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A Dreamcoat or a Rocket?

By hughdbryant
May 6, 2024 //
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Sermon for the second week in Lent, preached on 20th February 2024


Genesis 41.46 – 42.5
Galatians 4.8-20

Can we swap places for a minute? Would you come up here and see things as your preacher does, or maybe on your way out, let me know what you feel? We’ve got to deal with two stories today, the first one being Joseph and the amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.

Joseph’s brothers were jealous of his natty outfit, his coat of many colours, and when they were all on a journey through the desert, they chucked him into a pit, intending to sell him into slavery to the next bunch of traders coming through with their camel train. But unfortunately for them, some other spice traders came across him, pulled him out of the pit and took him away to Egypt. where they sold him to the Egyptian government, to Pharaoh, as a slave.

But Joseph prospered. He did a good job, and eventually, with various twists and turns in the story, he ended up being effectively Pharaoh’s viceroy, running the administration of the country. His secret was that he could interpret dreams. He was a kind of diviner, a seer.

He saw the future in a dream and realised that the crops would fail, and he would need to build up a stockpile of grain, if widespread famine in Egypt was to be avoided; so when the crops duly failed, and the famine broke out, Joseph sold grain to all and sundry and became more and more influential, owning more and more land as people run out of money and had to give him their land in return for food.

Among the people who were affected by the famine was Jacob, living in Canaan. Jacob was Joseph’s father, but he had been told that Joseph had died, torn apart by wild beasts, his brothers having shown their father the coat of many colours, stained with the blood of animals, to simulate the remains of a tussle to the death.

Jacob sent the brothers over to Egypt from Canaan, where they were, to buy grain, not knowing that they were about to buy it from the brother whom they thought they had abandoned to an unknown fate in the desert.

They didn’t know it was that long lost brother that they were buying from, and as you will remember, there is a thrilling story full of suspense about Joseph toying with his awful brothers, and making them think that they were going to be wrongly accused of stealing a whole load of grain from Pharaoh so that they would meet a dreadful fate. Then, at the last minute, the tables were turned and Joseph revealed himself as their brother.

You can imagine that it must’ve been a real ‘Oh something moment’ for them, quite a shock. Imagine how they must have felt. They must have thought that the most likely thing would be would be for their younger brother, who was now in such a powerful position, to get his own back on them; that it would not turn out well for them.

The lovely thing is, in this story, that Joseph didn’t do that. In fact he forgave his brothers, and invited them to bring their father over from Canaan to where they could live in Egypt in a land of plenty. Joseph didn’t blame them because, according to the account in the book of Genesis, he reasoned that his whole story, being abandoned and sold into slavery, and then working his way up with Pharaoh so that he became the head of the government of Egypt, was God’s will, was what God had intended, and no humans, certainly not his brothers, were really responsible or to be blamed.

What a wonderful story! That’s one of the two pieces we are looking at this morning. The other one is part of Saint Paul’s great letter to the Christians in Galatia, which is part of modern day Turkey. This reads almost like one side of a telephone conversation.

We don’t really know what Paul was responding to, and what the Galatians were saying to him. We can only try to draw inferences from what he is saying.

You wouldn’t pick this passage in the letter to the Galatians. I think if somebody asked you what the letter is all about, the bits which everybody quotes are the passage where he says that you are all sons of God in union with Christ Jesus. ‘Baptised into union with him, you have all put on Christ as a garment. There is no such thing as Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female. You are all one person in Christ Jesus’. That comes at the end of chapter 3. and then, at the end of chapter 5, he talks about the signs of being led by the Holy Spirit. ‘The harvest of the spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, fidelity, gentleness, and self-control’. These are the qualities that come when you are a good Christian.

But these two famous passages are not what we are looking at today. This bit is all about the Galatians kind-of hedging their bets about what they really believed in.

They would be Greeks living in the Roman Empire, and you would remember that every Roman house had its household gods, Lares and Penates, and of course, in the Greek world, there was the Pantheon, on Mount Olympus; Zeus, and Hera, and all the other gods, each one representing and upholding a particular sphere of influence: so Ares, or Mars, was the god of war, for example.

The big difference between the theology of the Romans and Greeks and Judeo-Christian theology, (because Christianity originated in Judaism – Jesus was a Jew) was that whereas the Greeks and Romans worshipped lots of different gods, the Christians, as well as the Jews, worshipped one God, one true God, and by and large, they did not make statues or paint pictures of the one true God. He didn’t really have a name – ‘I am who I am’, he said – and certainly in the Jewish tradition, only priests could see God and not be burned up in the experience. ‘Immortal, invisible, God only wise’ sums it up.

