyBWGoCU?si=GjVSf6PyqnHYEoC%5D, which ended up quoting a sermon which was preached at Christmas by the Reverend Dr Munther Isaac, the minister at the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Bethlehem, who is a Palestinian.

The sermon is called “Christ in the rubble.” It is available to see on YouTube and I highly recommend it. [See https://youtu.be/aEGiANa0-oI?si=whdmciTT00C6is-t%5D South Africa’s counsel, Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh KC, quoted this at the end of her address.

‘I want you to look in the mirror and ask, where was I when Gaza was going through a genocide?’

She produced staggering figures of the numbers, killed and injured, including 9000 children killed by the Israeli army, and a number of quotations from Israeli politicians suggesting that they want to drive all Palestinians out of Gaza and raze it to the ground. Dr Isaac, in his sermon, raised the issue of complicity: that Western nations, that he characterised as ‘the Empire’, (by analogy with the Roman Empire) are standing idly by or even supporting genocide, by providing arms and other support.

Clearly, there are strong arguments on both sides, but one thing which we must surely agree on, is that the current situation has nothing to do with that golden Jerusalem, with milk and honey blest.

Isaiah’s prophecy is so different.

‘I will appoint Peace as your overseer
   and Righteousness as your taskmaster. 
Violence shall no more be heard in your land,
   devastation or destruction within your borders;
you shall call your walls Salvation,
   and your gates Praise. 
The sun shall no longer be
   your light by day,
nor for brightness shall the moon
   give light to you by night;
but the Lord will be your everlasting light,
   and your God will be your glory.’

What a wonderful vision that is. Now all we need to do is to turn it into a realistic hope.

What shall we do to bring peace to the Middle East? I think that bringing things before the International Court of Justice is a good and constructive step. Others have suggested that there should be boycotts for as long as the genocide goes on.

If you agree with Dr Isaac and many other commentators, indeed, that it is genocide, then maybe there should be no more pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and we should stop buying Jaffa oranges. As the author Naomi Klein has pointed out, a campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions was very effective in bringing about the ending of apartheid in South Africa. [See https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/10/only-outside-pressure-can-stop-israels-war-crimes?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other%5D

As Prof. Vaughan Lowe, KC, one of the counsel for S. Africa, said to the International Court of Justice, however awful the attack on October 7 was, 9000 Palestinian children killed, and countless others maimed, and continuing to be killed and maimed, along with tens of thousands of their mothers, cannot under any circumstances be justified as self defence. [See the verbatim record at https://www.icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/case-related/192/192-20240111-ora-01-00-bi.pdf%5D

Let us pray.

Let us pray to you Lord, that your will be done and that you will bring about peace in your Holy Land, and in particular, in Gaza, today.

Amen.

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Will it ever End?

By hughdbryant
November 25, 2023 //
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Bible readings: https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=567221767

This morning we thought about the parable of the talents and Zephaniah’s prophecy of doom directed at people whose wealth had made them contemptuous of God, who built houses and did not live in them. We were thinking about economics, and wondering whether Jesus and the prophets had to some extent foreseen some of the insights of Karl Marx.

So this morning was economics and this afternoon is politics, or to be more precise, government. We have a description of the change of government, 3,000 years ago in the time of King David. We may look forward to a general election from time to time, but King David could do it simply by having his successor, his son Solomon, anointed, as a result of a promise which he had made to his mother Bathsheba.

You will remember the pretty dreadful story in the second book of Samuel, chapters 11 and 12, telling how King David had taken a fancy to Uriah’s wife Bathsheba when he accidentally saw her in the bath; he engineered for Uriah her husband, who was a soldier, to be put in harm’s way and killed in battle so that he could marry Bathsheba, and how the prophet Nathan had told this story.

‘In a certain town there lived two men, one rich and one poor.  The rich man had large flocks and herds; the poor man had nothing of his own except one little ewe lamb he had bought. He reared it and it grew up in his home together with his children. It shared his food, drank from his cup and nestled in his arms. It was like a daughter to him. 

‘One day a traveller came to the rich man’s house and he, too mean to take anything from his own flock or herd to serve to his guest, took the poor man’s lamb and served that up.’ David was very angry and burst out, ’As the Lord lives, that man deserves to die! He shall pay for the lamb four times over because he has done this and shown no pity.’ Nathan said to David, you are the man.’ [2 Samuel 12:1-7]

And David repented, although the Lord still punished him by saying that the child which he had fathered adulterously with Bathsheba would die, and he did: but then they had another son, Solomon, and David promised to Bathsheba that Solomon would inherit the kingdom after him.

Our lesson today was about how that promise was carried out. David, although he was a bad man in many respects, was a great king, and he kept his promises. I’m not sure that there is more than historical interest in the story so far as we are concerned, because we do depend on democracy in being ruled, rather than the divine right of kings.

