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The National Anthem of the Kingdom of Heaven

By hughdbryant
November 23, 2015 //
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Sermon for the Sunday next before Advent, Christ the King: 22nd November 2015

Daniel 5

Today in the Christian year we celebrate, we talk about, the idea of Christ the King. The expression ‘King’ comes up when he is on trial in front of Pontius Pilate, which seems to have been the most extraordinary scenario. ‘Are you a king?’ Pilate asks.

Pilate seems to me to have been a rather normal bloke, in a difficult position, having to deal with a bunch of fanatics who were zealots who caused a lot of trouble: possibly we might say they were in the line of ancestors of the people who are Zionists today, contributing to dissent and and unrest in the Holy Land. 

Well, perhaps that’s not a legitimate thing to say, but we can say that the Jews presenting Jesus for judgement by the ruler, by Pontius Pilate, were certainly not thinking about how to promote peace and harmony in the long run; they just wanted to rub out Jesus. He was asking awkward questions, which they did not find easy to answer. It was said that he was King of the Jews.

The idea of the kingdom of God in Jewish theology is a mixture of the idea of the Promised Land and the theology of God’s Holy Mountain. ‘They shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain’ (Isaiah 11:9) – the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and so on. We all know to some extent about Jesus’ rather upside-down concept of kingship. The first shall be last, washing people’s feet, giving up all that you own and giving it to the poor, when dealing with somebody described as a “rich young ruler”, a sort of prince.

But I’m afraid that I will rehearse all these stories, and then add a couple of pious sentences, saying that somehow you should follow them – and then you will forget this sermon and the ideas that it contains, probably before the end of the service, if not a few moments later.

I’d be very doubtful if a sermon, which concentrates on telling you, just in an academic way, what the meaning of kingship was in relation to Jesus Christ, would influence your life in any meaningful way, because you would find the way of life then so different, so alien from what we do now.

We have to build a bridge. What would Jesus do if he were here today? If we go back to the trial before Pontius Pilate, there’s an awful lot of irony in it. Pilate clearly is the representative of the ruling establishment, of the empire of Rome. So the idea that somebody else should come forward and present themselves as a king looks rather counter-intuitive, when it was so obvious that the ruler was a Roman.

Maybe Jesus’ kingship was a bit like all those grandly-named sort-of kings that survived in India after independence – I think largely for the purpose of owning classic vintage Rolls-Royces. The Maharajah of Jaipur, or the Nawab of Pataudi, for instance. Possibly Pontius Pilate had something similar in mind when he was tackling Jesus. ‘Are you a king?’ Meaning, ‘Are you one of those symbolic kings?’

I’m pretty sure that that’s not what the earliest Christians, what the contemporary readers of the Gospel, would have had in mind. The idea of some kind of symbolic king without any power just doesn’t chime with the whole of Jewish history. It’s more likely that they thought of a king as being like King Belshazzar the King of Babylon, the King from Ur of the Chaldees, portrayed in the wonderful fifth chapter of the Book of Daniel.

That King’s father, Nebuchadnezzar, was so confident in his own legitimacy and strength that he had invaded the kingdom of Judah, overrun the Temple, and nicked all the treasures, the gold goblets, plates and things used in the Temple rituals; he turned them over for use at parties, at his court banquet. It was pretty insulting to the Jews, but he had the power. 

Was their God so weak, so inferior to Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar’s god? The Jews didn’t believe this. What that King did, what Belshazzar did, was sacrilege to the Jews. Even today, in theological debates, now between Moslems and Christians, the heart of the matter is precisely that both sides think they have the correct understanding of the most important question ever, namely, what the nature of God is.

But then, despite all his power, Belshazzar encountered the writing on the wall. What did it mean? And Daniel, the Jew, explained. Despite all his power as a king, Belshazzar was finished.

What would happen today, if the confrontation between Jesus and Pontius Pilate was re-run in a contemporary environment? Was Jesus a king? And if so, what sort of king? Well, in St John’s Gospel, Jesus very clearly reserves his position, and points out that the kingdom that he rules as a king is not of this world. So we can’t judge him by how big a country he rules or how big an empire: or whether he has given up his power and become a constitutional monarch like the Queen; or whether he is still an absolute monarch, like the Saudi King, for example.

There’s a faint colour of artificiality about the move which I’m trying to make, between Jesus the king in the Bible and some kind of contemporary interpretation. But never mind; let’s pursue it. I’m confident that it will illustrate what needs to be said here. 

What would the kingdom of God look like? Is it like Belshazzar’s banquet, or is it ‘the year of the Lord’s favour’ as Jesus proclaimed in St Luke chapter 4 [4:19], fulfilling the prophecy of Isaiah [Is. 61:1,2]? Is it ‘They shall not hurt or destroy on God’s holy mountain’? Or is it, ‘The last shall be first, and the first shall be last’, in the Gospel story itself? [Matt. 20:16]
What does it mean to be a king? I think that the idea of kingship can be taken in more than one way. 