But the Galatians wanted to have it both ways. They wanted to go back to the old gods as well, just in case. And St Paul got very cross with them. He said it was a retrograde step and that they would no longer be able to be saved and gain eternal life, if they were enslaved by their worship of elemental spirits, as he called them. it could just have been earth, wind, fire, and water, the basic elements, but whatever it was, Saint Paul was very frustrated by the Galatians’ wanting to worship those elemental spirits as well as the one true God as revealed in Jesus Christ.

So on the one hand, we have the story of Joseph and the amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and all the other, a rather bad-tempered rocket written by Paul to the Galatians.

So – imagine you are up here. What do you say about those two passages? What lessons can we draw from them? I would be tempted, I have to say, to draw out how generous Joseph was. He was almost as saintly as Jesus wanted us to be in his Sermon on the Mount. Love your enemies. Turn the other cheek. Certainly not an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth where those awful brothers were concerned.

But I suspect that in the wider sweep of the story of the people of Israel, Joseph’s kindness rather gets blotted out. This is all part of the story of Israel being enslaved, and then freed, and then finding a place in the promised land, building the temple, having the temple knocked down, being enslaved again in Babylon, and so on, until eventually, at the time of the second temple, they are established in Palestine.

It’s very tempting to try to draw parallels with what’s happening in the same area today. Just imagine what the possibilities would be if Mr Netanyahu took a leaf out of Joseph’s book and showed compassion and forgiveness. But if you and I swapped places and you had drawn that conclusion, I’m not sure that people would give you an easy ride as they were shaking your hand on the way out at the end of the service. They might say you’d stretched things rather a lot.

And what about Saint Paul and the Galatians? Apparently, according to Paul, they were volunteering to be enslaved again by worshipping the elemental spirits, rather than the one true God. What would you say about that? It’s a different kind of slavery from the slavery which the Israelites endured in Egypt and in Babylon. This is more an intellectual slavery, abandoning their principles and hedging their bets spiritually.

And, in passing, you might want to observe that Saint Paul’s letters, particularly this sort of letter where he takes a congregation of Christians to task for something that he thinks they are doing wrong, is a sort of communication which I don’t think we would get in today’s world. Because St Paul is in effect telling the Galatians what to believe.

We go to great lengths to ensure that we don’t interfere with everyone’s freedom to believe whatever they want to. We regret the history of the missionaries. Who would say now, ‘Don’t believe in Scientology or Mormon, but stick to the real stuff?’ Alternatively, when we are thinking of Islam or Judaism, we are at great pains not to say that people mustn’t be Muslims or Jews, but that people should be only Christians.

No, instead, we emphasise that all three religions, called the religions of the book, effectively worship the same one true God. We just approach that one true God in slightly different ways. So we wouldn’t be tempted to write the sort of letter that St Paul has written if we found, for example, that somebody had converted from Christianity to Islam. Nevertheless, in certain countries the reverse move, from Islam to Christianity or Judaism, is something which is condemned, indeed, sometimes bringing the death penalty.

That happens in Pakistan or Iran, but we don’t tell people what to believe. We have to some extent therefore changed from Saint Paul’s approach. What do you think? What do we make of that?

So those are your reflection points for this second week of Lent. What lessons could we draw from the story of Joseph and the amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and what do you think St Paul was up to in his frankly rather tough letter to the Galatians? Would it wash today? Let’s swap places and you can tell me the answers.

Amen.

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Greater love hath no man

By hughdbryant
November 9, 2014 //
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Sermon for Evensong on Remembrance Sunday, 9th Nov 2014
John 15:9-17 – Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.

I wondered whether tonight I should just read you some of those stories of heroism and self-sacrifice which perhaps we all know, and which Remembrance Sunday reminds us of. They are almost sermons in themselves. For example:

Maximilian Kolbe, the Polish priest imprisoned in Auschwitz, who volunteered to take another prisoner’s place when the Nazis selected ten men at random to be starved to death after someone had escaped; or

Jack Cornwell, the boy sailor, ‘Boy’ Cornwell, who was only 16 when he was mortally wounded at the battle of Jutland in 1916, who stayed at his post by the ship’s gun which had been hit and put out of action. He stayed there, although all the rest of the gun crew were dead, ‘in case he were needed’, as he said before he died. Or

Robert Leiper Lindsay, the superintendent of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company oil-well compound in ‘the side of Persia that slopes down into Mesopotamia’, as the story in Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopedia [Arthur Mee, ed., c.1922 (undated), London, The Educational Book Company Limited, vol.9, p.6194] puts it, who died shutting down an oil leak to a furnace and saved 300 colleagues. This was one of my favourite stories when I was about ten, and it still moves and shocks me.