Jesus was known as the son of David; he was in a line of descent from King David as the enormous and slightly different genealogies, that you find in Matthew 1 and Luke 3, demonstrate. It was important in that world to be able to prove your ancestry. Perhaps there is a small lesson about how people can change their ways, reform and repent, because there is an interesting little sideline at the very beginning of the lesson from the first book of Kings which we had. The king was very old and Abishag the Shunnamite was attending the King. She was another beautiful young woman, much in the way that Bathsheba had been. But we are told, a little bit earlier, that she had been brought in essentially to keep the old King David warm in bed. But the account takes care to tell us that he did not misbehave. There was no hanky-panky.

In our second lesson we go from divine succession 3,000 years ago to the end times, God the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. This is something which is far beyond our understanding. If you think of our expanding knowledge of the cosmos, of the billions of years and billions of miles in time and space, it seems odd that one can simply say that God is the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. 

I think that mathematicians and philosophers will struggle today to tell you really what a beginning or an end of everything could possibly be. There will be some who will say that indeed they are logically impossible, because whatever you suggest to be the beginning, you can always imagine something that came before it; and the same is true of numbers, that whatever number you end up with, you can always add another one. 

So St John’s vision, when he was ‘in the spirit on the Lord’s day’, is as good as anything, as a vision of something which is completely beyond man’s understanding. This figure, of the ‘Son of Man’ clothed with a long robe with a sash of gold across his chest, says, ‘Do not be afraid. I am the first and the last, and the living one.’ It’s a vision of the kingdom. ‘Look, he is coming with the clouds. Every eye will see him, even those who pierced him’.

Well, I don’t think we are ready for him. Our world is full of terrible war, and our government, which I guess, at least so far as the ministers are concerned, you could say has not really been democratically elected but rather anointed, seems more concerned to be inhospitable to poor desperate refugees, than to do any of the other things that a good government should surely do. 

This is the time in the Christian year called the kingdom season, when we look forward to the coming of Jesus into the kingdom of God. But are we ready, and would we recognise Jesus? What if he came on one of those boats, or what if he was one of the brave surgeons still operating in the hospitals in Gaza? 

What would Jesus say? Dare one say it, he might well say it was time for a general ceasefire – everywhere.  All hostilities. This is the beginning. This is the ‘alpha’ of the kingdom. Let us pray that, until things get better, until ‘they shall not hurt or destroy on God’s holy mountain’, until then, there may be an alpha – but no omega.

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An Eye for an Eye

By hughdbryant
November 5, 2023 //
0

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

By Hugh Bryant

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Lawfulness of Love

By hughdbryant
October 16, 2023 //
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Sermon at Evensong on 15th October 2023 at All Saints Church, Penarth

Bible readings referred to:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But the world stands by. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let it be so: Lord, hear our prayer.

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Repent, and your sins will be forgiven

By hughdbryant
May 25, 2015 //
0

Sermon for Evensong on Whit Sunday 2015 at St Mary the Virgin, Stoke D’Abernon
[Ezekiel 36:22-28], Acts 2:22-38 – This man, handed over to you according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified ..

I find the book of the Acts of the Apostles, which is really St Luke’s Gospel Part 2, really interesting. Really interesting, because it gives us an insight into what the early church, the first Christians, did, when the story of Jesus was still pretty fresh in their minds. Today we see that they were confronted by things which have produced consequences, not necessarily good consequences, ever since.

This morning we had the story of the Holy Spirit coming to the believers gathered in Jerusalem for the Jewish Feast of the First Fruits, Harvest Festival (see Exodus 23:16). There were about 120 of them gathered together (Acts 1:15), and they were among a crowd of Jews, Jews from that splendid catalogue of places we can’t now really place: where were the Medes and the Parthians from, in today’s world? Anyway, the important thing is, that they were all Jewish.

St Peter preached the first Christian sermon to this multinational group – this group which was multinational, but not multi-ethnic. He told them the story of Jesus, saying how the great Jewish king David had foretold the Messiah’s greatness (in Psalm 16): ‘thou shalt not leave my soul in hell: neither shalt thou suffer thy Holy One to see corruption.’ (Psalm 16:11, BCP)

Peter pointed out that David was mortal; what David said about not suffering his Holy One to see corruption was not about himself, about David, but was a prophecy about the Messiah to come in future, that the Messiah would not be ‘abandoned to Hades’ (Acts 2:31, NRSV).

Jesus had died and been resurrected, had come back to life. It was he, Jesus, that fitted the description of the Messiah, the chosen one of God. Peter quoted Psalm 110, Dixit dominus domino meo, The Lord said unto my Lord: Sit thou on my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool.’ You might remember ‘Dixit Dominus’ set to music by Handel.

Peter concluded, ‘Therefore let all the house of Israel know assuredly, that God hath made that same Jesus, whom ye have crucified, both Lord and Christ.’