You can of course look historically at who has actually been a king, and identify the qualities these historic kings actually had. But equally, another way of looking at it is to see kingship as a kind of metaphor for the whole business of government, of leadership of people. What would a really Christian government look like – a government where Christ was really in charge?
Would he be democratic, for example? Surely yes. We believe that God loves every single one of us: indeed that he has called us all by name [Isaiah 43:1], and that therefore we are all worth knowing. That would imply that we should each have a vote; it would imply a need for democracy. 

But would Jesus approve of our particular version of democracy? So many people didn’t vote in the last general election. So, although the government claims a majority, in fact I believe that only 24% of the electorate as a whole actually voted for them. Many more, 36%, didn’t vote for anyone. It’s at least arguable that our current arrangements are not as democratic as one feels they might be, if we were trying to create heaven on earth. It’s something to think about.

Again, after Bishop John Robinson’s ‘Honest to God’, we now understand that the Kingdom of God isn’t in a particular place, where Jesus, the Lamb or God Himself is, up there somewhere on their thrones. In a spiritual sense, the Kingdom is with us here and now. We are God’s workers – ‘Take my hands and let them move | At the impulse of thy love’, as the hymn says [Common Praise no 581]. It’s up to us to work to bring about the year of the Lord’s favour. Jesus is our King – not in a temporal, earthly sense, as he says when Pilate questions him – but he does rule; he rules in our hearts. 

I worry a bit, when I say that. I worry because I think that it might be the same type of reasoning which IS, Daesh, uses in support of its ‘Caliphate’. They talk about their Islamic State having a king, a ‘caliph’. But the difference is that, whereas their caliph is to be a sheikh, an Arab king, who is defined as the successor to, or deputy for, Mohammed, in Islam, and is king, caliph, by virtue of that divine authority, in Christianity, as Jesus says, the king is not a secular ruler. ‘My kingdom is not from this world’, he said, in John 18:36.

And definitely, on our God’s holy mountain there will be peace: ‘They shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain’ (Isaiah 11:9). It’s so tragic that people who support Daesh believe that God supports violence. We understand that Moslems as well as Jews all worship the same God as we do – but the IS people don’t recognise that if their Islamic State were a real Caliphate, governed by God, then God ‘will dwell with them, they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them’: 

that we agree on; but we believe that 

‘he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more.’ 

That’s in our Bible, in the Book of Revelation, 21:3-4. To be fair, I think that most Moslems do not support the idea of a a militant ‘caliphate’, based on terror. They wouldn’t recognise a Daesh Caliph as a real ruler, whoever he might be.

So, even if there’s no kingly pomp, let us give our allegiance, let us indeed sing hymns and praises, sing the National Anthem of the Kingdom of Heaven, even, to our King, to Jesus.

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Deterrence, Leopards and God’s Mountain 

By hughdbryant
November 8, 2015 //
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Sermon for Evensong on Remembrance Sunday 2015