‘The quick mind of Lindsay sees at once that the pumps must be stopped and the supply of oil feeding the furnaces must be cut off; so he calls to his assistant to shut off the pumps, and sets off to cut off the furnace supply. But to get to the furnaces he must pass through the fountain of streaming oil, and arrive at the furnaces with his clothes saturated with petroleum. He knows what the end will be, but he does not shrink. He passes through the oil shower, turns off the oil tap of the furnaces, and then turns away, and falls, a blazing torch.’

Terrible stories. So moving. Would we be so brave, we ask ourselves. The first two stories were from wartime: Father Kolbe in the Second World War, and Jack Cornwell VC in the First. Robert Leiper Lindsay was in 1918. As you will know, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, that he worked for, became BP.

Jesus’ great saying, ‘Greater love hath no man ..’, is about love. He has said, ‘This is my commandment, That ye love one another, as I have loved you’ [John 15:12]. It isn’t the sort of soft love, companionable love, that Jesus means here. This is sacrifice, violent, painful. Like Lindsay, a ‘blazing torch’.

We can say amen to that. We know what terrible sacrifice Jesus went on to make, how He suffered.

But the mention of Jack Cornwell and Maximilian Kolbe, those wartime martyrs, and the fact that we are remembering those who made the ultimate sacrifice in wars, makes me think, what is the point of all that undoubted bravery in war? What was it for?

It is reported that, before Jack Cornwell, Boy Cornwell, died, he was told that the Battle of Jutland had been won; and he was pleased. ‘The strife is o’er, the battle done.’ He had died for his friends.

Similarly Maximilian Kolbe and Robert Lindsay, by their sacrifice of themselves, saved others. They died in order that others might live.

Now there are two other sacrifices which we have to consider today. First, our forces – now in harm’s way again in Iraq. Who will their sacrifices save? It is very difficult to be sure. We have seemingly moved a long way from the Ten Commandments and ‘Thou shalt not kill’. Even back in the 13th century, Thomas Aquinas restated the ancient Roman doctrine of the ‘Just War’. He suggested three criteria (Summa Theologiae vol 35, 40(1)):

war must be waged by the ‘due authorities’;
The cause must be just; and
Those waging war must intend to promote good, and avoid evil.

Right authority, just cause, right intention. Even so, Thomas must have reflected that his concept of a ‘just war’ didn’t sit very easily with what Jesus had said, notably in the Sermon on the Mount: ‘But I say unto you, that ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also’ (Matt. 5:39).

Thomas wrote, ‘The Lord’s words, “I say to you, offer the wicked man no resistance”, must always be borne in mind, and we must be ready to abandon resistance and self-defence if the situation calls for that.’ That begs the question when ‘the situation’ would call for resistance to be abandoned. What could be such a situation?

Why would one make war in the first place, why would one feel justified in going against Jesus’ command of peace and non-violence: His commands, not only ‘thou shalt not kill’, but also ‘turn the other cheek’?

St Augustine, Augustine of Hippo, writing, in the fourth century, much earlier than Thomas, identified another reason for which a Christian might be justified in using force, which I think is perhaps the only really good reason – as a matter of charity: to go to the aid of his neighbour who was being attacked.

This is clearly a really difficult area; when it isn’t a case of going to the aid of Poland, when it isn’t a case of a threat to our own independence, but a bloody dispute between governments whose legitimacy is in some cases questionable, and who have shown brutality and a contempt for the rule of law, on the one side, as, say, may be argued to be the case in Syria and Iraq, and opposing factions upholding a particularly vicious and intolerant type of militant Islam – who are killing Christians and other non-Moslems simply for not being Moslems, unlike their opponents, the dubious governments, so unsatisfactory in so many ways, but who at least allow freedom of religion. Where is the ‘just war’ in this context?

But I have left to the end the biggest self-sacrifice, Jesus himself. Greater love hath no man. ‘This is my blood of the New Testament, which is shed for you and for many for the remission of sins’ (The Communion, at p.256 in the Book of Common Prayer). Greater love hath no man, than that he die for his friends. Is it, die instead of his friends? That was Maximilian Kolbe. Or was it to help his friends? That would be like Jack Cornwell or Robert Leiper Lindsay.

