Archives for posts with tag: Jesus
« Older Entries

The Morning After

By hughdbryant
April 21, 2024 //
0

Sermon for Morning Prayer on 21st April 2024, Fourth Sunday of Easter

Acts 4:5-12, 1 John 3:16-24

https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=580609123

I want you to think about the morning after the morning after the morning after the night before. Or possibly, the morning after that.

Think of something that has happened, something that you’ve been involved in, that was really a big deal. Something that really made a difference.

Maybe it was the day you got married, if you did. Or the day when you won an Olympic gold medal. Or the day when something really momentous happened in the world outside. Perhaps you can even remember Armistice Day, or perhaps more likely, the day after the Brexit referendum. In all those cases, things changed; things changed really radically for ever. Nothing would be the same again. In our Bible lessons today the context is another of those enormous events as we enter into the world of the very first Christians, in the first, the earliest, churches.

The momentous event was of course Easter, Jesus’ resurrection. They had either experienced meeting the risen Christ themselves or they had met people who had. That’s one reason why I always find it very exciting to read the Acts of the Apostles, written by St Luke, as book 2 of his gospel, in effect; and St Luke was certainly around at the earliest time even if he didn’t actually meet Jesus. St Paul describes him as the ‘beloved physician’ and there are certainly moments in the Acts of the Apostles, describing St Paul’s journeys, where the third-party narrative, ‘they’ did this, ‘they’ did that, turns to ‘we’ did it, so we can infer that Luke was there.

So it is a very immediate, personal account of what it was like to be an early Christian. And so we are seeing the Easter people, the first Easter people, picking up their lives and carrying on after the amazing events of Easter. And we hear that they ‘met constantly to hear the apostles teach, and to share the common life, to break bread and to pray. A sense of awe was everywhere and many marvels and signs were brought about through the apostles’. They held everything in common, as we heard in one of the lessons a couple of weeks ago.

And then the part which we heard read today: Peter and John had healed a man who had been crippled from birth, who was begging at the gate of the temple. Peter said, ‘I have no silver or gold; but what I have I give you; in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, walk!’ And the man who had been crippled from birth sprang up, stood on his feet and started to walk.

Needless to say it attracted a lot of attention, and Peter said this to the crowd: ‘Why stare at us as though we had made this man walk by some power or godliness of our own? The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of our fathers, has given the highest honour to his servant Jesus… And the name of Jesus, by awakening faith, has strengthened this man, whom you see and know, and his faith has made him completely well.’

The chief priests and the Sadducees, just as they had done with Jesus himself, took exception to this and considered it to be blasphemy. They arrested Peter and John and put them in prison. And the passage describes what happened when they were asked to explain themselves.

It’s very reminiscent of a similar episode when Jesus himself was tackled about healing somebody on the sabbath day. Again, to use a contemporary expression, the disciples pushed back against the criticism. What was wrong with healing somebody who was sick? You might be tempted to say, what does it matter who the doctor was? Just be grateful that the cure worked. But the high priests were concerned that Peter and John were giving credit to Jesus in a blasphemous way. But they insisted that it was Jesus who was the divine agent and it was the sick man’s faith in Jesus which had brought on his healing.

Let’s go back a minute to the question of the morning after the morning after the morning after the night before. Nothing was the same after Easter. Whom could you trust? There were so many people claiming that they were the true believers, that they had an inside track to understanding the story of Jesus.

So let’s look at the first letter of John, the first ‘Epistle General of John’ as the King James Bible puts the heading. It’s possible that the John who wrote the letter was the apostle, or certainly was the same person who wrote Saint John’s Gospel. Although he would have had to be pretty old, it’s not impossible. Some scholars do think that all three of them are the same individual.

Again we are in the world of the very early church, and it’s clear that in that world it was commonly expected that the end of the world was round the corner, and all the references to salvation and eternal life referred to a last judgement at the bar of heaven which was just about to happen. All the more reason, the early Christians felt, to be sure that you were a true believer, that you were one of the people who were truly saved, the elect.

And this is what the letter, John’s first letter, is all about. In one of my Bibles there’s a sub-heading describing the letter as a ‘recall to fundamentals’. It begins with these words: ‘It was there from the beginning; we have heard it; we have seen it with our own eyes; we looked upon it, and felt it with our own hands; and it is of this we tell. Our theme is the word of life. This life was made visible; we have heard it and bear our testimony; we here declare to you the eternal life which dwelt with the Father and was made visible to us.’ Do you remember the beginning of St John’s Gospel? ‘In the beginning was the word’. And it is all about love. The ‘word’ is Jesus, and Jesus is love; and the key to being saved is whether you are ‘in Christ’, which is a rather mysterious expression which is generally reckoned to mean whether Christ is in you.