Isaiah 10:33-11:9; John 14:1-29
‘We will remember them.’ This has been a time of remembrance today, looking back in remembrance on all those brave people who have given their lives in the service of their country in war. Now in the evening of the day, ‘at the going down of the sun,’ it is time perhaps for us to look forwards, and reflect on the question of peace.
‘The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them …. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain.’ This beautiful and mystical scene is the prophecy of Isaiah. And then in St John’s Gospel, ‘In my father’s house are many mansions …. Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.’
When I started to study Latin and Greek, the Latin was Julius Caesar, De Bello Gallico (‘about the war in Europe’), and the Greek was Xenophon’s Anabasis, another history of war. Julius Caesar, as you know, invaded Britain in 55 and 54BC – less than a century before the time of Christ. It was definitely a warlike time throughout the Roman Empire.
Jesus grew up surrounded by wars. Before then the world of the Old Testament was permeated with lots of violence and wars. The story of the exodus from Egypt was very violent and the entry into the promised land equally involved a number of battles.
In the passage we have read from St John’s Gospel, Jesus says, ‘If you love me, you will keep my commandments.’ Presumably, that includes ‘Thou shalt not kill’. But even so, Jesus himself also said, ‘I came not to bring peace but a sword’ (Matt. 10:34). So would Jesus have belonged to the Peace Pledge Union, and worn not a red poppy, but a white one, today? Just as today most people see war as something to be avoided if possible, but never to be ruled out as a last resort, in Jesus’ time, war was an unavoidable fact of life.
Following St Thomas Aquinas, the church developed a doctrine of the ‘Just War’. (See Summa Theologiae 40.1). This is what Aquinas says. ‘If a war is to be just, three things are needed. It must be waged by the due authorities, for those who may lawfully use the sword to defend a commonwealth against criminals disturbing it from within may also use the sword of war to protect it from enemies without. … the cause must be just, …. And those waging war must intend to promote good and avoid evil.’
It might be instructive to compare these principles with the principles laid down in the United Nations Charter allowing a modern nation lawfully to declare war – or at least to make war, even without a declaration – on another. These days the requirements for a war to be just are: that it should be in self defence; or because a treaty obliges us to wage war to protect another nation – as we were obliged by treaty to protect Poland at the beginning of WW2 – or because the approval of the United Nations has been obtained.
But the original ‘just war’ principles are still influential. War can only be waged lawfully by a sovereign nation: you cannot have private wars, vendettas, as they have in Sicily between Mafiosi. The cause must be just. A nation can’t wage war simply in order to benefit itself. So Hitler’s quest for Lebensraum, literally, ‘living space’, territorial aggrandisement, was not a legitimate occasion for making war.
And the means employed must be proportionate. Proportionality is an old legal principle dating back at least to the lex talionis, an eye for an eye, (Deut .19:21): the point is that it is just an eye for an eye, not more. There were similar provisions even earlier, in Babylonian law and the laws of Hammurabi.
There must also be a reasonable expectation that the war will be successful. This does still come, perhaps, from Aquinas. He says, “The Lord’s words, ‘I say to you, offer the wicked man no resistance’, [Matt. 5:39 ] must always be borne in mind, and we must be ready to abandon resistance and self defence if the situation calls for that.” (Summa Theologiae 40.1) Pyrrhic victory might not be lawful. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus certainly went much further than the Lex Talionis.

Are we content that there is, or there can be, such a thing as a just war? Does it matter that some of the wars which have been waged, at least arguably, as just wars, have not achieved their objectives? See for example the situation in Iraq today, or even more tragically, in Afghanistan.
Is it reasonable to ask, what would Jesus do? Would he have something to say, for instance, about the doctrine of mutually assured destruction, (the rationale behind the holding of nuclear weapons), or of ‘shock and awe’ as used in Iraq. Would these doctrines square with the doctrines of just cause and proportionality in the case of MAD, or proportionality, in the case of ‘shock and awe’?
The theory of nuclear deterrence does not depend on the rightness of one’s cause. The opponent is deterred not because we are right, but because we can kill him. Perhaps it is proportional to respond to a threat of global annihilation – with what? With a threat of global annihilation. But perhaps that simply illustrates that the principle of proportionality is inadequate in the context of nuclear weapons. And again, what about a nuclear suicide bomber? MAD will not affect them.
I for one was very encouraged when Parliament refused to back military action in Syria. It seemed to me that the criteria for a just war were indeed not properly met. There was no threat against this country, so as to raise a question of self-defence. There was no treaty obligation to help some of the Syrians against the Syrian government – how could there be? And what was the likelihood of success – if indeed one could agree on what would constitute success? Of course, the question may come up again soon.
So much of our Remembrance Day liturgy and poetry was inspired by WW1. That was supposed to be ‘the war to end all wars’ – which must be a perfect example of Aquinas’ second test for a just war, that the cause must be just. There can surely be no more righteous cause than the eradication of war for the future.
But even in this most worthy objective, war was not a solution. Indeed the seeds of the Second World War were sown in the aftermath of the First one. Can we honestly point to many wars and say they have really achieved anything?
Perhaps universal pessimism is not justified: it was vital that Nazism had to be defeated: war was the only way to do it; the war succeeded. The war on Nazism succeeded at least in that the military threat to this country was removed – it was justified according to the principle of self defence.
But one cannot change people’s minds by war against them. Just as there are still people who are Nazis, even in this country, and there certainly are still Nazis in mainland Europe, it is certainly arguable that people have been inspired to take up terrorism by their believing that the West has waged war unjustly in the Middle East.
This is a terribly difficult area. Clearly we can be, and we are, really thankful for the bravery and sacrifice of our soldiers, sailors and airmen. That is the main purpose of Remembrance Sunday. But it is much more difficult to know where our duty lies as Christians in the face of the threats to peace which the world now faces.
We must say our prayers, we must pray for world peace. But also we must be alert, we must scrutinise everything that is done in our name, especially if warlike acts are being prepared. ‘At the going down of the sun’ we will remember. We must remember – and because of what we remember, we must be careful. And we must be just.

