Archives for posts with tag: Jews

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 1 Corinthians 15, 10 Commandments, Adam, Ash Wednesday, Bible, Easter, Eve, faith, Freebie, Genesis, God, Jesus, Jews, Justification, Moses, New English Bible, Pentateuch, Resurrection, Romans, salvation, Sin, St Paul, The Fall, UNRWA

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The Lawfulness of Love

By hughdbryant

October 16, 2023 //

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 Archbishop Tutu, Balfour Declaration, Bible, Cain and Abel, Camp David Agreement, Christians, Church Times, Corinthians, EU, Far Aza, Gaza, God, Good Friday Agreement, Hamas, Israel, Jesus, Jews, Mark Regev, Mark Urban, Middle East, Moses, Nelson Mandela, New English Bible, Newsnight, Northern Ireland, Palestine, Paul Handley, Psalm 139, Psalm 22, settlements, South Africa, St John, St Paul, SternGang, truth and reconciliation, two state solution, united nations, West Bank, World Health Organisation, Yitzhak Shamir, Yom Kippur War, zionists

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Confectionary

By hughdbryant

November 20, 2022 //

Sermon for Evensong on 20th November 2022 at All Saints, Penarth: Christ the King

1 Samuel 8:4-20: John 18:33-37: Psalm 72. See https://tinyurl.com/ydmp6t26

This Sunday the church celebrates ‘Christ the King’.

Kings. God save the King! King’s Counsel: King Charles III – and now today, in the church, we are celebrating Christ the King. Actually, the church has only had a feast of Christ the King since 1925, when Pope Pius XI first made it a festival in the Roman Catholic Church; and in 1969, Pope Paul VI determined that the right time for the festival would be the last Sunday before Advent, at the end of the church year.

Now, never mind whether you are a Catholic or an Anglican or a Methodist or a Baptist, you will probably be using the same readings from the Bible this weekend for the various services in your church, and thinking about Christ the King. We Anglicans have something else, earlier than the feast of Christ the King, to celebrate at the same time. I’ll come back to it.

You might think that I was going to pick up on what Samuel has said in our Old Testament lesson about the the disadvantages of kings, of absolute monarchy. If you were reading it in the King James version, you would see that Samuel warns the Israelites that if they make somebody a king, among other bad things, he will “take your daughters to be confectionaries”. In the rather more down-to-earth version which we have been using, the confectionaries have become “perfumers”, but either way you wouldn’t want your daughter to become perfumers or confectionaries to the King. That sort of king has a distinct whiff of slavery about him.

Now today, I think if you read some of the newspapers, the ones that have a rather bigger section about the royal family than my beloved Guardian, there are quite often articles which speculate on what in the old days the Queen, and now the King, might be thinking about the various things that the government is getting up to. And perhaps people might start to think that a wise king would be preferable to yet another Prime Minister. But then we remember that we have a constitutional monarchy. For us the King is just a figurehead, even if he is an inspiring one.

But it’s interesting to look back at the argument about the pros and cons of being a king that was going on between Samuel and the elders of Israel. They said, ‘Give us a king to govern us’. And then there is this fascinating sentence, “Samuel prayed to the Lord, and the Lord said to Samuel, ‘Listen to the voice of the people and all that they say to you. For they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them.’’’ It’s God speaking – and He says that the people have rejected the idea that He, God, should be their ruler, their king.

The way that they thought about God in those days was that He was much more like a kind of Marvel comic superhero than what we think God is. Having the Lord on your side in those days was a huge advantage, for instance in a battle, and they didn’t seem to be worried about the thought that He might be much bigger than just a superhuman supporting one side against the other. So a king could even be God. God could be a king. It gives a historical background to the idea of the ‘divine right of kings’ – that the first King Charles claimed, for instance.

So it wouldn’t have seemed strange to the Israelites to hear that God had said that they had rejected him, God, from being their king over them. But it’s strange to us. We would think of God as being bigger than any king.

Now when Jesus is being questioned by Pontius Pilate, it’s perhaps a rather different kind of strangeness which we notice. Surely it is pretty strange to ask somebody whether they are a king. I think it’d be pretty hard to miss, certainly in normal circumstances. I mean, I am not assuming that people who were kings went around with crowns on their heads so you’d be able to recognise them as royals, but even so you would have thought that it would have been pretty obvious to Pontius Pilate whether Jesus was a king or not.

Indeed, Jesus does query this. ‘Was that a question that occurred to you or has somebody else suggested it?’ And Pilate, who always seems to me to be a pretty common-sense sort of person, says that he doesn’t really get it. He says, ‘Your own nation, the Jews and chief priests, have handed you over to me. It looks a bit of an unlikely thing to do to a king. So what have you done?’

Jesus replies that he’s not a temporal ruler, a ruler in this world, a political figure, in which case he says he would certainly have been able to call upon his followers to fight off the Jews, and keep him from being handed over to them. In the normal course of things if he was at risk of being seized by the Jews in some ignominious way, it wouldn’t sit very easily with the idea that he was, or might have been, the king of the Jews.

So you’ve got two angles on being a king. One in the Old Testament, and the other one from the time of Christ; but in neither case does the idea of what it was to be a king at that time really square with what we understand about kings.

In the Old Testament, a king could also be a God, or even God himself. Bear in mind that the Jews were unique in worshipping just one God, whereas most of the others, like the Egyptians or the Babylonians, worshipped lots of different gods. The Jews worshipped Yahweh as their God, just the one God.

We have learned that when a new king was consecrated in Egypt or Babylon, the priest would declare an oracle from one of the national gods over the new king, and what he would say was, ‘You are my son, I am your father.’ That’s the god speaking through the priest. So in Babylon and Egypt, they believed that being a king was even being the son of a god.