In John’s First Letter there are a series of illustrations of what it means to be in Christ and to be in the light of Christ. ‘A man may say I am in the light; but if he hates his brother, he is still in the dark.’ Only the man who loves his brother dwells in the light. And then this great passage that we had read to us as the second lesson, contrasting two examples, one, the greatest example, that greater love hath no man…, And we ought to lay down our lives for one another, the supreme sacrifice; and the other, because we can’t be in a position to offer a supreme sacrifice every day, the everyday salvation, the everyday expression of love, which you will remember from the sentences before the traditional Holy Communion service, ‘Whoso hath this world’s good, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him?’ If a man has enough to live on, and yet, when he sees his brother in need, shuts up his heart against him, how can it be said that the divine love dwells in him? That’s how it works. God is love.

God is love; God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. If we are in Jesus, in the Son, we are in love, love is in us; and the test of that is how we show that love. Let us love our brothers and sisters, let us love our neighbours. If we are Easter people, if we are like those early Christians on the day after the day after the day of the great event, what difference does it make to us? Is it still buzzing in our minds? Does it still draw us irresistibly to do things that we didn’t do before? Let us pray that it does.

Amen.

Tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Categories Uncategorized

Politics for the Doubting

By hughdbryant
April 8, 2024 //
0

Sermon for the Morning Service at All Saints Church, Penarth

On 7th April 2024

Acts 4:32-35; John 20:19-31 https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=579426284

You hear that people who go to church describe themselves as Easter people. We are Easter people. I presume that means that, as Christians, our lives have been touched by the momentous events of Easter all those years ago. It has been made a huge difference to our lives and to the way that we carry on. The biggest thing about Easter – not really an elephant in the room, but something altogether bigger – is Jesus’ resurrection from the dead.

Jesus definitely died, and he died in a way which really doesn’t leave it open to anyone to say that he wasn’t really dead. If you die by crucifixion you are most definitely absolutely dead. He was then put in a tomb which was sealed with an enormous rock and put under guard by the chief priests and the Pharisees, who had been given permission to do so by Pilate because they said they were afraid that the Christians would steal his body. So I think we can be sure that he was definitely buried in a grave which would not be easy to get at.

And then on the third day, as we celebrated last Sunday, the stone had been rolled away, the grave was empty, and Jesus had somehow risen from the dead. He saw Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James and Joanna, and perhaps other women who had gone to the tomb to dress the body, who all went to tell the disciples. They were not believed initially. ‘The story appeared to them to be nonsense.’

Some versions of the gospel add that Peter took it on himself to rush back to the tomb, and he found it empty and realised what had happened. But the other disciples were sceptical until Jesus appeared to two people on the way to Emmaus and they brought the news back to the disciples. And then Jesus appeared to all of them in the way that we had described to us in Saint John’s Gospel just now. On the first day of the week; when the doors of the house were locked; somehow Jesus got in and stood among them, giving them a chance to touch him and realise that he wasn’t a ghost.

And Jesus stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you.’ That’s one thing that you will miss this morning. We only share the peace when we’re having holy communion. I’m afraid we’re not doing that today. But this is where sharing the peace comes from. It’s a way of reminding ourselves of that appearance among the disciples, appearance by the risen Lord, Jesus resurrected from the dead.

They saw and they believed. They didn’t know how he had been resurrected, but they had no doubt that he had been. And then along came Thomas, officially known as ‘Thomas the Twin’ but known almost universally afterwards as ‘Doubting Thomas’. Because Thomas just couldn’t believe that Jesus had risen from the dead. Then we have this really powerful story, which I think really appeals to lots of us – it certainly appeals to me – showing how Thomas came to believe, because he saw and touched Jesus, in a way which I think we can all understand. He almost stood for Everyman at that moment. He could be any of us.

And then Jesus said this marvellous thing. ‘Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.’ That means all of us. We haven’t seen Jesus. We haven’t touched him. But to a greater or lesser extent, we Christians all believe. We believe that he rose from the dead. That makes a huge difference.

If you accept that this is possible, that that happened, that there is a life after death, that is going to make a big difference to you. But it probably isn’t going to make as much difference as it did to the disciples who actually saw him and touched him. They didn’t have any doubt. They believed.

So what effect did it have on them? One effect, one major effect, was what we have heard described in our reading from the Acts of the Apostles, that ‘those who believed were of one heart and soul’ and ‘no one claimed private ownership of any possessions. There was not a needy person among them,’ for ‘as many as owned lands or houses sold them’ and brought the proceeds of what they sold to be put into the common fund.

It looks like an early form of communism: at which point some of you may start to fidget and mutter about not mixing politics and religion – but perhaps another way of looking at it is to compare this passage with some of the Sermon on the Mount: that Jesus seems to have been talking in a utopian way, not a practical way. Turning the other cheek; not going for an eye for an eye but loving your enemies: just not practical, you might say. Just as you might well say that although a form of communism looks to be ideal, our experience in the last 2000 years has told us that it’s just not practical.