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Je suis Charlie

By hughdbryant
January 11, 2015 //
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Sermon for Evensong on the First Sunday after The Epiphany, 11th January 2015
Isaiah 42:1-9, Ephesians 2:1-10

‘Time was when you were dead in your sins and wickedness, when you followed the evil ways of this present age, … We too were of their number: we all lived our lives in sensuality, and obeyed the promptings of our own instincts and notions.’ [Eph. 2:1-4, in the New English Bible]

The people of Ephesus were, before they discovered Christ, debauched and decadent. There’s something in this passage, in St Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, which is rather reminiscent of things that I have read and heard in connection with Moslem fundamentalists, in places like Bradford, parts of Birmingham or even nearer to home, from where young people are going to join Islamic State – or whatever it’s now called – in Iraq.

The Western world, according to their lights, is supposed to be decadent and depraved, godless; whereas they learn, in their madrasahs, that if they follow the prophet Mohamed, this will be the real thing, the true path to salvation, to God. In St Paul’s time, decadent Ephesians became decent Christians through faith. Today, wide boys from Halifax, through their faith, can become martyrs, according to the ISIL propaganda.

This is a terrible week to have to think seriously about the various challenges to Christianity and our Western way of life, from the various Muslim fundamentalist groups, in particular, Islamic State, and from the various groups which claim to subscribe to Al Qaeda.

The events in Paris and Northern France have been truly shocking, and they come on top of extraordinary brutality and cruelty shown by the ISIL terrorists in beheading people that they have kidnapped, and in forcing people to do things for them on pain of death. We must not forget the terrible atrocities of Boko Haram in Nigeria as well.

St Paul’s great message was that the gospel of Jesus was a gospel for the Gentiles just as much as it was for the Jews. There are these slightly recondite discussions in his letters about whether it’s necessary to be circumcised or not, and what the status of the Jewish Law is: must you, in effect, become a Jew before you can become a Christian?

It was, if you like, a very early example of inter-faith dialogue. True, St Paul was actually trying to proselytise, was trying to convert people, which is something which is not supposed to happen in inter-faith communications today. Rev Richard Cook, the recently retired vicar of Goldsworth Park in Woking, who was very much the Diocese’s expert on Islam, and is a good friend of the imam of the Shah Jahan Mosque in Woking, which I believe is supposed to be the oldest mosque in this country, used to say that, whenever he met his friend the imam, for a cup of tea or something, the first thing that the imam always said, after he had inquired after his health, was whether Richard was ready to convert to Islam or not.

He didn’t get too upset when Richard politely declined. Trying to persuade each other of the relative merits of their particular understanding of God is something that happens all the time. We can still talk to people of a different religion, exchange ideas with them, try to understand their position better, even if they are at the same time trying to convert us.

This civilised dialogue is a world away from the murders at Charlie Hebdo. The terrorists’ assault, which some of our newspapers characterised as ‘an assault on free speech’, an ‘assault on democracy’, was indeed an assault on the way of life of a civilised country.

The hallmark of free speech is said to be that, even though I disagree with what you say, I would defend to the last your right to say it, your freedom of speech. Equally, as a consequence of our all being God’s creatures – or just our all being human – as a matter of human rights – we are democrats: we have the right to choose our own government, by majority voting. To the extent that our voices are silenced, by people like the terrorists who attacked Charlie Hebdo, it is an assault on democracy.

But amid this outpouring of grief and solidarity, solidarity with the journalists at Charlie Hebdo and with all journalists, who not unnaturally feel that this has been an attack on them all collectively, alongside all that, there have, perhaps unfortunately, been some notes of discord.

Earlier in the week, in his LBC radio phone-in programme, Nick Clegg encountered a questioner called Omar, who asked him whether he didn’t agree that the journalists at Charlie Hebdo had in fact brought their demise on to themselves, by their blasphemy. Nick Clegg was very angry on air, and insisted that the attack on Charlie Hebdo could not be defended under any circumstances or on any grounds.

But it was plain that the questioner, Omar, either didn’t understand what he was saying or, certainly, didn’t agree with it. And there was a piece on Radio Four involving some vox pop interviews with people in Bradford. They were British; they had Yorkshire accents, and were probably second or even third generation since their ancestors came over from the Indian subcontinent. Nevertheless they also commonly came up with the view that the Charlie Hebdo attack was brought on by the journalists themselves, by their blasphemous publications.

There was no concept, in these people on Radio Four or in Omar on LBC, that somehow the principles of human rights, of free speech, of democracy, could trump the seriousness of any alleged blasphemy. We say that the merits of democracy, of free speech, are self-evident: we all live by them. Anyone trying to contradict the principles of free speech or democracy is, in effect, attacking our society.

At which point I ask myself where we get our sense of human rights, of free speech, free will, of democracy, from. Because it seems to me that in fact they are not simply true or desirable in themselves. It’s not necessarily true that, because you’re a human being, you will automatically agree that democracy is a good thing, or that free speech is a good thing. Omar and Co are evidence of that.

