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Are they Grape-Nuts?

By hughdbryant
October 6, 2025 //
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Sermon for Mattins and Morning Prayer (Principal Service) at All Saints Church, Penarth, 5th October 2025

Habakkuk 1.1-4; 2.1-4

Psalm 37.1-9

2 Timothy 1.1-14

Luke 17.5-10

It’s a pity that we don’t have lantern slides at 8 o’clock, because I could show you the picture on the slide which is going to be shown at 10 o’clock when I start to preach the sermon then. It’s a sort of shovel, or it could be a large spoon, with round things in it, quite small.

I wondered whether they were my favourite special-treat breakfast cereal, Grape-Nuts – I should explain that I didn’t choose the pictures, as Susannah is leading the service at 10 as well as this one – but I suspect that at 8 o’clock we need to stay away from pictures and screens and things like that, and just keep our worship simple and our pictures in our heads, where, of course, those of you who listen to the wireless know that the best pictures are.

What is in the big spoon? I asked Susannah and she told me that they were mustard seeds, picking up a reference to the Gospel reading, the New Testament lesson today. I have to say that it rather threw me, because I thought mustard and cress was something which you grew on a face flannel on the bathroom windowsill, but apparently this is what mustard seeds really look like.

The lessons are all about how we confront a world which is going wrong, which is going against us. The Old Testament lesson, from the prophet Habakkuk, comes from a time around 600 BC when the Assyrians had overrun the northern kingdom of Israel, and all that was left of God’s chosen people were the two tribes of Judah and Benjamin, together with the survivors from the massacre when the Assyrians invaded the northern kingdom, who had fled to Jerusalem to take refuge there.

Habakkuk was preaching when the Babylonians were beginning to sweep down on Palestine; they are the Chaldeans, if you read a bit more beyond one of the bits that we have for our lesson, which is in two bits, the first four verses of chapters one and two respectively. If you read on in chapter 1, beyond where it says

Devastation and violence confront me;

strife breaks out, discord raises its head,

……

for the wicked outwit the righteous,

and so justice comes out perverted.

Habbakuk goes on in his prophecy by saying

Look, you treacherous people, look:

here is what will astonish you and stun you,

for there is work afoot in your days

which you will not believe when it is told you.

It is this: I am raising up the Chaldaeans,

that savage and impetuous nation,

who cross the wide tracts of the earth

to take possession of homes not theirs.

Terror and awe go with them;

their justice and judgement are of their own making.

Their horses are swifter than hunting-leopards

And he goes on to say how terrifying they are in all sorts of other ways. Obviously they fulfilled the American strategic objective for a successful army in the invasion of Iraq, ‘shock and awe’.

But this terrible army had its limitations.

Their whole army advances, violence in their hearts;

a sea of faces rolls on;

they bring in captives countless as the sand.

Kings they hold in derision,

rulers they despise;

they despise every fortress,

they raise siege-works and capture it.

A terrifying picture. Who could stand against them? But then –

Then they pass on like the wind and are gone;

and dismayed are all those whose strength was their god.

People who believe that ‘might is right’ turn out to be completely mistaken; and the key words in Habakuk’s prophecy come in the second chapter, in our second part of the lesson, [2:4]

Look at the proud!
 Their spirit is not right in them,
 but the righteous live by their faith.

It’s an idea that St Paul picked up on in two of his letters. In his great letter to the Romans, [1:17], he said that in the gospel of Jesus

is revealed God’s way of righting wrong, a way that starts from faith and ends in faith; he says, as Scripture says, ‘he shall gain life who is justified through faith’.

In the letter to the Galatians [3:11], where St Paul is drawing a distinction between following the provisions of the Jewish law, just carrying out the 10 Commandments, and having faith, saying that the way to salvation is through faith, he says that

It is evident that no one is ever justified before God in terms of law; because we read, ‘he shall gain life who is justified through faith’.

I’m not sure why the compilers of the Lectionary decided that we should have a lesson from the second letter to Timothy rather than one of these passages from Romans or Galatians, (which clearly reference the passage in Habbakuk), but certainly in the passage from the second letter to Timothy, St Paul celebrates that the fact that Timothy and his mother and his granny, Eunice and Lois respectively, all had strong faith.

But you might be a little bit puzzled about exactly what this faith is. It’s pretty clear that it’s not what we would call blind faith, just believing that something is true without any evidence for it. If that was true, you might never take another paracetamol ever again; or even worse, you might try to cure Covid by drinking some bleach. But we are not talking about President Trump’s belief system; this is a word which has more of a connotation of trust about it. It’s not so much about believing that something is the case, but rather, trusting in God to produce a good outcome, to right the wrongs. It’s very close to hope. Hope in the Lord. Trust in the Lord. As Isaiah puts it [14:31]:

but those who look to the Lord will win new strength,

they will grow wings like eagles;

they will run and not be weary,

they will march on and never grow faint.