Perhaps meeting Jesus risen from the dead had made the disciples feel that they could do anything, that they could ignore practicalities and just go for whatever was the best and most ideal thing. What do we, 2000 years later, we who have not seen and yet have come to believe, are we able to do idealistic things? Maybe looking again at Thomas we might have to admit that although we do believe, perhaps our belief is not as strong as Thomas’ became – once he had touched the Lord.

Maybe we do still have a few doubts, and therefore to some extent in our lives we still play safe. So although living in a commune and sharing everything sounds great in some ways, we are cautious about throwing caution to the winds and selling up. But there is something there. There is definitely something which we could say. In the context of the extreme difference between rich and poor that the neoliberalism of the last 40 years or so, has produced, the emphasis on individualism, that everyone has the seeds of their own success in them, all you have to do is to get on your bike, as one of the politicians said at the time, all that is beginning to ring rather hollow, because just like the commune which the apostles operated, it doesn’t really work. It doesn’t make us love our neighbours or, increasingly, love God.

So now in this Easter season, when we are Easter people, let’s think hard about what that really means and whether we can say, ‘Lord I believe; help thou mine unbelief’[Mark 9:24]. That still means we believe, and it still means we can do something to show that we believe. Tomorrow it will be the Festival of the Annunciation, the angel announcing to Mary that she will be the mother of the son of God. The Bible lesson will be the Magnificat, which is arguably one of the greatest revolutionary texts in all of literature.

’He hath put down the mighty from their seat:

and hath exalted the humble and meek.

He hath filled the hungry with good things:

and the rich he hath sent empty away.’ [Luke 1]

Maybe Thomas was on to something. No doubt about it.

Tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Categories Uncategorized

The Fall and the Freebie

By hughdbryant
February 19, 2024 //
0

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 Answer, ‘Because I told you not to.’

‘ Why not?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You adjust something so that it fits. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Categories Uncategorized

Will it ever End?

By hughdbryant
November 25, 2023 //
0

Bible readings: https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=567221767

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Categories Uncategorized

An Eye for an Eye

By hughdbryant
November 5, 2023 //
0

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

By Hugh Bryant

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Categories Uncategorized

The Lawfulness of Love

By hughdbryant
October 16, 2023 //
0

Sermon at Evensong on 15th October 2023 at All Saints Church, Penarth

Bible readings referred to:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But the world stands by. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let it be so: Lord, hear our prayer.

Tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Categories Uncategorized

Captain Slow

By hughdbryant
October 3, 2023 //
1

Sermon for Mattins (Morning Prayer) on 3rd October 2023 at All Saints Church, Penarth

Readings: https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=563256396

https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=563256396

It occurred to me that you might be a bit fed up if I spent the next 10 minutes talking about the Last Supper, Jesus shocking the disciples and forecasting that one of them was going to betray him, but then going on to celebrate very first Holy Communion. I think it will be a bit of an anticlimax to hear a sermon all about that and then not to receive communion, but as you know, we are not doing a holy communion service this morning.

If we look at our other lesson, the reading is from the prophet Ezekiel who was writing from exile in Babylon, making a prophecy about the circumstances under which God’s chosen people the Israelites would return to Jerusalem. Our reading comes after a few lines in which Ezekiel mentions that the existing people, who are currently in Jerusalem, have suggested that the Israelites should go away and find somewhere else. It resonates; it’s sad, even today.

It does have the well-known lines about the Lord promising to the Israelites that when they come to Jerusalem he will give them ‘one heart and put a new spirit within them’; he will remove the ‘heart of stone’ from them and give them a ‘heart of flesh’ so that they may ‘follow God’s statutes and keep his ordinances, and obey them’, so that ‘they shall be his people and he will be their God.’

In one sense the whole of the Old Testament is all about the history of Israel’s being obedient and then disobedient to the Lord their God and all the various consequences thereof. Again, I think it doesn’t really fit for me to go into that in more detail this morning. We would need a learned seminar at least.

So if I’m not going to spend a lot of time on our lessons – I hope that you will forgive me for so doing – what do I want to dwell on? Perhaps it’s not strictly true, that I am completely ignoring our readings, because I saw something in the passage from Ezekiel, which sparked a thought within me, which I hope will be worth our pursuing together. That is that after Ezekiel has finished his prophecy, we are told that the cherubim lifted up their wings ‘with the wheels beside them.’

If you go to the beginning of the book of Ezekiel, in the first chapter, he says that he was among the exiles by the River Chebar, and the heavens were opened, and he saw visions of God. He saw extraordinary visions of four living creatures, the cherubim, with four wings, and four different faces each; and there were wheels.

It was sometimes described as the vision of the chariot. ‘When they moved, [the wheels] moved in any of the four directions without veering’. Perhaps the mechanical engineers in our congregation will be able to confirm that this is, perhaps, one of the earliest references to Ackermann steering that we’ve come across in literature.