‘That Jesus, whom ye have crucified.’ Possibly those words have been some of the most troublesome ever uttered. It said that the Jews were God-killers. That was certainly the way that the early Church fathers, such as Origen and Irenaeus, went on to see things. The original promise to Abraham and the renewal of Israel promised to Ezekiel in our first lesson, ‘[Then] you shall live in the land that I gave to your ancestors; and you shall be my people, and I will be your God’, the early Church fathers thought that promise had been replaced, replaced by the anointing of the Messiah, Jesus.

That interpretation caused untold misery for the Jews. Christianity was set against Judaism. For centuries, it wasn’t the Muslims who persecuted Jews, but Christians. I have read that even some of the defendants at the Nuremberg trials relied on the theory that Jews were God-killers, in order to justify the Holocaust. The idea had come down in German theology, it’s surprising to learn, through Martin Luther.

But it does seem very unfair. Indeed, it illustrates how careful we must be when we read the Bible, not to take things out of context. As you will remember from the lesson just now, what Peter said in full was, ‘When he [Jesus] had been given up to you, by the deliberate will and plan of God, you used heathen men to crucify and kill him’ (Acts 2:23, NEB).

I will come back, to dissect the various strands in it; but first we should recognise that, at the end of the passage in Acts, (verses 37-41), the Jews listening to Peter were ‘cut to the heart’, and asked what they should do. Peter said, ‘Repent, … repent and be baptised, every one of you, in the name of Jesus the Messiah for the forgiveness of your sins; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.’ And then note this; he went on, ‘For the promise is to you, and to your children, and to all who are far away, everyone whom the Lord our God may call.’

There’s actually no suggestion that the Jews have been replaced as the chosen people of God. And we read that three thousand were baptised that day – a huge number.

Of course, St Paul became the apostle to the non-Jews, to the Gentiles – which is us. ‘The Lord our God’, that St Peter spoke about, is the same God, whether we are Jewish or Gentile – or indeed Moslems.

If we go back to what St Peter said, ‘when he had been given up to you, by the deliberate will and plan of God’, you killed him. Could one say that the Jews were not responsible, except insofar as they carried out God’s plan? Ironically, if so, it would be the same defence that was used by the guards in Auschwitz, ‘We were only following orders.’

No. I don’t think that the Greek text works that way. Literally, it says, ‘this one, handed over [or betrayed] in accordance with God’s definite will and foreknowledge, by the hand of lawless men you killed, crucifying him.’ That he was handed over – a word which can mean ‘betrayed’ (εκδοτον) – was foreseen and willed by God. But you, using ‘the hand of lawless men (meaning outside the Jewish law, as the Romans were), killed him.’ There is no doubt that Peter did hold his fellow-Jews to blame.

But equally, the great thing about the Christian gospel is that they were not condemned eternally. Even for such a terrible crime, for having killed the Son of God, if they repented and were baptised – baptised as a symbol of washing away their sin – they would be forgiven, and the Holy Spirit would come to them.

And yet: and yet, I must confess that I thought about the ‘blood libel’, so-called, against the Jews, when I visited the Holy Land a couple of years ago, and saw the awful wall which the Israelis have put up, sometimes separating Palestinians from the fields which they farm, and when I saw the substantial Western-style suburbs which they have built illegally on Palestinian land – not so much pioneer ‘settlements’ but rather, proper towns like Milton Keynes – and when I read about and saw on the TV what the Israelis did in Gaza – for every Israeli soldier killed, they killed at least 10 Palestinian civilians, including women and children. Are the people who did these things, these dreadful people, really God’s chosen people?

It leads me to think two things. First, that we should hate the sin, and try to love the sinner. What the Israelis have done, and continue to do, is wrong, and hateful. They put forward excuses or explanations, but they are not justified. They are, I believe, guilty of brutality, racist oppression and invasion. But face to face, I have never met a nasty Jewish person. They really do conform with God’s promise to Ezekiel, ‘I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will take the heart of stone from your body and give you a heart of flesh’ (Ezekiel 36:26). So we must follow St Peter, and recognise that even the worst sins can be forgiven. We must not oppose the Jews because they are Jews, but only oppose the harm they do in Palestine.

The second thing which occurs to me, is that we don’t really understand what it is to be ‘chosen’ by God. I have a feeling that the God of the Old Testament was rather more akin to the old Greek idea of God – essentially, a superman living above the clouds, so the ‘superman God’ could have human favourites, which is all rather different from the more spiritual, transcendent God that we think of today. What does it mean, today, to ‘sit at the right hand of God in heaven’?

That’s a question for another sermon, another day. But just think: this huge question came up for the first time in the first few weeks of the church. What a momentous time it was. And we still need to try to understand it, even 2,000 years later. Let us pray that the Holy Spirit will come to us and help us as it did those earliest Christians. ‘Repent, …. so that your sins may be forgiven.’ Think what it meant then, and what it could mean today.

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