They will soar, on wings like eagles: they will ‘mount up with wings like eagles’.

Just now our world looks a bit like what it must have looked like to Habakkuk; there is a lot going wrong. There are terrible wars, invasions; the rule of law looks to be under threat in places: –

devastation and violence confront me;

strife breaks out, discord raises its head,

…..

for the wicked outwit the righteous,

and so justice comes out perverted.

We can think of plenty of places and cases today, where those words would be very apt. We are going to have a vigil later on today here to pray for the people of Palestine; equally our prayers should go for the other places in the world where there is no peace and where the rule of law does not securely run: Ukraine and the south of Sudan chief among them, as well as Gaza and the West Bank; and all those places where people are held hostage or are fleeing violence and persecution and are becoming refugees.

We need to trust in the Lord, to pray with confidence and realise the power of prayer, even if our faith is only the size of one of Susannah’s mustard seeds, or a spoonful of Grape-Nuts. It doesn’t matter. You can rely on God to put things right in the end. Let us pray that he will use us in his service to that good end.

Amen.

Hugh Bryant

From the PowerPoint slides at the 10 o’clock service. What are those little beads?
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The Holy Father

By hughdbryant
April 30, 2025 //
0

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No,” said a few people in the crowd.

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

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

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Temptation in the House of Louis Jadot

By hughdbryant
March 10, 2025 //
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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

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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 //
0

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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Sabbath Day Observances

By hughdbryant
October 21, 2024 //
0

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

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

Matthew 12:1-21

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Comfortable Words in Gaza

By hughdbryant
October 13, 2024 //
0

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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Happy Marriages

By hughdbryant
October 6, 2024 //
0

Genesis 2:18-24, Mark 10:2-12

Sermon preached at All Saints Church, Penarth, on 6th October 2024

https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=595219558

I want to share with you that sometimes when I am thinking about what I am going to say in one of these sermons I have a distinct sensation of cognitive dissonance. I’m sure you all know what that is. You see something, you feel something, and somebody tells you what it is – but their description doesn’t square with what you are feeling, or seeing, or hearing. That’s cognitive dissonance. And I get that feeling quite often when we say our prayers together in church. 

We pray for our ‘broken world’. I don’t really get it. I open the curtains in the morning and the sun is shining – well, sometimes it is – and the birds are singing, and the cats are lying in wait for the birds; the milkman has just come and the paperboy is just delivering my copy of the Guardian. I would be tempted to say that all is well with the world: well, at least it is with my world. It’s not broken – and I thank the Lord for it. Of course if I was waking up in the middle of Gaza or Beirut or Kyiv, or any of those other places where there is terrible death and destruction as a result of war, then I wouldn’t say that. But somehow or other I don’t think it’s the world that is broken; it’s more us. It’s more what we do that’s going wrong.

I felt that same sort of ‘pull’ in two different directions when I was reading our lessons for today. The story of Adam and Eve, where Eve is created from Adam’s rib, in order for her to be a companion for Adam, and then Jesus laying down the law about divorce – ‘Don’t do it’, he said – well, in both of those cases I had that sense of unreality. I don’t believe that all women are descended from an offshoot of the original man, and equally, it doesn’t ring true to me that Jesus, who was so compassionate and understanding in so many other ways, should be so uncompromising about marriage breakdown. 

And then again, when I took another look at these topics, I realised that there is so much that people disagree about here that I could be here for hours and still not really scratch the surface. What is the theology of men and women? What is the Christian way to approach that huge area that we call ‘sex’? 

Let me just try to tackle a couple of things: if you think that this is something that we should come back to, then maybe we should think about putting together a discussion group, or even a sermon series. But I would just caution everybody that this does seem to be an area where there are no very easy answers which everyone agrees about, and there is really quite some potential for putting people off. I’ll try to be careful.

The Ministry Area Council – what we are used to refer to as the PCC – the Parochial Church Council, has decided that the churches in this Ministry Area should join an organisation called Inclusive Church, where the name tells you all about what it does. We want to be able to say, hand on heart, that our churches welcome everyone, whatever they look like, whatever they say their pronouns are, and whatever their gender and sexual orientation may be, because we believe that the biggest thing in our Christian witness, following Jesus, is to carry out his commandment of love, to love our neighbours as ourselves. 