There are many nations in the world today where democracy, the rule of the people, is subservient to the idea of theocracy, rule by God or by God’s representatives, by mullahs for example. It’s not the case that everyone, simply by virtue of being human, will assent to the proposition that democracy is pre-eminently a good thing, or that free speech is a good thing.

Even we to some extent accept restrictions on free speech – sometimes for commonsense reasons, so you are not allowed to shout ‘Fire!’ in a cinema – but also, ironically, for the purpose of collective security, in order to prevent the attacks on our way of life which terrorists have made and have threatened in future. We accept limited restrictions on free speech in order to preserve the right to free speech in general.

We justify the idea of free speech, the idea of human rights and so on, I think, not on the basis that they are self-evident truths, but rather ultimately because of our Christian belief. We believe that God made us equal in His sight, and that He gave us the freedom to choose good or evil. Muslims also believe in God, and possibly, in the same God. But they believe that free speech doesn’t come into it. If you blaspheme, according to them, you forfeit your right to life.

So we are in disagreement with Muslims, disagreement over something very important, about how God works. Although I would stress that this is not an argument for anti-Semitism, one could draw a parallel with the disagreements between the Jews and the Christians in the time of Jesus. The Jews and the early Christians were in disagreement. Jesus was a threat. He challenged the orthodoxy of the Pharisees and the scribes, their cherished beliefs. They dealt with the problem by killing Him.

In an evil way, the terrorists in Paris may also have felt that they were somehow solving the disagreement that they felt, between their own vision of the good life and what they perceived to be the contradiction to it in decadent Westernism, by killing what they saw as a major source of the decadence and blasphemy which they so disagreed with. That is not in any way to excuse the evil of what they did, but it might explain it.

What is our way of dealing with people we fundamentally disagree with? In so many cases, unfortunately, as a matter of history, it has involved warfare. If as a country we can’t agree with someone, or we feel that their view needs to be overturned, there is, always not very far from the surface, a resort to warfare.

We disagree with the Syrians. We are at war with them. But I do feel that we are not likely to change their minds by bombing them. I feel that instead, the solution to all this trouble must lie in the development of mutual understanding.

But, as St Paul has pointed out here, there is a limit to what we can do; there is a limit to how we can bring about the Kingdom. Everything depends on our believing and trusting in God, and in God responding with His bountiful grace. Are we prepared to risk that, or are we going to carry on as though we had never heard the Gospel message, of peace and forgiveness? Peace and forgiveness leads to repentance and reconciliation.

I pray that, as we defend our way of life, our gifts of free speech and democracy, we will remember how our prophet, the prophet Isaiah, foretold the coming of God’s kingdom, and how gentle our Messiah is to be.

Here is my servant, whom I uphold,
my chosen, in whom my soul delights;
I have put my spirit upon him;
he will bring forth justice to the nations.
He will not cry or lift up his voice,
or make it heard in the street;
a bruised reed he will not break,
and a dimly burning wick he will not quench;
he will faithfully bring forth justice.
He will not grow faint or be crushed
until he has established justice in the earth;
and the coastlands wait for his teaching. [Is. 42:1-4].

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Hiding your Light under a Bushel

By hughdbryant
February 9, 2014 //
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Sermon for Holy Communion at St Andrew’s, Cobham, on 9th February 2014, the Fourth Sunday before Lent
Isaiah 58:1-9, Matt. 5:13-20

It’s funny how words change their meaning over time. When Jesus was speaking to his disciples, at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, he said they were ‘the salt of the earth’. He meant that they were pretty good: that they had a strong flavour: they were capable of doing good things.

They used salt, in those days, to preserve food; so if a piece of meat was well salted, it would stop it going off. But these days, when we say that somebody is the ‘salt of the earth’, we tend to think of them more in terms of Arthur Daley or Eddie Grundy in the Archers: a little bit fly, a bit of a lad. Heart of gold, but the cheque’s in the post. You know what I mean.

So maybe to get the full flavour of what Jesus was saying, you need a slightly different expression. Not ‘salt of the earth.’ How about ‘light of the world’? As we’ve just heard, Jesus told His disciples that they were ‘the light of the world’ [Matt.5:14]. In St John’s gospel he says that He himself is ‘the light of the world’. Here He goes on to talk about the disciples being like ‘a city built on a hill’, which can’t be hidden from view, and that, once you have lit a lamp, you mustn’t hide it away: you mustn’t ‘hide your light under a bushel’.

What does it all mean in practice? Jesus was to some extent contrasting His message with the teaching of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law – the Jewish law, which was the 10 Commandments and the laws of behaviour which you get in the first five books of the Old Testament, and then in the Jewish law as developed by the various rabbis over the years and recorded in the Mishnah and the Talmud.