That is the same formula that the prophet Nathan used when he consecrated David as the king of the Jews. If you look at 2 Samuel 7:14, through the prophet Nathan, God says about King David, ‘I will be a father to him and he shall be a son to me’. So King David is expressed to be a son of God.

So that’s the background to what on the face of things is rather an odd conversation between Pontius Pilate and Jesus. Pontius Pilate, who is just a normal bloke in this, doesn’t understand that in the Jewish tradition, to be the king means much more than just being an earthly ruler.

In a sense, Pontius Pilate stands for all of us. He saw this remarkable man, who had no crown, no entourage, no motorcade, no trappings of majesty about him – rather the reverse – but nevertheless, he was being accused of holding himself out as being the king of the Jews.

What made it so serious was that to the Jews it would have meant Jesus was holding himself out as being the son of God. Since they didn’t recognise him, they thought that it was blasphemy. Everybody got it wrong. It’s another illustration of the way that Jesus was a king, but a king in an entirely different sense.

Think of the idea of the Servant King in Isaiah 52:13 – 53:12, picked up in St Mark’s gospel 10:45 where Jesus says that ‘the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve’, for example, and what Jesus said about the first becoming the last and the last becoming first (Matt. 20:16).

The more I think about this, the more I realise this is like so many other things that we learn about Jesus. In a sense, he was a king, but in other senses he was much more modest. I think we can learn from him on all sorts of levels as a result. God isn’t like superman. He doesn’t necessarily weigh in on one side or another. But equally he is not a normal king. He doesn’t have the trappings of office and he doesn’t rule in the sense that King Charles rules, or even like an actual absolute monarch – as King Zog of Yugoslavia did, perhaps.

Instead Jesus defined his kingship in relation to something he called the truth. ‘Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice’. And Pontius Pilate came up with the sort of thing that you might hear from Piers Morgan: ‘What is truth?’ It’s a good challenge.

That’s all very interesting, you might say. All that stuff about being a king. But at the beginning you did say that the Feast of Christ the King is a celebration. How are we supposed to go about celebrating? You get the answer in the first collect, the first prayer of the day, which Beth will say. It goes, “Stir up, we beseech thee, Lord, the wills of thy faithful people”. So today is not just Christ the King Sunday. It is sometimes called “Stir-up Sunday”. This is the day when you are supposed to start mixing the Christmas pudding. That is something to celebrate. I wonder, if you are stirring up a Christmas pudding, if it makes you what Samuel called a ‘confectionary’. Why not be a confectionary? A confectionary for King Jesus, indeed. Keep stirring!

Tags Babylon, Bible, Charles III, Church of England, divine right, Egypt, God, Jesus, Jews, king david, King Zog, monarchy, Pontius Pilate, Samuel

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Theophilus the Migrant

By hughdbryant

November 5, 2020 //

Sermon for 1030 Eucharist at St Mary, Oatlands on 21st October 2020

Acts 16:6-12; 2 Timothy 4:5-17; Luke 10:1-9 (http://bible.oremus.org/?ql=470148758)

On Sunday we were remembering Saint Luke, the ‘beloved physician’, as Saint Paul describes him in his second letter to Timothy, the one who wrote not only the Gospel according to Saint Luke but also the Acts of the Apostles, I want to carry on remembering St Luke this morning, looking at the same Bible passages as we used on Sunday.

Folli [Revd Folo Olokose] treated us to a theological masterclass in his sermon on Sunday. I don’t want to go over exactly the same ground again, but he did make some points which I will just briefly mention, particularly for anyone who was not there on Sunday.

Folli took, as the heart of his sermon, the name of the person to whom Saint Luke dedicates his two books, Theophilus. Who was Theophilus? Folli argued that it is a name for a type of person, not someone in particular – not who, but what. It literally means, ‘a friend of God’. It could mean any of us.

All the other things which might seem to make us different from each other, such as our education, our physical characteristics, or the ability to run a four-minute mile, are all things which can come and go, and might depend on where you have been born, who your parents were. However, being God’s friend is something which lasts forever, and which any of us can be.

So Folli argued that, in dedicating his books to Theophilus, Luke was in fact dedicating them to all of us, to all who love God. And we see from today’s lessons that Luke was a companion of Saint Paul on his travels. ‘We did this..’, rather than ‘they did it’, in the passage from Acts 16 which was one of the lessons prescribed for Sunday.

During the night Paul had a vision: there stood a man of Macedonia pleading with him and saying, ‘Come over to Macedonia and help us.’ When he had seen the vision, we immediately tried to cross over to Macedonia, being convinced that God had called us to proclaim the good news to them.

We set sail from Troas and took a straight course to Samothrace, the following day to Neapolis, and from there to Philippi, which is a leading city of the district of Macedonia and a Roman colony. We remained in this city for some days.’

Luke says, ‘We’. He was there, travelling with St Paul. In a wider sense, who are ‘we’ in this context? From Paul’s letter to the Romans, ‘… there is no distinction between Jew and Greek, because the same Lord is Lord of all…’ (Romans 10:12).

So in our lesson today, Luke reports on Jesus sending his disciples out ahead of him, to prepare people for him coming and preaching among them. Roughly the same report comes in St Matthew’s Gospel too.

You might note that Jesus instructs the apostles, ‘Do not move around from house to house’. I had a bit of an unholy thought – do you think our Lord might have had tier 2 or tier 3 in mind?

Of course they didn’t have a plague then. Sending them out they were a bit like Billy Graham’s people, arranging one of his crusades, securing the venues and booking the hotels – although Jesus stipulated that it should all be done on a shoestring – but what was the message that Jesus was going to preach?