So having said all that, here are a couple of thoughts. First, the apparently simple idea that God made them male and female. I have a feeling that my doctor daughters would want to add some footnotes to that. The first half – God made them – is reasonable shorthand for the process of creation, and it surely covers evolution as well. 

But the second bit – male and female – is now understood in a very nuanced way, because the scientists now understand that people may be physically endowed with organs which normally go with one sex or the other, but also, whatever their physical characteristics; that people may, again as a matter of the way they are made, be inclined to be more or less male or female in their sexual orientation. Gender and sexuality are seen as distinct, as two different things.

So scientists talk about a spectrum of sexuality between being absolutely male and being absolutely female, in the way that people feel themselves to be, quite separately from the gender with which they were born. 

And that also includes sexual attraction. There is again a spectrum. I was going to go on to say, ‘and scientists consider that xyz is the case’, but I think to be fair one has to say straightway that there may be differences of scientific understanding, for instance between scientists in most countries in Africa, and those in most countries in northern Europe and the USA, on the question of sexual orientation. 

The majority of western scientists say that sexual orientation is something that you are born with, and it is not something you can learn – or unlearn. 

But if you were in Uganda or Nigeria, for example, homosexuality is regarded as a crime, something which is voluntary, learned. They believe that people choose to be hetero- or homosexual, not that they are made one way or the other.

Provided that you are a straightforward male-oriented person in a male body or female-oriented in a female body, you’re fine. But if you are at all different from any of those parameters, on the various spectrums which run from those basic positions to the logical extremes of being bisexual or transsexual, things are much more difficult. Are you allowed to use bathrooms which are appropriate for the way you feel yourself to be, irrespective of your physical gender? What if you feel yourself to be female, but still have the body of a man, say?

And of course there are the vexed questions of whether the church should marry people of the same sex, or whether there should be homosexual priests and whether they themselves can be married. 

People find references in the book of Leviticus which they bring forward to say that anything other than basic boy-meets-girl is an ‘abomination’. They conveniently forget that in the same passages all sorts of other bits of behaviour, which no-one would take exception to these days, are identified as being impure in a religious context. Try this, from Leviticus chapter 19:

You shall not plant your field with two kinds of seed. You shall not put on a garment woven with two kinds of yarn.’

It’s clearly ‘of its time’, and not something which we would abide by today – or that we would even vaguely consider to be sinful. And after all, if we are trying to love our neighbours, think what someone else might feel like, if he or she was in one of those different categories. What does it feel like? In the end, everyone is human. Everyone is a neighbour. Everyone deserves to be loved. That’s the important thing about being ‘male and female’.

On the question of divorce, if you compare what Jesus is reported to have said about divorce here in St Mark’s Gospel, with what he said in St Matthew’s Gospel and what St Paul says about marriage in his first letter to the Corinthians, things are not so simple: the three accounts aren’t all the same, they don’t just say that marriage is for a man and a woman and that there should not be any divorces. 

Matthew said that Jesus added a caveat that there shouldn’t be any divorce unless the wife commits adultery (but he doesn’t say anything about straying husbands), and St Paul brings up another situation where one of the parties isn’t a Christian and there are tensions as a result. Paul feels that it’s okay to let a marriage between a Christian and a non-Christian break up if that becomes a bone of contention. 

Bear in mind that the story in Saint Mark’s Gospel of what Jesus said was written down much later than what Saint Paul wrote to the Corinthians. Saint Paul’s letter to the Corinthians probably came 40 years before any of the gospels were written down, so the idea that there isn’t an absolute prohibition on divorce probably reflects the time of Jesus more clearly than the rather fierce quote that appears in Mark’s gospel. 

We have to say that that fierce quote, suggesting that Jesus said that anyone who gets divorced, male or female, is eternally condemned, just doesn’t chime with everything else we know about Jesus. 

I would suggest that Jesus would say that there is room for forgiveness. I hope that I am right in saying that, because, I’m ashamed to say, I am sinful in that way too, as I have been divorced. So I pray that, in all this area, we can follow Jesus more nearly, and love each other more dearly, day by day. 

Amen.

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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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Gone Up

By hughdbryant
May 11, 2024 //
0

Acts 1.1-11

Luke 24.44-53

https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=582458634

Today is Ascension Day. Having heard the lessons that you have heard, and having recited the Apostles’ Creed, you are in no doubt that we are celebrating Jesus’s Ascension, his going up into heaven.