But anyway, there is something on wheels; and that’s what piqued me, because in among all the other things we have to deal with at the moment in our lives, there are a lot of people exercised about something on wheels, namely, the 20 mile an hour speed limit.

Now, I want you to be immediately reassured; I am not about to turn into Jeremy Clarkson, or side vehemently with one or other of the parties in the Senedd, on this issue: but it did seem to me that it was a good opportunity for us to discuss how we put our faith into practical effect in today’s world.

Is there a Christian way to look at the 20 mile an hour speed limit? I suppose the key to all this, if we are Christians, is to ask, what would Jesus do? If Jesus was around today, how would he approach the 20 mile an hour speed limit? What is the Christian approach to it?

This is a bit like when I was studying Latin and Greek at school and university and we had to do prose composition; you might be given the Times editorial from a couple of days earlier and asked to put it into the Latin of Tacitus or the Greek of Demosthenes. Our teachers delighted in finding modern passages with things that didn’t exist in classical antiquity, such as trains and aeroplanes. What is the Ancient Greek equivalent of Concorde?

It’s just the same problem that we have in this case, wondering what Jesus would have done about the 20 mile an hour limit. What sort of car would Jesus be driving? So far as I know, the only form of locomotion which Jesus used was a variety of ponies, starting with Shanks’ and extending to the famous ass on Palm Sunday.

Presumably there were horses and carts, but the only ones that we hear about in the Bible are chariots, predominantly in a warlike context. In Psalm 20, for instance, ‘…some trust in chariots, some in horses, but we will make mention of the name of the Lord our God.’

But I don’t think that a chariot is really a parallel with a motor car today, or even with an SUV, come to think of it. If that was the case, Jesus would have been rumbling about in a tank or an armoured fighting vehicle. I certainly don’t think that I see Jesus riding on a Challenger II on his way into Jerusalem. No, it looks as though Jesus was much more often travelling at 4 mph, walking pace, or alternatively, at maybe 5 knots in a fishing boat on the sea of Galilee.

So what is the underlying message, which we could draw a parallel with, over the gap of 2000 years? I would like to suggest that it is a message about slowing down, that whatever form of locomotion we are using, whether it is on foot or in a car, or in a chariot or on a train, or in a boat, the message of the 20 mph zone is to slow down, and moreover, to slow down for reasons given which have to do with care for our environment and so as to avoid harm to our neighbours, by not running them over.

I think that when we consider God’s creatures and caring for them, slowing down will be good for all creatures, not only cutting down the number of people knocked down on the road, but it will also be good for animals; cats and squirrels, for example.

Do you think that Jesus would go along with this sort of reasoning? I wonder if, by contrast, there were actually any experiences that Jesus would have had, which would have given him a taste for speed. On the water, the only thing I can think of again points to slowing down, when he stilled the storm, so force 10, 70 mph, winds dropped to a pleasant breeze.

As you can see, I am beginning to think that Jesus is coming out as Captain Slow, but maybe there are other factors that I haven’t taken into account. Maybe there is such a thing as Captain Too Slow. What do you think Jesus would have done? Let us dwell on that with a little prayer, every time we set our speed limiter to 20 in the car.

Amen.

Hugh Bryant

Tags , , , , , , , , , , ,
Categories Uncategorized

Talking to the Archbishop

By hughdbryant
September 7, 2023 //
0

Sermon for Mattins on 3rd Sept 2023 at All Saints Church, Penarth

Romans 12:9-21

Matthew 16:21-28

https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=560606098

What does it mean to be a Christian? Is it one of those organisations that have a rule book or a constitution which you have to keep to if you are going to be a member? Some people say that they think that what’s really valuable about Christianity is that it provides a moral compass that people can live by, especially today, when even in public life people do things and say things that perhaps in the past we wouldn’t have thought possible.

I won’t try to trace that pattern through recent history, in case I say something wrong about one of your heroes; but I think one could mention in passing things like former President Trump continuing to repeat a patently untrue story about having won the last election, for example: and I think it would be fair enough to have in mind some of the things that former prime ministers of recent years have said as well, as being ‘economical with the actualité’, as somebody once described it. You hear people say, ‘Things are going to the dogs’: ‘The policeman are getting smaller’: ‘Nobody knows the difference between right and wrong any more’.

So it’s interesting to come across what almost looks like a rule book for being a Christian, in what St Paul wrote to the Christians in Rome. ‘Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good’. ‘Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers.’ It reminds us of Jesus’s own Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5). St Paul says do not repay anyone evil for evil, for example. Live in harmony with one another – and in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says don’t just go tit for tat, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, but turn the other cheek; if someone wants your shirt, give him your coat as well. If a ‘man in authority’ makes you go one mile, go with him two. Give when you are asked to give and don’t turn your back on someone who asks for a loan. Jesus and Paul are pretty similar. This is the moral philosophy of Jesus Christ. Saint Paul, writing to the Romans, was probably writing before any of the gospels were written down, so it’s pretty clear that what he was saying reflected what all the early Christians held to by way of their moral beliefs.