The message wasn’t going to be about life after death. Jesus hadn’t died at this stage. Let’s look at the Gospels where Jesus sends out his disciples to do the Billy Graham thing, that is, our Gospel passage today from St Luke, chapter 10, where Jesus sends out 70 or 72 apostles, and St Matthew chapter 10, where he only sends out 12 apostles.

By the way, the word ‘apostle’ comes from the Greek verb αποστέλλω, which means ‘I send out’, so an αποστολος, the noun from it, means someone sent out, in the same sense that an ambassador is sent out.

The other difference is that in St Matthew’s account, Jesus wanted the apostles just to go to the ‘lost sheep of the house of Israel’, and not to go to the non-Jews, the Gentiles and Samaritans, whereas in St Luke’s gospel the only thing that mattered was whether they were welcomed or not.

Given that Luke and Paul were together for some time, and that actually Paul wrote his letters, like the letter to the Romans, before any of the Gospels were written, I’m inclined to say that Luke’s account is more likely. Paul’s idea that there was no difference between Jew and Greek, between Jews and non-Jews, Gentiles, seems to me to be more in line with what Jesus was teaching.

In St Luke’s Gospel, immediately after the 70 are sent out, we read the story of the Good Samaritan. The point is, it doesn’t matter what nationality he was. He cared for his neighbour, for the person he found hurt on the road. Surely Jesus wouldn’t have warned the apostles off having to do with Samaritans, if he was going to praise the Good Samaritan in his next breath, as He did.

Bear in mind that St Matthew’s Gospel is generally reckoned to have been aimed at a Jewish readership, whereas St Luke probably wasn’t a Jew and was writing for everyone – for ‘Theophilus’. And St Paul definitely had the same idea. No such thing as Jew and Greek.

One thing that these two accounts, in Matthew and Luke, do have in common is that the apostles were sent out just after Jesus preached his great Sermon on the Mount. You know, all those great challenges: love your enemies, turn the other cheek. Think of the lilies of the field: they neither spin nor weave: yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Don’t worry about material comforts. The Lord will provide.

Surely, you might say, the sermon on the Mount is great in theory, but not really doable. Impractical instructions. How literally can we take what Jesus said? Why would we have armies, if we really always turned the other cheek?

And according to St Luke, it was all for Theophilus. For anyone who loves God. No one has any special qualification to receive God’s blessing.

So if we are thinking about Jesus’ teaching as he sent out the apostles, and the idea that in God’s sight we are all equal, neither Jew not Greek, can I pose a question for you to think about?

My question is about refugees, about ‘migrants’. If we believe that it is true that all people, from any nationality, are equal in the sight of God, why should we be entitled to live in bounteous Surrey in England whereas a person from another country – Syria or Afghanistan or South Sudan, say – has to pass rigorous checks before they are let in? Why are they not equally entitled?

Is it because they will overwhelm our public facilities, schools, hospitals and so on? Is that true? They will be a drain on our economy, some people say. The statistics say that immigrants contribute 15% more in tax than people who were born here. Or, should we sift out the applications so that we only let in people with a certain minimum level of qualifications?

But just a minute. I wasn’t born in the UK only because I’d won an Oxford scholarship. What does ‘Theophilus’ mean? Are British people more entitled to salvation than, say, Ethiopians? In St Luke’s terms, both could be ‘Theophilus’.

What do you think? It might be a good idea to imagine that we could be like the people on the road to Emmaus, that we might suddenly meet Jesus. What would we say to Him? Would we justify to Jesus what we do, keeping poor immigrants out of ‘our’ country? Even if our country is supposed to be ‘full’, how would we, who have so much, justify drawing up the drawbridge against people who have so little?

I’m not telling you what to think. We have quite a few refugees who’ve come to this area, and we have a local charity to help refugees, Elmbridge CAN. Through them I’ve had refugees and, yes, ‘economic migrants’ staying for a few months in my own spare room. I felt that I was being called to help them. They are all now settled – productively. Should we be doing more of that sort of thing for refugees?

Well, I hope that is food for thought. Please do keep on thinking about St Luke and Theophilus. Theophilus. Everyone.

Tags Acts of the Apostles, apostles, Bible, Billy Graham, economic migrants, Elmbridge CAN, Emmaus, Folo Olokose, gentiles, gospels, Greeks, Israel, Jesus, Jews, luke, Macedonia, Oxford University, Philippi, physician, refugees, Roman colony, Romans, Samaritans, sermon on the mount, Solomon, St Paul, Surrey, Theophilus, Timothy

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Eight-Minute Sermon

By hughdbryant

June 14, 2020 //

When I first started to train as a Reader (the Diocese likes to call us ‘licensed lay ministers’), the vicar of St Andrew’s Cobham, where I was worshipping, said to me, when he asked me to do my first sermon, that it should be eight minutes long. Eight minutes is still the target, even now. Keep an eye on your watches, but I have to warn you, there may be more. Eight minutes, right?

Jesus said to the first 12 disciples, as he sent them out,

‘Go nowhere among the Gentiles and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. As you go, proclaim the good news, the kingdom of heaven has come near’. …

‘Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons. You received without payment; give without payment.’ (Matt. 10:5-8)

It’s practical stuff. The kingdom of heaven has come near. It isn’t a message about heaven in the sense of it being at the last judgement, after we die; this is the here and now. The kingdom of heaven is here, and what it implies is not particularly spiritual either. Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers.