Jewish Law has a rule for absolutely everything, and the Pharisees were famous for knowing all those rules and punctiliously carrying them out. But of course in the story of Jesus, in the gospels, the Pharisees are not the good guys. They are the ones that opposed Him. They are the ones that Jesus called hypocrites, ‘whited sepulchres’; they looked all right on the outside, but on the inside they were full of awfulness, ‘full of dead men’s bones’.

But it doesn’t mean that Jesus was against the Jewish law. The Jewish law, in its essence, was – and is – a very good set of principles. The bit that we’re familiar with, the 10 Commandments, is a fine ethical code, and Jesus assured the disciples that He wasn’t there to dismantle the Jewish law: not ‘one jot or one tittle’ would be taken away. But, He said, you have to do better than the Pharisees and the scribes if you’re going to have a place in heaven.

Then Jesus went on to preach His most famous sermon – probably the most famous sermon there’s ever been – the Sermon on the Mount, about going the extra mile, turning the other cheek, loving your enemies. All this is contrary, counter-cultural stuff, which is the essence of Jesus’ teaching.

But He wasn’t going against what the law and the prophets had previously taught. If we look again at the first lesson, from the book of the prophet Isaiah, it’s actually the same kind of message. What do you do in order to show that you’re obedient to God, that you have a proper respect for Him?

Do you cover yourself with sackcloth and ashes, and do some drastic fasting? According to the prophet Isaiah, the Israelites are complaining, because they do do all that, they go through all the ritual of fasting and self-abasement: but they don’t think God takes any notice.

Isaiah points out – and as a prophet he’s speaking the words of the Lord – that the right kind of penitential behaviour is not doing something which only really impacts on you yourself. Instead it is doing something for other people: ‘to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free’. Sharing your food with the hungry: taking the homeless poor into your house: clothing the naked when you meet them, and never sneaking out of looking after your family.

‘Then’, Isaiah says,’your light shall break forth like the dawn.’ If you give of your own food to the hungry, and satisfy the needs of the wretched, ‘then your light shall rise in the darkness, and your gloom will be like the noonday’.

How should it affect us? There are posters for the Alpha Course, where there’s a man looking a bit puzzled and asking himself, ‘Is that all there is?’ Is his normal life all that there is – or is there more to life?’ The course introduces you to the idea that there is more to life, and the reason that we know that there is more to life is because, as Christians, we understand that the meaning of the gospel, the good news of Jesus, is that God does care for us.

But what Jesus is telling us here in his preaching is that this is not just something good for us as individuals. If we’re disciples, the fact of our being a disciple should shine out from us. ‘Let your light so shine … so that they may see your good works, and give glory to your Father in heaven.’

Let’s assume that we are all trying to be good disciples. What does it mean in practice to say, ‘Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works’? What good works? ‘To loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free’. But – are you actually oppressing anybody? What do you think? Do you think that it applies to you in any way today?

Isaiah suggests that the way to set free the oppressed is to share your food with the hungry: take the homeless poor into your house: clothe the naked when you meet them.

Sharing your food with the hungry may be quite straightforward. As the manager of our Foodbank, I’m very grateful that so many people – and that certainly includes lots of people here – have gone and bought extra food when they’re shopping and have given it to the Foodbank.

But what about taking the homeless poor into your house, and clothing the naked when you meet them? Would it be stretching it too far to ask, in this context, how you think that the ‘Bedroom Tax’ fits in with the idea of taking the homeless poor into your house?

Say somebody works for a low wage, and gets housing benefit. In the old days, they would have had a council house at a cheap rent which they would have been able to afford. Unfortunately they don’t have many council houses any more, so now we have housing benefit, to make up for the extra cost of privately rented houses. The poor person’s children have grown up and moved away; so strictly speaking, they don’t need three bedrooms any more.

So the new rules say that their housing benefit will only be paid to cover the cost of a house which the government says is necessary. So they are paid enough to be able to afford a one-bedroomed house – whereas they are actually living in a three-bedroomed house. There aren’t any one-bedroomed houses available. Very soon our poor person won’t have enough to live on.

In effect, Isaiah suggests that we, as individuals, should be doing something about that. The Jewish law, the law of Moses, is pretty clear that society must care for its weakest members. In Deuteronomy ch.14, Moses tells the Israelites to make a tithe on all their wealth, to provide for ‘aliens, orphans and widows’ living with them, so that those aliens, orphans and widows may have enough to eat.

Aliens, orphans and widows. Immigrants, refugees: children in care: people living on their own. It really doesn’t take too big a stretch of the imagination to realise that we still have the same sort of people in our society that Moses was worried about 3,000 years ago.