The idea is said to be like taking someone else’s punishment for them – again like Maximilian Kolbe. We are sinful; instead of punishing us, as He could, God put up His own son, and punished him instead. ‘Who of thy tender mercy didst give thine only Son Jesus Christ to suffer death upon the Cross for our redemption; who made there (by his one oblation of himself once offered) a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction, for the sins of the whole world’: that’s what the Prayer Book says, in the Prayer of Consecration on p. 255.

I hope that God isn’t really like that. The language of human sacrifice – or of blood feuds: having ‘satisfaction’ is the language of D’Artagnan, the language of duels – ‘redemption’, paying the price, the price of sin, does not really square with the idea of a loving God. The idea of ‘substitutionary atonement’, as it’s called, seems to me to be very barbaric.

We may be fallen people. We may indeed be sinful. But what does that really mean? It surely doesn’t mean that we have a price on our heads, which has to be paid, or else we go into the fires of Hell.

‘Sin’ isn’t a question of persistent badness, or criminality, or just plain evil. All those things might be signs of sin, but they aren’t sin itself. In the New Testament, ‘sin’ is the translation of the Greek ‘αμαρτία, from the verb ‘αμαρτάνω, I ‘miss the mark’, I don’t hit the target. It has a connotation of distance, separation from the goal. So sin is separation, distancing, from God’s kingdom. ‘Remission’ of sins is forgiveness, release from prison.

I would like to emphasise not only the sacrifice, Jesus’ greater love, on the Cross, but also the Resurrection. God is assuring us that not only are we grateful for Jesus’ taking upon himself the punishment that perhaps we might have deserved, but also that it isn’t a story with a sad and pointless end – like the story of so many wars.

Here ‘The strife is o’er, the battle won’; but instead of a posthumous VC, we have a living God, who raised Jesus from the dead. What a sign! Let us indeed remember them: let us remember those who gave their lives in order that we might be free. But let us always remember that biggest, that most meaningful, sacrifice. Greater love hath no man – Jesus had that love, and it was for us.

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The Generosity of Cyrus the Great

By hughdbryant
September 22, 2013 //
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Sermon for Evensong on the 17th Sunday after Trinity, 22nd September 2013
Ezra 1; John 7:14-36

‘By the waters of Babylon, we sat down and wept: when we remembered thee, O Sion …
How shall we sing the Lord’s song: in a strange land?'(Psalm 137). The Israelites had been enslaved by Nebuchadnezzar, and they had spent fifty years in a strange land, Babylon, from 587BC until they were freed by King Cyrus, Cyrus the Great of Persia, who defeated the Babylonians and generously decided to allow the Israelites to go free, to go back to Jerusalem and to rebuild the temple.

That’s the story we hear from the book of the prophet Ezra, written in the fourth century BC, Ezra being the great prophet of the Second Temple, the temple which was rebuilt following the return to Jerusalem under the Persians.

The great story of Israel, leading up to the Christian gospel, is one of obedience to the Law, to the Law of Moses; and the question whether the Israelites were faithful to one god. ‘Thou shalt have none other gods but me.’ When the Israelites turned aside and did worship other gods, Baal and Moloch for example, as a result they were deserted by God and the Temple was destroyed.

You can read all this story very succinctly in the Acts of the Apostles, in the sermon delivered by St Stephen in Acts 6 and 7, or in one of the ‘history psalms’, such as Psalms 78 or 106. The Israelites regarded the Temple as being of huge importance. They made a house for God to live in. It was the same idea that the apostle Peter had at the time of the Transfiguration, to make tabernacles, little houses, for Jesus, Moses and Elijah. (Matt. 17:4)

But Stephen in his sermon explained that Jesus had changed things. ‘Howbeit the most High dwelleth not in temples made with hands; as saith the prophet, Heaven is my throne, and earth is my footstool; what house will ye build me, saith the Lord: …. Hath not my hand made all these things?’ (Acts7:48f)

In our New Testament lesson from St John’s gospel, Jesus is pointing out that the Jews are very literal in their adherence to the Law, so there are certain things that the Law allows them to do, for instance carrying out circumcisions, on the Sabbath, but not, according to them, healing the sick.

So the Jews were questioning Jesus about what authority, what basis he had, for challenging them, and Jesus answered that he wasn’t simply a man, but that he got his knowledge also from his divine origin. St John’s gospel has a major theme, which is that Jesus was the Son of God.