Most of that today would equate to being an instruction to become a doctor or a nurse. ‘Curing the sick’ is just that – become a doctor or a nurse; ‘raising the dead’ looks totally miraculous, but today there are cases where people who have been given up for dead are actually revived and brought back to life through the exercise of expert medical knowledge. ‘Cleansing the lepers’. ‘Cleansing’ meant that by curing the leprosy you removed the disfigurement from the faces of people who had been sufferers. Their faces were clean, unblemished, again. And ‘casting out demons’ is what we would understand today as psychiatry.

The Holy Land then was a land under foreign occupation. I think that suggests a way we might understand this rather odd instruction that Jesus gives, about where the disciples should concentrate on going, going to the lost sheep of the house of Israel rather than to the Gentiles or the Samaritans.

That doesn’t sit very well with our understanding of Christianity. Christ was – is – Lord of all. He was God in human form, true God, the Almighty, the creator of all there is, seen and unseen, not just of the Jews.

I think the way to understand what Jesus said, seeming to favour the Jews, is simply that the Jews were the lost sheep because of the fact that they were under the oppressive rule of the Romans. ‘Gentiles’, which means ‘nations’, is a shorthand expression for the Romans, because lots of nations became Roman citizens. So Jesus wanted his disciples at least initially to concentrate on people who needed help, on the oppressed, not on their oppressors.

Oppressed people. I think it’s time to come clean, to let you into the secret, what that’s got to do with my trying to preach for eight minutes. Time’s nearly up. Eight minutes. Not yet for this sermon, actually.

It’s how long it took for that policeman to kill George Floyd. ‘I can’t breathe’, he said. And amazingly, other policemen, who were standing around, and even bystanders, who were filming the scene on their phones, just watched and did nothing: they let him die. They let him be killed. Nobody really thought of him as a human being. He was a black man, and as such, he wasn’t counted as being, really, human.

A great movement has sprung up in reaction to this terrible crime, to point out that it is the tip of an iceberg and that black lives matter. It is because Mr Floyd was black that he was treated as subhuman. What would Jesus do? His lost sheep of Israel, I’m pretty sure, would today include plenty of black people.

This part of Surrey isn’t a very racially mixed area. Our congregation today doesn’t seem to have any black faces in it. It ought to have. I can assure you that there are black people around, and the important thing is that they are just like us. They are human beings.

Down the road from Whiteley Village and Saint James’s in Weybridge is St Mary Oatlands, where there is a very wonderful vicar called Folli Olokose. He is a French national, born and brought up in Nigeria. He is a black man. At St Andrew’s in Cobham there is a deacon, shortly to become a curate, Dr Moni Babatunde; born in Nigeria and brought up in Wimbledon, living in Cobham for the last 20 years or so. A black lady. And it’s not just black vicars. There are many other black families living around us.

In a way, it’s not right to go into the question ‘where they came from’. It ought not to make any difference. The only reason I mention African or Indian or Caribbean heritage is simply to emphasise the fact that they are black people. They are not being treated equally. Dr Babatunde told me that when her son passed his driving test, she took him on one side and quietly gave him some advice on what to do if – when – he is stopped by the police. For eight minutes.

He is a talented young man who has just achieved first class honours in philosophy at Nottingham University and is now doing the law conversion course in order to become a solicitor. But even so his mother has had to warn him how to conduct himself so as not to get arrested. Because he is black.

So there it is. Eight minutes. Time to die. Time to live. Time for the kingdom of heaven to come near. But let’s do something about it.

Tags African, Black Lives Matter, black people, black vicars, Caribbean, first class honours, gentiles, George Floyd, God, Guildford diocese, I can’t breathe, Indian, Jesus, Jews, Nottingham University, oppressed, oppression, Philosophy, police, racism, racists, Romans, Samaritans, St James Weybridge, St Mary Oatlands, St Paul, Surrey, Whiteley Village

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Gnashers

By hughdbryant

November 16, 2019 //

Sermon for Evensong with the Prayer Book Society on Saturday 16th November 2019

Daniel 7:15-28; Revelation 9:13-21 – see http://bible.oremus.org/?ql=440816069

Earlier this week, some of us were here in this Founder’s Chapel at Charterhouse, also under the auspices of the PBS, for the competition to select candidates to go forward to the finals of the Cranmer Awards in February next year at the Bishop’s Palace in Worcester. Thanks to Revd Chris Hancock’s excellent organising efforts and Fr Tom Pote of Holy Trinity, Guildford encouraging four good students to enter, we had a very good selection of six candidates, four juniors and two seniors, who had to read passages from the Prayer Book and from the Authorised Version of the Bible, which in the final they have to memorise and deliver by heart.

Everybody did really well and we are putting forward from the Guildford Branch two very strong candidates. Competitors in the competition can choose the passages which they use, and because the competition aims to look for people who can bring out the richness of the language in the Prayer Book and the excitement of it, it’s a good idea to find passages which are in themselves dramatic and colourful. So, for example, the conversion of St Paul (Acts 9:1-19) was one passage used and another was the reluctant wedding guests, where one who turned up improperly dressed was cast out into the outer darkness where there is ‘weeping and gnashing of teeth’. (Matt. 22:1-14)

We all love the Prayer Book and the Authorised Version of the Bible for many things but especially for the spiky and memorable words. I don’t know how young I was when I first registered the idea of weeping and gnashing of teeth – possibly at the time when my milk teeth were falling out, the whole idea of gnashing them was even more exciting.

Today’s lessons are cases in point. They are fanciful, metaphorical, colourful evocations of things which no one could literally experience. Prof. John Barton, in his splendid book ‘A History of the Bible’, [J. Barton, 2019, A History of the Bible, London, Allen Lane, at p 369], has pointed out that the mythical animals which you meet in Daniel chapter 7 (just before the passage which was our lesson this afternoon), a lion with eagle’s wings, and a leopard with ‘wings of a fowl’ and four heads, are not animals which anyone could meet in a zoo.