I’m not telling you what the answers should be. But I encourage you to go away and think about it. Just to suggest one instance: is it right that, when the property market is booming, we should be imposing taxes on the poorest people so that they have to make a choice between paying the rent and buying food?

Or, do you think that things have changed, and in fact these ideas from the Jewish law and from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount are not actually directly referable any more to present-day circumstances? What do you think?

Last week was Candlemas, when we celebrated the coming of Jesus as ‘a light to lighten the Gentiles’, and Jesus said later on, ‘I am the light of the world’. This week, we’re looking at Jesus’ teaching that we, his disciples, his followers, we also are the light of the world.

Our challenge today is to make it a reality, so that our light is not in fact hidden under a bushel, so that it is not just a matter of us feeling a rosy glow: instead the challenge is to us, so that we really do become a light, a light to the world outside.

So I pray, ‘Let our light so shine, so that they may see our good works, and give glory to you, to our Father in heaven’.

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Mick Philpott and the Prison Chaplain

By hughdbryant
April 7, 2013 //
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Sermon for Evensong on the First Sunday after Easter, 7th April 2013
Isaiah 53:1-6, 9-12; Luke 24:13-35 –

This has been a rather challenging Easter time – and I don’t just mean that there is heightened tension in Korea, or that the weather has been totally dreadful so that thousands of lambs have been lost in snowdrifts, although of course those are dreadful things that have happened round this Easter – I was thinking instead about the terrible case of the Philpotts, convicted of killing six of their children.

Rather extraordinarily, the Chancellor of the Exchequer has tried to link their depravity to the fact that they were receiving social security benefits. The judgement in the Philpott case came a few days after the government brought in sweeping changes in the Welfare State, which were widely criticised by the churches generally – if anyone would like to know more about what the churches have said about the government’s reforms to the Welfare State, please ask me after the service and I will make sure you get a copy of the report prepared for the Free Churches, which was endorsed by 42 Anglican bishops including our Bishop Ian.

Among other things, it points out that most of the social security budget goes on paying old age pensions, and only about ten per cent goes on unemployment benefit. Most unemployed people are unemployed for less than a year; and more benefit is paid to those who are in work, but whose pay is too low to allow them to afford to pay rent and eat.

But perhaps the most challenging thing that I came across in the last few days was a headline on Twitter, ‘Spare a thought for the prison chaplain who has to minister to Mick Philpott.’

Well, I had all that in my head, but then I realised that in my sermon I should not forget that we are still in the time of Easter and we are, in our church life, focussing on Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. The Bible lessons tonight are from Isaiah, where you might have heard in your head the aria in Handel’s Messiah, ‘He was despised and rejected’, the prophecy that the Messiah would not be a triumphant king but would be a suffering servant who would suffer and take upon himself the sins of the world; and the other story, of the two disciples walking to Emmaus encountering Jesus, not realising who He was, even though He was explaining to them what the Hebrew Bible had said about the Messiah, for example indeed in passages like the ‘He was despised’ passage in Isaiah, and then when they sat down to eat together, ‘He took bread, he gave thanks, he broke it and he gave it to them’, and then ‘their eyes were opened’ and they knew who he was. The memory of the Last Supper came to them vividly.

So should I talk to you about the greatest thing, the heart of the Gospel of Christ, His resurrection, or should I take it for granted that, yes, you believe in the Resurrection, and get on straightway to how it should affect us in the way we behave as Christians, how we treat people who are as bad as Mick Philpott?

I can imagine that, if for some reason somebody who doesn’t normally go to church – perhaps who doesn’t believe very much – if somebody like that has joined us for tonight’s service, when I pose that question, they will think that we are rather odd people. The Resurrection is clearly a piece of picturesque nonsense, they will say. Nobody could possibly believe in it, and anyway, this was 2,000 years ago. Nobody’s ever seen anything like it since.

But on the other hand, real life questions about how we look after people who are less fortunate in society and how we deal with people who seem to reject the whole basis of society itself, who seem to reject the idea of having any care for people other than themselves, are live issues which everyone in society should be concerned about.

Well, if you take that view, whatever else you do, you should come to the open meeting which will be held at Church Gate House, St Andrew’s, on Tuesday night, by our MP, Dominic Raab, when he invites us, his constituents, to question him and make representations to him so that he can represent us better in Parliament.

It would be interesting to know whether he sympathises with the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s view, that in some way, being on benefits made Mick Philpott more likely to commit manslaughter of his children. Perhaps our MP has a different view. It will be very interesting to learn what he feels, and perhaps to ask him to take some messages back to Westminster.

But what about those two disciples on the Emmaus road? They were very sad. They had heard all Jesus’ teaching. They had learned from Him that we should love our neighbours as ourselves: so if our neighbour is out of work, sick or disabled or needy in some other way, Jesus’ teaching seems clear. We should treat that neighbour as we ourselves expect to be treated.