I was thinking about that when I started listening to one of those radio programmes where the Archbishop of Canterbury interviews various people. I don’t know whether you’ve come across them, on BBC Radio 4, but I heartily recommend them. They are absolutely fascinating. The interviews are with a very wide variety of people. I think it’s true to say that most of them are top people, leaders, in one way or another, but they’re not necessarily people who would immediately spring to mind as wanting to have a public chat with the Archbishop of Canterbury.

A person like that was a lady called Dr Susan Blackmore, whom I’m sure some of you will know far better than I do: she was certainly a new one on me. It turns out that she is a ‘psychologist who is interested in the paranormal and matters spiritual’, according to the BBC, and who is keen on ‘Zen meditation’.

A lot of the people that Archbishop Justin interviews are not actually believers but are atheists, and Dr Blackmore is one like that. What struck me was that she and Justin Welby both seemed largely to believe in the same moral principles: they would both, I think, have recognised the same things as being good and bad; and if you took the labels off I think that Dr Blackmore would have been quite happy with most of the moral ideas outlined by Saint Paul – and indeed, by Jesus himself. She certainly believes that mankind is capable of altruism, going the extra mile and so on, being generous to strangers, and also, to some extent, in being ultimately generous: ‘greater love hath no man’ and all that, sacrificing oneself for your friend.

Then a very interesting moment in the conversation happened. These two people, who appeared to be identikit decent middle-class English people, with plenty of goodwill towards their fellow men and women, suddenly came to something which clearly stopped both of them in their tracks.

That was this: Dr Blackmore asked the Archbishop, “Hey, look: what would happen if it turned out that you discovered that there was good scientific evidence that the resurrection of Jesus Christ never happened, and that Jesus had died just like any one of us – and stayed dead?” Clearly Dr Blackmore expected him to say that it wouldn’t matter too much; that he had a ‘belief in the round’ and that he would still be a Christian even if it turned out that Jesus was just another bloke, perhaps a prophet, as Muslims believe.

But Archbishop Justin didn’t say that. He said, “Well, if Jesus wasn’t resurrected from the dead, it would be over. All my Christianity would be washed up instantly.” He said that it might be possible, perhaps, that he would revert to a kind of agnostic position about whether there was a God, in the sense of an ultimate creator, but he was quite clear that, just like St Paul, he believes that the whole thing depends on the resurrection of Jesus. In his first letter to the Corinthians Paul says, “If Christ was not raised, then our gospel is null and void” (1 Cor. 15:14).

It isn’t the case that Christians believe in a sort of generalised creator, a creative force, some kind of ill-defined spiritual positive force, what William Paley in the 17th century referred to as the divine watchmaker: a creator, who, sure enough, created the world and everything in it, and just like a watchmaker he had made the mechanism and set it off, and away it went without any further interference from him. That’s not Christianity.

Christianity is about Christ; and that crunch moment is what we see in the story from Saint Matthew’s Gospel, with Saint Peter trying to talk Jesus out of going to suffer and die in Jerusalem. Jesus knew what was waiting for him, and he told the disciples about it. Peter reacted as I think any of us might have reacted if we’d been there. He didn’t want to see this good man, who’d taught him so much and had shown him so many wonderful things, hurt in any way.

But he didn’t get it. Peter acknowledged Jesus as his Messiah, as his heavenly king come on Earth. But he didn’t really know how that worked. He probably had a picture in mind of something more like an earthly king, a King David or a Roman emperor in triumph; and of course, Jesus turned everything upside down, as he always did. The triumph was a triumph over suffering. He had to suffer first, before his triumph, because he wasn’t a king who was above all suffering, but was rather a king who was at the heart of everything, suffering what his people suffered – and worse.

It might be interesting at that point just to look back to the differences between how St Paul saw morality as it affects Christians – and how Jesus himself did ; and to compare it with somebody like Dr Blackmore the psychologist, who denied that there was any such thing as free will, but seemed to be able to recognise good and evil nevertheless. She certainly didn’t acknowledge that there was a God, or that Jesus was in any way divine. I think that, although she didn’t actually say so, she didn’t believe in the resurrection.

But if you say that you don’t believe that people can choose what they do freely, because you’re determined, pre-programmed, so you are fixed by your evolution, your genes and your experience, then is there any real meaning to good and evil? Dr Blackmore is left looking down an empty hole. On the other hand Saint Paul can say, “Hold fast to what is good”, because he can point to what Jesus has said, and through Jesus, in Jesus, Saint Paul recognised ultimate reality, a justification for everything.

Justin Welby said that when he was 19, in his second year at university, a friend had taken him to church and then on to supper, during which the friend had been telling him about the cross and the resurrection of Jesus, and the Archbishop said there was suddenly a ‘sense of presence’ in the room. “I’m not sure how to explain that,” he said, and his friend had apparently said, “What do you want to do now?” The Archbishop had said, “Whatever it is, it is good – and I need to cooperate with it”.