Fr Etienne Charpentier, in his commentary on Daniel ch 7, [E. Charpentier, translated by John Bowden, 1982, How to Read the Old Testament, London, SCM Press, at pp 90-91] has observed that the second half of the Book of Daniel, from chapter 6 onwards, and the whole of the Revelation of Saint John the Divine at the end of the New Testament are what is known as apocalypses; uncoverings, literally, from the Greek ὰποκαλυπτειν, ‘taking the cover off’, literally; the Latin translation of that Greek word being ‘revelare,’ taking the veil off, revealing, so, Revelation.

We have come to use the word apocalypse to connote a catastrophic end, possibly the end of the world. But this is not the whole story. Certainly in the Bible, in Daniel and in the Book of Revelation, the intention is to give a glimpse into heaven, a glimpse of the Divine at work. But this glimpse is not in the sense of a learned work of history or a Panorama documentary, but rather a metaphor, a myth, a picture of something which we cannot see. Charpentier writes, ‘History is thought to unfold in a straight line, the end of which is hidden in God’s secret.’

Saint Paul, in 1 Corinthians 13, speaks of seeing through a glass, darkly [v12], and contrasts that with the clear vision which will come with the coming of the Kingdom. We are not intended to take these things literally. We shouldn’t have nightmares about lions with wings or a beast with iron teeth. Remember that Daniel is supposed to be having his dreams and encountering the powers of evil at the time of the Persian Kings Nebuchadnezzar, Cyrus and Darius, who cast him into the den of the lions, at the time of the exile in Babylon in the sixth century BC, whereas in fact he was writing about 165BC, at the time of the Maccabees, the great Jewish revolt against king Antiochus IV’s attempt to impose Greek religion on the Jews by force.

The historical context when these books were written is very interesting. It gives us a clue why we should still consider them as relevant to our life today. They were written at times of danger, strife, when people were worried about the future, threatened by external forces, not sure what the right thing to do should be, and in particular how to deal with earthly powers opposed to the ways of God.

Who are these four kings in Daniel, and who are the forces, a third of whom are wiped out in the vision in Revelation? They are mythical forces; but perhaps we can identify them down the ages with particular cases where faithful people have turned to the Bible for guidance and inspiration in their own times of trouble. As one scholar has written, ‘To uphold his people’s hope in dramatic times, God lifts the veil which hides the end, revealing the happy outcome to history as a result of God’s victory.’ This is the theology of apocalypse.

If we are looking for signs of the apocalypse today, you will not need me to add to the chorus of voices shouting the odds about our contemporary situation, with our general election, all the problems of the NHS, the need for food banks and the continuing consequences of the Brexit referendum. If we are looking for signs of an apocalypse, we might class the signs of climate change as ‘apocalyptic’ more than anything else.

What to do in the face of all this? The spiky words of the Prayer Book are very helpful. We pray the Collects; and as we use some of the wonderful prayers, ‘for all sorts and conditions of men’, the Book helps us to bring all those men – and women – before the Lord in humility. Let us reflect on how those apocalypses that we have read about, those revelations, visions of heaven, can tell us the true way to that place where true joys may be found.

In the words of the psalmist, in today’s psalms,

‘Defend the poor and fatherless: see that such as are in need and necessity have right.

Deliver the outcast and poor; save them from the hand of the ungodly.’ [Psalm 82] or

‘Blessed is the man whose strength is in thee: in whose heart are thy ways.

Who going through the vale of misery use it for a well: and the pools are filled with water.

They will go from strength to strength …’ [Psalm 84]

I wish you all a blessed Advent time, not too much Election or Brexit stuff, and a very happy Christmas. ‘O how amiable are thy dwellings: thou Lord of hosts!’

Tags Antiochus IV, apocalypse, authorised version, Book of Common Prayer, Brexit, Chris Hancock, Cranmer Awards, Cyrus, Daniel, Darius, dark glass, Etienne Charpentier, GE2019, Gnashing of teeth, Holy Trinity Guildford, Jews, John Barton, Maccabees, Matthew 22, Nebuchadnezzar, Prayer Book Society, Psalmist, revelation, St Paul, Tom Pote, Weeping

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Skipping like Rams

By hughdbryant

May 12, 2019 //

Sermon for Evensong on the 3rd Sunday after Easter, 12th May 2019

Psalm 114, In exitu Israel, Isaiah 63:7-14, Luke 24:36-49 – see http://bible.oremus.org/?ql=424470667

‘The mountains skipped like rams: and the little hills like young sheep’.

Today is a very sheepy day in the church. Lots of sheep. The Roman Catholics call it Good Shepherd Sunday – and we have followed their nice idea this morning here at St Mary’s.This morning in the Gospel of John, Jesus ticked off the Jews who were clamouring to know if he was the Messiah they were expecting; he ticked them off by saying that, even if he was, they wouldn’t realise: because they weren’t from his flock. He said, ‘But ye believe not, because ye are not of my sheep, ..…

My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me:

And I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish’. [John 10]

The other readings prescribed in the Lectionary this morning included the story of Noah’s Ark; ‘The animals went in two by two; the elephant and the kangaroo’. And the sheep, of course. And there is a piece from Revelation which is a vision of a great multitude standing before the throne of God and ‘before the Lamb’. Behold the Lamb of God.

And in other parts of the Bible there is the parable of the lost sheep, and Jesus’ rather enigmatic saying to Peter, when, in response to Peter’s three denials of Jesus earlier, he had asked Peter three times how much he loved him, and, after Peter had assured him he did, Jesus answered each time, ‘Feed my lambs’, or, ‘Tend my sheep’ [John 21:15-18]. And there is the vision of the Last Judgement in Matthew 25, with Jesus separating people into two groups, ‘as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats’.