Cleopas and the other disciple would remember the Sermon on the Mount. If somebody strikes you, turn the other cheek. ‘Blessed are the merciful’. And they would remember Jesus’ teaching, ‘Judge not, lest ye yourselves be judged’.

So when confronted with an evil person like Philpott, according to Jesus’ teachings, they would have hated the sin but tried to love the sinner, they should have tried to forgive the sinner; they would have faced the same challenge as the prison chaplain is no doubt facing now.

But the problem for Cleopas and the other disciple (perhaps it was Mrs Cleopas), was that they had heard all Jesus’ wonderful teachings and they had begun really to believe that He was the Messiah, the chosen one of God: that He was going to bring in the kingdom of God, so that all His teaching about love and forgiveness would make sense.

If it had been today, they would believe that Mick Philpott would listen to the chaplain, would be repentant in time, would pray for forgiveness and would become a reformed character. But they were afraid that none of that was going to happen; in effect they were like the newspapers today, thrashing about: some saying very intemperate things going one way, and others equally trenchantly preaching the other way, in relation to such things as social welfare and criminal justice.

Nobody has said why their particular view is to be preferred. It is assumed that, if you read the Telegraph, or the Daily Mail, you will have a particular view; you will sympathise with what those papers – and perhaps George Osborne also – have said. If you read the Guardian, you will have an altogether contrary opinion, but equally, you will feel very strongly that it is the right thing.

But none of the newspapers has pointed to any reason why their particular view was right or wrong. That was how the poor disciples, Cleopas and the other one, felt after Easter. All the bright promise of Jesus’ preaching and teaching, the great crowds which He had drawn to Him, the baptisms, the healings of the sick, the various other miracles, even raising Lazarus and the widow of Nain’s son from the dead – they had all come to a crashing halt at the hands of the Sanhedrin, the Jewish leadership and the Roman administration.

Pontius Pilate wanted to avoid any possibility of civil unrest, and therefore he had countenanced the patently unjust killing of Jesus on the cross. Poor Jesus had therefore died, in the most horrific way – and that’s as much as Cleopas and the other one knew. The whole brave enterprise had ended in calamity.

It made it look as though everything that Jesus had been promoting and preaching about was, after all, just His opinion. It had looked right at the time; it may have sounded fine coming from Jesus’ mouth – but however eloquent He was, in the ultimate analysis Jesus was just another human being, and therefore He could be brought to a halt, he could be controlled by authority, by the brute force of the Roman soldiers.

He could be – and in fact He had been – killed.

When He met Mr and Mrs Cleopas, what Jesus did was to go through what the Hebrew Bible said about the Messiah, to remind the Cleopas’ what they were looking for, what the Messiah would be like: that He wouldn’t be a triumphant warrior, but he would be more like a suffering servant.

But He didn’t get through to them. The Bible says that their eyes remained closed to Him. They didn’t rumble who He was. It was just as I was saying earlier, that they knew that the Messiah was supposed to do certain things and was supposed to be certain things: but they couldn’t see how it could apply to Jesus, in the light of what had happened on the cross.

In the ultimate analysis, after a brave show Jesus had just been killed, extinguished. He couldn’t do any more good. Then when Jesus broke bread as He had done in the Last Supper, all of a sudden the light went on in their brains, their eyes were opened, and they realised that He had come back to life, and there He was, alive with them.

So the prophecies in the Bible were not empty ideas, not just pretty stories. Jesus was the real thing. The Cleopas’ realised that indeed, the Kingdom of God had started.

So let’s look again at what everybody thinks about these various events, that have happened in the last week. But let’s look at these events in a different light. It isn’t the case that there is no touchstone, no standard against which to judge what the right thing is to do.

There is a standard: the standard of the kingdom of God. So when you are confronted by Mick Philpott, the question is not what the journalists in the Telegraph or in the Daily Mail or in the Guardian think are the right principles to be followed.

Instead the principle should be, ‘What would Jesus do?’ because, the Lord is here. The Lord is with us. He is risen indeed.

‘Behold, I tell unto you a mystery’. That mystery is that Jesus was raised from the dead. The sacrifice was not in vain. Even though it was 2,000 years ago, it still means that everything has changed. The judge said that Mick Philpott ‘had no moral compass’. Frankly that could also be said about some of the newspapers. Jesus rose again from the dead. That is the most important thing in our lives – even today. It has given a ‘moral compass’ to all Christians. That moral compass includes the commandments of love and forgiveness that Jesus preached. Or to put it another way, we could just ask, ‘What would Jesus do?’

That’s how the chaplain will be starting with Mick Philpott. That’s how we should start, every day.

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