It’s perhaps a bit like John Wesley, walking down Aldersgate Street to a Bible study meeting, to study one of St Paul’s letters, and he said he was feeling a little bit reluctant, perhaps because he had done too much Bible study that day, and then all of a sudden he ‘felt his heart strangely warmed’. He had a strong feeling that Jesus, God, was there and that He did care, personally, for him.

Dr Blackmore by contrast, when she was 19, had one of those out of body experiences – although she did say she was smoking cannabis at the time – but apparently she experienced a very real feeling of going down a tunnel with a light at the end, which is an experience which quite a number of other people have testified to, but which doesn’t necessarily lead you to believe in God.

So what is it that makes you a Christian as opposed to someone who does Zen meditation? The difference is Jesus. The difference is the unique history of Jesus. After this we will say the creed – we’ll say, “I believe”- and there is nothing like it. Maybe there are some bits that you find difficult to understand or even to believe. But taken as a whole it is like the constitutional document for being a Christian.

I believe. I believe in God the father Almighty. I believe in Jesus Christ, who was crucified, died and was buried. On the third day he rose again. There is nothing like it. Frankly we wouldn’t be here, and there wouldn’t be people in church all round the world, if that was some kind of illusion, if it hadn’t happened.

As the Archbishop himself said, there are today about 85 million Anglicans, let alone the other denominations, Roman Catholics, Baptists, Methodists, Lutherans, Pentecostals, Orthodox, and although in Western Europe and in the northern hemisphere generally, fewer people are coming to Christ, in the world as a whole Christianity it’s still far and away the biggest and fastest-growing religion.

Christ is coming to more and more people. More and more people are being confronted by this amazing story and realising that they can’t make sense of their lives without in some meaningful way coming to terms with it. And they realise that coming to terms with it isn’t necessarily a picnic.

As Jesus himself said, ‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me’. It’s not a prosperity gospel. It can be tough, but once you’ve confronted it – once it’s confronted you – then your life is changed forever. If you do the things that St Paul recommends, your love will be genuine, you will rejoice in hope, you will be patient in your suffering; and, so far as it depends on you, if it is possible, (because Paul is a realist), you will live ‘peaceably’ with all.

That’s a perfect context for this service. What we are doing is celebrating, praising, the God who came to us in the form of a man, went through terrible suffering, died, in the most horrible and undeniable way, and then, on the third day, he rose again. So today we must give him our praise; and we must show our love, love for God and love for each other.

Tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Categories Uncategorized

GWR

By hughdbryant
August 1, 2023 //
0

Sermon for Parish Eucharist on the 8th Sunday after Trinity, 30th July 2023 at All Saints, Penarth

1 Kings 3:5-12

Romans 8:26-39

Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=557551823

‘Can I have a second-class single off-peak with a Senior Railcard to the kingdom of heaven?’ A second-class single off-peak with a Senior Railcard to the kingdom of heaven. That’s what I said to the man in the booking office here in Penarth. 

‘I beg your pardon?’ he said.

Now the fact that he was a bit stumped is, I should hasten to add, not a reflection on how useful it is to have a booking office at the station, as I am sure you will know very well from listening to Mick Lynch. But if we’re on this journey to the kingdom of heaven, where is it? What sort of a place is it? 

The first thing to say is that it’s a kingdom. We’re in the United Kingdom here in Wales. I think that I am risking having some of you shoot me on the way out if I add to my Mick Lynch reference with any ‘Yes Cymru’ allusions, so I won’t. 

But is the set-up in the kingdom of heaven like that of the United Kingdom? We can look at the story of the beginning of King Solomon’s reign over the people of Israel; it may not exactly be the kingdom of heaven, but surely it might give us some pointers. Solomon chose wisdom rather than long life or riches. No big increases in the civil list for King Solomon! 

But in one important respect he was similar to our king, and that is that actually, King Solomon wasn’t the top man. King Solomon got his authority and his power from God; our king, our Monarch, gets his power from the people. He is a constitutional monarch. In these senses, neither he nor King Solomon are absolute monarchs. In both cases they look to a higher authority. But in the kingdom of heaven, the king is the king. The king is God.

Remember that originally, in the story of Israel, the prophet Samuel was pestered by the leaders of Israel to appoint for them a king. Initially he was very reluctant to do so because he thought that a king would exploit his people in all sorts of ways. 

So Solomon was a pleasant surprise, as he chose wisdom over riches, although as you will no doubt remember he wasn’t perfect; he was what used to be called a ‘ladies’ man’, having at the last count 700 wives. They are supposed to have distracted him a bit from the duties of government, somewhat unsurprisingly.

So I think we can infer that the place we are going to is run by a good king, somebody who has all the wisdom of Solomon, without his bad side. That makes sense, because we understand God to be all-powerful and all-knowing.