Sheep are good and goats are bad, according to this. It reflects the Jewish idea of the scapegoat, sacramentally loading the sins of some people on to the back of some poor goat, which is then cut loose to roam in the desert till it dies of hunger and thirst.

I’m sure you can think of other sheep references. The idea of a sacrificial animal, a scapegoat, is a very old one in Judaism. Actually, of course, they seem to have mixed up sheep and goats quite a lot. The ‘lamb of God’, the sacrificial lamb, is effectively a scapegoat, a goat: the idea is that Jesus is that scapegoat, that, as we say, in the Prayer of Consecration in the Communion service (page 255 in your Prayer Books), he ‘made there (by his one oblation of himself once offered) a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction, for the sins of the whole world’.

The vision of the New Jerusalem which our Old Testament lesson from Isaiah shows, is in line with this.

‘Surely they are my people, children that will not lie: so he was their Saviour.

In all their affliction he was afflicted, and the angel of his presence saved them: in his love and in his pity he redeemed them; and he bare them, and carried them all the days of old’ (Isaiah 63.8-9).

Then the prophet recalls the story of the Exodus from Egypt. God must have been infinitely powerful, in order to part the waters of the Red Sea and let the Israelites pass through on dry land. It is the same thing that our Psalm, Psalm 114, celebrates. ‘When Israel came out of Egypt’. All these miraculous things happened. The sea ‘saw that, and fled’; ‘The mountains skipped like rams: and the little hills like young sheep’.

All this is meant to prepare us for the greatest miracle of all, Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. So when he appears to the disciples in Luke’s account, he stresses that what has happened to him is just as it was foretold by the Jewish prophets. The author of the Gospel, Luke, is usually taken to be a doctor – St Paul described him as (Col. 4:14), ‘the beloved physician’. He is a scientist; his Gospel tends to look for objective facts as well as metaphysical theology. So here, in this resurrection appearance, Jesus does a re-run of the Doubting Thomas story. See me, touch me, feel me. I am not a ‘spirit’, not a ghost.

And there’s this rather curious eating ‘broiled’ fish and, if you can believe it, ‘honeycomb’. You remember, the Gospel says, ‘And they gave him a piece of a broiled fish, and of an honeycomb. And he took it, and did eat before them.’ Now the ‘broil’ isn’t some American style of cooking, but just another word for being cooked. American English sometimes preserves much older English words than are now current in English English. The ‘honeycomb’, by the way, isn’t evidence of Jesus liking combinations of flavours which even Heston Blumenthal might find challenging – fish and honey sounds a disgusting combination – but rather it’s a rare example where the Authorised Version of the Bible has been led astray by what was presumably a corrupted manuscript. They translated as if it was μελου – ‘of honey’, as if it had had an ‘L’, instead of the better reading, μερου,’R’, ‘of a piece’, ‘of a piece of fish’. There’s just fish, no honey.

But still, he ate it. So let’s assume we can say that, astonishing as it was to see, it happened. But is it too contrary to ask, ‘So what?’ If we had been there, what would we have made of seeing Jesus brought back to life? Would we have picked up on the idea that he had offered himself as some kind of human sacrifice? And if he had, what was the purpose of the sacrifice?

If we follow the theology of Isaiah, the mechanism, how it works, is what is called ‘substitutionary atonement’. Greater love hath no man – and here Jesus is showing his love for us by accepting, or even bringing on himself, punishment which we, not he, deserved. He was offering himself to make up for our sins, to atone for them, to propitiate – those two last words you will recognise from services and hymns. Atoning for our sins; for ‘he is the propitiation for our sins’ (1 John 2:1; in the ‘Comfortable Words’, p.252 in your Prayer Books). The idea is one of ransom. God’s wrath has been bought off.

Does that square with how you think of God? Do you – do we – seriously think, these days, that God is so threatening? It seems to me that one would have to impute some characteristics to God that I doubt whether we could justify. Granted there are people who claim to have conversations with God, perhaps in the way the Old Testament prophets like Isaiah said they did. God ‘spoke through’ the prophets. But in Jesus, the prophecies were fulfilled: there were no more prophets.

What about the ‘sin’ that we are said to need to ‘propitiate’? What is it? Obviously, some sins are bad actions, breaches of the Ten Commandments – thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal. But we say now that sin is wider than just doing bad things – which could be dealt with as crimes, without bringing God into it, after all.

Sin, we say, is whatever separates us from God. So if God is love, the ultimate positive, hatred is sin. If God commands us to love our neighbour, and we wage war upon him instead, that is sin. But what is God’s reaction? Is there an actual judgement? Do the sheep go up and goats down? And if so, what was Jesus doing?

In the great last judgment at the end of St Matthew’s Gospel, when the sheep and the goats are being separated out, Jesus the Judge Eternal was bringing another angle on God. ‘Inasmuch as ye did it unto the least of these, ye did it unto to me’. You didn’t just turn your back on a starving man; you turned your back on Jesus, on God. Perhaps that’s how he takes our place, in some sense.

The great French philosopher and founder of the network of communities where people with learning difficulties and ‘normal’ people live together, called L’Arche, (in English, the Ark), Jean Vanier, has just died at the age of 90. On the radio this morning someone quoted him as saying, ‘It doesn’t matter whether you believe in God: just believe in love’. I think that Jean Vanier meant that God is love. God showed that love for mankind by sending Jesus to live as a man here with us. In that he brought us closer to God, in showing us true love, Jesus conquered the power of sin. Perhaps this, rather than the idea of ransom, of human sacrifice, is what it means that Jesus offers ‘propitiation’ for sin.