Perhaps the nicest and most picturesque words in this connection unfortunately are not ones that we in Wales use, but they are in Psalm 47, verse 5, where the Church in Wales sees fit to translate the verse as, “God is gone up with a shout of triumph, and the Lord with the sound of trumpets”, whereas in the 1662 English Book of Common Prayer (which is also authorised for use in Wales), Bishop Miles Coverdale translated the Psalms, and what he said was, “God is gone up with a merry noise”. Gone up with a merry noise: and I am delighted to say that that expression, ‘gone up with a merry noise’, actually survives into Common Worship, the Church of England’s latest prayer book.

It reminds me of someone releasing a balloon, so that it shoots up to the ceiling, with a noise like a loud raspberry. I hope it’s not sacrilegious or blasphemous to have an innocent smile at the thought of Jesus disappearing into a cloud like a balloon – and Coverdale left no doubt what sort of noise it was, by what he said in the second half of the verse, (God is gone up with a merry noise,) and the Lord with the sound of the trump. The sound of the trump.

Am I seriously saying that the best we can do in the face of the Ascension is to make schoolboy jokes? Perhaps we are a bit embarrassed about the story, because honestly I don’t think any of us really believes that Jesus somehow levitated into the clouds, with or without sound effects, and disappeared from sight. I suppose you could say that, if we believe in the Resurrection, that’s so difficult to believe that adding an Ascension doesn’t really make any difference in terms of credibility. In for a penny, in for a pound.

It does bother some people, even faithful people in our churches here in Penarth. I took a service the other day and we recited the Creed; on the way out as I was shaking hands with everybody, one of the faithful said to me, “By the way, he descended into hell: where is hell? Where exactly is that?” And as far as I can tell, they were not trying to pull my leg.

What do these apocalyptic miracles really mean? Are they in any sense true or factual? Those of you who have heard me preach before, will know that at this point I like to bring out the story of the first spaceman Yuri Gagarin, who apparently was asked by President Khrushchev whether he had seen anybody up there – and he was able to confirm that he hadn’t. There weren’t any people with white beards sitting on top of the clouds. But it didn’t actually put Yuri Gagarin off going to church. So far as I know he was a regular churchgoer and he remained one after going up above the clouds.

But equally, if someone who doesn’t normally darken the doors of church came in and listened to what we were saying and what we were professing to believe, they might react with a certain amount of ridicule. So I would say that we ought to be able to cope with the idea that the Ascension is a story. It is the sort of story that you would have to have made up in order to explain why Jesus was no longer there, after a substantial period – it says 40 days – of resurrection appearances. If there hadn’t been an Ascension you would have had to invent one.

Well, maybe that sounds insufficiently respectful, and if so, I hope the Lord will forgive me. But I think it’s important to wrestle away at the true meaning of the Ascension story. As I was in my study writing this, I looked up and there, high up on the windowsill, was Tikka Masala, my beloved Bengal cat. Bengals love to climb up things. My other Bengal, the late lamented Poppadum, who lived to cat 100, 21 years old, was an inveterate tree climber. She scared the pants off us by getting stuck at the top of really tall trees. But she never actually fell, fortunately. She was queen, queen of all she surveyed. Top Cat indeed.

People like going up. If you are ‘high up’ in society, it means you are superior – and indeed ‘superior’ is a Latin word which means above, on top of, something. All the ‘high’ words, or at least most of them, have very positive connotations. To be ‘on high’ is to be at the top, to be superior indeed, to be in charge.

There is a slight exception which is that, certainly at the time of Jesus, it did slightly depend in what context you got up to your high place, whether this was a good thing or not; because if you were strung up, as Jesus was in the crucifixion, then ascension was not divine or praiseworthy but was a sign of disgrace. But that does seem to be an exception that proves the rule.

The idea of the divine being ‘high up’ predates Christianity, of course. The Greeks believed that the gods lived above the clouds on Mount Olympus, and in the Old Testament the Canaanites worshipped the Baals ‘on the high places’. They erected sacred poles and altars in high places. They were obviously meant to be the sort of place where God would be found. The Roman Catholic Church doesn’t just believe in one Ascension, Jesus’s Ascension, but also they believe that his mother Mary ascended into heaven too.

If you are a logical positivist, as I was when I was an undergraduate, studying philosophy – and I was fortunate enough to attend some of the last lectures given by Sir Alfred Ayer in Oxford – you learned that for something to have meaning you had to know what would contradict it: and I wonder whether there is that kind of connotation to the very mysterious thing that the two men in white say to the disciples. ‘This Jesus who has been taken up from you into heaven will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.’ Jesus is going to come back, which is a reversal of the Ascension, a contradiction of it. And perhaps as such that flags up for us the possibility that this may look far-fetched, but it’s not. We may not understand how something works, but all we need to know is that it does work. So I think we are allowed to let our imaginations run riot on Ascension Day. God is indeed gone up, with a merry noise.

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