But have we got the right ticket? Are we going to be on the right train? Will we get to this marvellous place? It looks from Saint Paul’s letter that perhaps the train to the kingdom of heaven is something like the Orient Express, very exclusive – although of course, if it starts from Cardiff Central, it will run on the GWR, God’s Wonderful Railway.

But look what St Paul says. ‘For those whom he foreknew he also predestined… [T]hose whom he predestined he also called’. You need to be ‘predestined’. So it looks a bit as though not everybody can ride on this train. It isn’t really up to you whether you can book that kind of ticket. So is that really the case, that unless you are somehow given a golden ticket, you can’t get on the train? Is that what it means to be predestined, to be called? 

No. I don’t think it is. St Paul says, ‘We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.’ God’s covenant, God’s agreement with his people the Israelites, is based on their love for him; to love God and love your neighbour. If you love God and follow his commandments, then, St Paul says, God will choose you; you can get on the train. And it will indeed be a very special ticket. ‘If God is for us, who is against us?’ 

And who is going to decide whether God is for us and whether we will get a ticket? That is what Jesus does. St Paul says that Jesus intercedes for us, that He speaks up for us. ‘And who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or the sword?’ 

Then we will have this wonderful, blessed assurance that we are on the train. ‘I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord’.

I may have tried to buy a second-class ticket with a senior Railcard, but it looks as though actually I am in an all-first-class Pullman, on the up main line to heaven. And what’s the station for the heavenly destination like? Is it one of Brunel’s temples of steam, Paddington or Bristol Temple Meads perhaps? Or Santa Maria Novella in Florence or Zürich Hauptbahnhof or the Gare du Nord in Paris? Perhaps I’m not on a Pullman, in fact, but on the Train Bleu, headed by Pacific 231, speeding towards the Côte D’Azur. Whatever – but for sure, we are approaching a divine destination.

But you have to realise that God’s Wonderful Railway came a little bit later than Jesus; and during the time of Jesus, He wasn’t into locomotion in the way that some of us like me are today. 

When Jesus was describing what your destination would be, He offered other sorts of images, comparing it with a market garden with a mighty mustard seed, or yeast in a loaf of bread or a trader on the Silk Route dealing in pearls, or on a deep sea trawler, with a hint that in the Kingdom of Heaven only the best fish would get on to the overnight train to Billingsgate. 

Now it is just about possible that one or two of you might not immediately picture this wonderful railway, and it is possible that you might see heaven without steam locomotives or even Trains à Grand Vitesse; and I think that you will all have rumbled the fact that, just like the man in the booking office, I can’t say exactly where the kingdom of heaven is to be found, at least in the sense of pinpointing it on Google Maps or finding it in Bradshaw.

That’s true: but Graham Kendrick, the great hymn writer today, has written a hymn, or perhaps it’s more properly called a worship song, which could give you another clue. It’s called ‘Heaven is in my Heart’. One thing is for sure. 

That is that when you do get there, nothing will separate you from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.  

Tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Categories Uncategorized

Toy Soldiers

By hughdbryant
March 13, 2023 //
0

Sermon for Evensong on the third Sunday of Lent, 12 March 2023, at Saint Peter’s, Old Cogan

https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=545542568‘

Put on the whole armour of God…; the breastplate of righteousness…; the shield of faith…; the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit.’

My favourite toy shop – yes, my favourite toy shop – isn’t Hamleys in Regent Street but it’s in Zürich and in a number of other places in Switzerland under the name Franz Carl Weber. It’s a very old shop; it’s been going since 1881. It is a truly wonderful toy shop. 

The top floor is very well stocked with model railways at one end and dolls at the other end, so there is no sexist hierarchy. Then on the floors going down, are pedal cars and bikes, dressing up clothes, board games and construction toys: there is Lego and Playmobil but, alas, no more Meccano. There’s absolutely everything for kids in there and indeed there is quite a lot for their grandpas to enjoy as well. 

But there is one small category of stuff that Franz Carl Weber does not stock. I wonder if you can imagine what it is. Well, the answer is that Franz Carl Weber, the best toy shop in the world, I think, does not stock anything to do with war or weapons. There isn’t even a spud gun to be had in there. No toy soldiers; no World of Warfare games, no Airfix kits of warplanes; nothing to do with war or weapons. 

I’ll come back to the toy shop without any toy soldiers in a minute. But I just want to look at something else we haven’t got at the moment, which is any hymns today. Sometimes that’s quite a good thing; because it’s rather like listening to the radio – you know, ‘the pictures are much better on the radio’ than on the TV – because they are in your head. That goes for other things that you can hear in your mind’s ear, if I can put it that way. So what would be our hymn?  I would suggest the one that immediately springs to mind is a great one of Charles Wesley’s, 

Soldiers of Christ arise, 

and put your armour on. 

Strong in the strength which God supplies 

through his eternal Son. 