It’s interesting how these theological questions evolved. In 600BC, 2,700 years ago, it was a live issue whether there was one god; but it was already part of the Jews’ vision that that one god had to have a house, and the house had to be magnificently furnished. The idea of God being beyond time and space had not really taken hold; but it was true that the Jews understood God as not being something made, like a golden calf – God was not a ‘brazen idol’. He was the Creator and sustainer of the world.

It is perhaps a bit salutary to realise that these steps in the history of our own civilisation – the Persians conquered the Babylonians, the Greeks conquered the Persians, the Romans conquered the Greeks and the Romans conquered Britain – those early steps took place in those mysterious and rather feared places which perhaps today we would see on the map and say, just represent threats and trouble: Iraq, Iran, Israel, Syria. That’s where it happened. It is perhaps difficult for us to remember that these places together represent the cradle of our civilisation.

It does look as though things have regressed from the time when the great king of Persia, Cyrus, could be so generous to the Jews living in exile in Babylon. The dreadful use of chemical weapons recently looks to be an innovation in brutality – but if you look at Herodotus’ Histories, you will realise that even in the days of Cyrus there were some ghastly inhumanities going on.

I don’t think it’s appropriate to go into the gory details here, but suffice to say that man’s inhumanity to man seems to have been a hallmark of this part of the world, at once the cradle of civilisation and at the same time the scene of bestial cruelty. That was true even in these heroic times, when the Jewish exile was coming to an end.

The idea that God did not live in a particular place was not something which Jesus started. ‘Heaven is my throne and earth is my footstool’ is an idea which comes from Isaiah chapter 66. So Jesus’ preaching was not that revolutionary – it was simply emphasising what was in the prophets’ teaching already – but, as often seemed to happen, the Pharisees didn’t understand, and thought that Jesus was some kind of a charlatan.

I think it’s not very fair that we should have this idea that the Pharisees were all bad. I think we have to have some fellow-feeling. What would we have thought if we’d been there? For instance, if we’d heard a rumour that Jesus might be the Messiah, but we’d compared it with what we could remember had been prophesied about the Messiah: ‘You won’t know where he has come from.’ But we did know exactly where Jesus had come from.

Would we have been clever enough or trusting enough to become disciples? Or would we have stood on the sidelines, going with the flow, like the majority of the Jewish people? Would we have recognised all the miracles that Jesus did and realised that He was who He claimed to be?

But hang on a minute. Isn’t that all really rather academic? What possible difference could any of that stuff make to our lives? How does the fact that we go to church and we call ourselves Christians affect how we look at what’s happening in the Middle East today? Or if we come across people who are in need, or suffering from disabilities; do we put it down to their ‘lifestyle choices’, as a government minister did the other day?

Where is God in all this now? Is God speaking to us through His Holy Spirit, or has He left us to sort things out by ourselves? I think Jesus would be cross with us, just as He was cross with the Jews, if He saw us not taking care of the hungry, the weak, the poor, those who are not as fortunate as ourselves in our society: not, in other words, loving our neighbours as ourselves.

Jesus was clearly right in saying that the Pharisees had forgotten the law of Moses, because they were setting out to kill him. They had conveniently forgotten ‘Thou shalt not kill’. He was absolutely serious when He pointed out that, even on the basis of conventional wisdom, on the basis of the Law of Moses, ‘Thou shalt not kill’. That was true in the early years of the first century, when Jesus said it (or at least when Jesus implied it); and it’s true today. The right answer to the crimes of someone like Mr Assad of Syria is not more killing.
Nearer to home, Jesus’ emphasis, when faced with the fact that many people are hungry today, even in England, even in the rich borough of Elmbridge, in Stoke and Cobham, Jesus’ emphasis would surely be on feeding those people rather than trying to blame them for somehow bringing hunger upon themselves.

I can’t help the feeling that, although I don’t think Jesus actually said it in words, what is implied by his great commandment to love our neighbours as ourselves – which is in the Law of Moses; it’s in Leviticus, chapter 19 verse 18 – is that you have to take people as you find them. The Good Samaritan didn’t check to see whether the man, who had fallen among thieves and was lying injured on the road, he didn’t check whether the man had been imprudent or had not gone out properly prepared, or even had perhaps said the wrong thing.

None of that mattered. The only thing that mattered was he was hurt and in need. That should surely be our motivation too. Remember what Jesus said that the eternal Judge would say at the day of judgement: ‘Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.’ (Matt. 25:34f).

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