Which is it? I don’t think that I can give you a neat resolution, a pat explanation, of this. Theologians from the early fathers through Thomas Aquinas and the Reformation scholars to the moderns like Richard Swinburne [Richard Swinburne 1989, Responsibility and Atonement, Oxford, OUP] have all wrestled with the meaning of what Jesus did – or what happened to Jesus, and why. It is, if nothing else, a demonstration of power, infinite power. No wonder that the ‘mountains skipped like rams’. But can we still feel it? We need to keep our eyes open.

Tags authorised version, Bible, Book of Common Prayer, broiled, Comfortable Words, Doubting Thomas, Exodus, flight from Egypt, flock, God, Good Shepherd, honeycomb, Isaiah, Jean Vanier, Jerusalem, Jesus, Jews, Judaism, L'Arche, Lamb of God, last judgment, Luke’s Gospel, Matthew 25, Messiah, Noah’s Ark, oblation, prophets, propitiation, Psalm 114, revelation, Richard Swinburne, Roman Catholics, sacrifice, Scapegoat, sheep, sheep and goats, Sin, st John's gospel, St Peter, substitutionary atonement, ten commandments

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You are my Friends

By hughdbryant

March 17, 2019 //

Sermon for the Second Sunday of Lent, 17th March 2019

Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18, Philippians 3:17-4:1, Luke 13:31-35

As we woke up on Friday, to hear the news about the terrible shootings in the mosques in Christchurch in New Zealand, the New Zealand Prime Minister, Mrs Ardern, made a moving statement about the fact that it seems clear that the 50 people killed were the victims of a racist, Islamophobic terrorist. Mrs Ardern said, ‘Many of those who will have been directly affected by this shooting will be migrants, they will be refugees here. They have chosen to make New Zealand their home and it is their home. They are us.’

A bit later on, a picture appeared on Twitter [reproduced above] of a man who, if I can say this, did not look like a Moslem, but rather like Andy Capp in the cartoons, in a flat cap, standing smiling outside a mosque in Manchester with a placard which said, ‘You are my friends. I will keep watch while you pray.’

Terrible atrocities do sometimes seem to bring out beautiful and uplifting thoughts, like those of Mrs Ardern and of the man in the flat cap outside the mosque in Manchester.

In our Lent study groups we are going through the Beatitudes, the ‘blessed are they’ sayings which Jesus spoke at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5.

The second one, perhaps the right one at a time of tragedy, is ‘Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.’ This is one of those short sentences that contains impossibly dense and complicated ideas. On the face of things, for somebody to be mourning, to be sad, to be heartbroken, is not in any sense the same as to be fortunate, which is what the word translated as ‘blessed’ means.

How lucky for you that you are heartbroken; what a wonderful thing it is that you are in floods of tears. Clearly there’s something which doesn’t add up. Try telling the distraught people that were on the TV from New Zealand that they were in some way blessed or fortunate. But really it means, as it says, that those who mourn will be blessed, will be comforted in future: and that is a message of hope after all.

St Paul, in his letter to the Philippians, condemns those who live as enemies of the cross of Christ. Earlier in the chapter we had as our reading, he identifies the people that he condemns. He says, ‘Beware of those dogs and their malpractices. Beware of those who insist on mutilation – I will not call it ‘circumcision’’. Beware of people who tell you you have to become a Jew in order to become a true Christian.

Nevertheless, Paul was proud to tell everybody that he had been circumcised and that he was an Israelite of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born and bred, and a Pharisee [Phil. 3:5]. He’d thrown it all over, after his Road-to-Damascus experience, and in his letters, for example to the Galatians and to the Romans, he made the point that, in the kingdom of heaven, there is no difference between Greeks, (Gentiles), and Jews.

The Israelites had been the chosen people of God, and the others, the Gentiles, the ‘nations’, were the great unwashed. But St Paul’s mission was to bring the good news of Jesus precisely to those Gentiles, to those who were not circumcised. He said, ‘Our citizenship is in heaven.’ Ordinary nationality doesn’t apply in heaven.

But originally, Paul – and Jesus – were Jews, sons of Abraham, descendants of Abraham. The word of the Lord came to Abraham and said, ‘Look toward heaven and count the stars; because that’s how many your descendants will be.’ The sons of Abraham. They were Israelites, the chosen people of God.

The gunman is supposed to have said that one of his reasons for shooting Moslems was because he saw them as strangers, ‘invaders’. At the beginning of this week in morning prayers we were reading from the Book of Deuteronomy, where Moses speaks the words of the Lord, a prophecy about offering sacrifice of the first fruits of the land, the land of milk and honey, which the Israelites have been led into, the promised land. Moses tells them to say in their prayers that they are descended from ‘a wandering Aramean’, or from ‘a Syrian ready to perish’, that they have been led into Egypt and then eventually out of Egypt again, as strangers in the land. Even they, the chosen people, started out as strangers.

There are many passages in the Book of Deuteronomy, and in the Jewish Law generally, which St Paul would have been very familiar with, which impose on Jews a duty to care for a stranger that is within their gates, to care for strangers along with orphans and widows. That is the spirit that Mrs Ardern has so eloquently reminded us of. It is not a spirit of antipathy towards immigrants and refugees, not against strangers, not against people who are different from ourselves.

This is such a difficult area. There are so many apparent paradoxes. The Jews, refugees, made it to the promised land; they went to the holy city, Jerusalem, and set up the temple there. ‘Jerusalem the golden, with milk and honey blest’.