…

Stand then in his great might, 

with all his strength endued, 

but take to arm you for the fight 

the panoply of God.

The panoply, the complete kit of weapons, the suit of armour; for this is a hymn based on our reading from Saint Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. And it’s a rousing hymn: that I certainly remember being very popular with us when I was at school.

And in one sense, what’s not to like? Either about our lesson, or about Charles Wesley’s poetic rendering of it? Stand up to evil; be armour-plated in your resistance, use the best weapons you have, to stand up for the good guys. It’s pretty topical, in the context of the Ukraine. There’s lots in the newspapers, on the TV and on the radio, comparing the weapons used by the Russians with those supplied to the Ukrainians by the Western nations. 

There’s something quite celebratory about the respective descriptions of the Russian and western tanks that we and some of the other European nations – and, indeed, the United States – will be sending – in fact I think that we are already sending, for the Ukrainians to use. 

There has been quite a lot of learned discussion about the relative merits of the Western weapons as against the weapons used by the Russian invaders. I am sure that most 15-year-old boys would be able to give you a detailed rundown of the respective specifications of the Russian T90 as against the Challenger 2 or the Leopard 2 tanks, or the Abrams.

You know, I used to rather like playing with toy soldiers and those Britain’s model field guns which shot out a sliver of lead as a shell. My friend John DeVille, when we were eight or nine, had the most marvellous model 18 inch ‘naval howitzer’ which reproduced all the main things that a real field gun did. You could lay the barrel at the right elevation and tracking; the shells were little masterpieces of brass with a spring inside them and the lead projectile which you put in the breach and then fired, then ejecting the casing. The whole thing was about eight or 9 inches long and it went with our toy soldiers, which were predominantly lead or die-cast, painted in enamel and colourful in their fine uniforms. 

But there was a problem. The problem was, what to do if there was a battle. Then you would actually shoot your wonderful naval howitzer or model 25-pounder at the army which you had lined up against them. But I didn’t want to break any of my soldiers and I didn’t want to damage the opposition’s half-track truck that I was very proud of. So this was a war without casualties. 

And after a bit it began to dawn on me that there is no such thing, that those beautiful soldiers would get smashed up. Some of them would lose arms and legs – and heads. Some of them would not get up again. 

And I want to suggest to you, in all humility, that St Paul may have been a bit up the pole here, in this famous passage from his letter to the Ephesians. In celebrating weapons of war, even when they are used in a good cause, he is missing what Jesus himself said. ‘Love your enemies. Turn the other cheek.’ 

Oh, but surely, you will say, Saint Paul is being a realist. The way of love is just not practical, and you do need the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation and the sword of the spirit; and indeed you may say that this is exactly in line with the Old Testament as well. 

Look at our lesson from the book of Joshua, where God says to Joshua, 

‘There shall not any man be able to stand before thee all the days of thy life: …Be strong and of a good courage: ..Only be thou strong and very courageous, … that thou mayest prosper whithersoever thou goest.’

And you will remember that this led on, once the Israelites had crossed over the Jordan, to their encounter with the Amalekites where, rather surprisingly, God took them to task for having shown mercy to the people whom they defeated. 

But the thing that perhaps St Paul didn’t really get, but which Franz Carl Weber, when he set up his toy shop in 1881, did understand, is the point about my not wanting any of my toy soldiers to be broken. Mr Weber realised that you can’t have a war without breaking soldiers; that the use of weapons does not bring about victory, but it is, rather, a sign of failure. 

Paul paints a picture which looks like a Roman centurion in his armour, and perhaps, as he was the ‘ambassador in chains’ imprisoned in Rome when he wrote the letter, he might have seen a victorious general coming back from a campaign and being granted what was called a triumph, leading the people whom he had conquered, their kings and generals, in chains through the streets of Rome. His centurions would be in their best uniform.

But war never really leads to triumph. Away from the soldiers marching in their dress uniforms there are the broken ones, maimed and dead on the battlefield. And at this time, when we are now confronting again the feeling that we have to wage war, in order to defend civilisation against the attack of the Russians, we don’t know what victory should really look like. 

And at this time of Lent we have to realise that the conflict that Jesus entered into, in trying to bring about his kingdom of love, ended on the battlefield. Jesus was one of the fallen. 

But the other message of Lent points to the triumph, the real triumph, of Easter. Be of good cheer and I will support you. Do the right thing and I will support you, is God’s message to Joshua. The prophet Isaiah, (or perhaps more correctly the first of the three prophets writing under the name), had a vision of the kingdom in which they would ‘beat their swords into ploughshares, and they would not learn war any more.’ 

Then, on God’s holy mountain, the sword of truth will have more truth than sword; the breastplate of faith, more faith than breastplate, and the helmet of salvation, more salvation than helmet. Let it be so! Let us pray for peace and love in place of war. With that peace and love, we can have the ‘sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life’ which comes at Easter.

Tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Categories Uncategorized
« Older Entries