But Jesus points out that, because that is where the council, the Sanhedrin, is based, it is only in Jerusalem that he can be condemned, and that Jerusalem is a city that kills prophets, that throws stones at people who are sent to it.

Mrs Ardern was one of those world leaders, like Mrs Merkel in Germany, who has dared to extend a welcome to refugees. She still extends that welcome. But what about us? The challenge to us today is surely not to be fixated with ‘taking back control’, with restricting immigration and upholding national identity, however important some of those things might seem to be at first.

Jesus said, ‘Strive to enter in at the strait gate. Struggle to get in through the narrow door. For I tell you that many will try to enter and not be able to. You may stand outside and knock: say, ‘Sir, let us in.’ But he will only answer, ‘I do not know where you come from.’ [Luke 13:24]

Where do we come from? You could say that Jesus makes getting into the kingdom of heaven seem like a refugee trying to come ashore in Italy, or trying to get through at the Hungarian border or even being caught up in our own Government’s ‘hostile environment’ at Heathrow today. Contrast that with what Mrs Ardern said. ‘ … They will be refugees here. They have chosen to make New Zealand their home. It is their home. They are us.’

The challenge for us as Christians is to raise our sights above the earthly ghastliness which stems from narrow nationalism, and to seek what is truly heavenly. ‘Blessed are those who mourn, because they will be comforted.’ Let us pray that, with God’s help, we can become channels of peace, so that we too can say that they are our friends, and that we will keep watch while they pray.

Tags Andy Capp, beatitudes, Benjamin, chosen people, Christchurch NZ, Christians, circumcision, Deuteronomy, Friends, heaven, Hebrew, Israelite, Jacinda Ardern, Jesus, Jews, Lent, Matthew 5, milk and honey, Moses, Moslems, mosques, Pharisee, Philippians, Sanhedrin, St Paul, Syrian, wandering Aramean

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Not a White Christmas

By hughdbryant

December 24, 2018 //

Sermon for Evensong on the Fourth Sunday of Advent, 23rd December 2018

Isaiah 10:33-11:10, Matthew 1:18-25

‘In the bleak midwinter’; ‘Snow had fallen, snow on snow’; ‘Good King Wenceslas looked out … deep and crisp and even’. But Bethlehem is a hot place, dusty rather than snowy. I suppose carols and hymns can be rather an unreliable source of proper geographical information. ‘And did those feet .. walk upon England’s green and pleasant land?’

I don’t suppose they sing ‘Jerusalem’ in Italy, or in France or in Germany. Or if they do, presumably those feet were walking in the Black Forest or on the Palatine Hill, or maybe, in the Bois de Boulogne. There is, if we are literal about it, quite a lot of nonsense which we happily tolerate at this time of year. Things that appear to go completely contrary to common sense; like snow in Bethlehem. It probably was quite cold at night in the stable, once the sun had gone down. But there certainly wasn’t any snow.

One of the things that these carols are doing is assimilating the story of the birth of Jesus into our homes, or rather into an idealised version of our homes, because even here in England a white Christmas is, of course, very rare. I think it’s a fairly safe assumption that we won’t have one this year either.

And as well as the carols, the Bible readings that we traditionally use at this time also contain things which look contrary. Isaiah’s wonderful vision of the peaceful life on ‘God’s holy mountain’, after the Rod of Jesse, the Saviour, has beaten the Assyrians, and saved God’s chosen people, isn’t just a pastoral idyll.

It deliberately puts almost impossible companions together. The wolf and the sheep; the leopard, the kid; the calf, the young lion, the cow and the bear – the little child, leading them, like a party of schoolchildren following their teacher around the Tower of London, say.

Or perhaps it’s a classroom, full of these unlikely neighbours, who are not busily eating each other, but they are sitting attentively in class, being kept in good order by a little boy, like my two-year old grandson Jim. In your dreams, Sunshine!

Well, yes; in Isaiah, in Isaiah’s dreams. In the words of the prophet, telling his hearers what God has spoken to him and said, that the Rod of Jesse would come and slay the Assyrians, and then that they ‘would not hurt or destroy on God’s holy mountain.’

Interesting that it is on a mountain, on a high place. The Greek gods were on a mountain too; on Mount Olympus. And in the Old Testament, the heathen gods, the Baals and the Astartes of the Chaldeans, were worshipped with sacred poles, which were ‘in the high places’. ‘High places’ was almost a synonym for where God lived. We ourselves look up, look up to heaven, because conventionally, God lives in Heaven, and Jesus sits at God’s right hand ‘on high’, we say. Think of our Psalm this evening.

Unto thee I lift up mine eyes:

O thou that dwellest in the heavens. [Ps. 123]

But again, it’s not literally true. Yuri Gagarin, the first astronaut, was said by Nikita Krushchev to have gone into space ‘but not to have seen God there’. The early astronauts didn’t find a man with a white beard sitting on a golden throne and floating above the clouds. John Gillespie Magee’s wonderful poem, which is often read at the funeral of a pilot, ‘High Flight’, comes to mind. ‘Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth … put out my hand and touched the face of God’. And so, on God’s holy mountain, children can safely play with cockatrices, vipers, and with asps, cobras. ‘Sheep may safely graze’.

It’s a much better outlook for the Israelites. The Messiah would come along and free them from slavery. The Rod of Jesse would mete out retribution to all their foes. That’s something that we can certainly relate to. ‘If only ..’, we say. If only: what would you call in the Rod of Jesse to do in your life? But maybe we are too comfortable, too well settled to really empathise with how the Israelites must have felt.

But there are people who are in exile, who are not free, who may even be subjected to slavery, even today, not far away. On Friday I did my first Father Christmas duty of this Christmas, up at Brooklands College, where there is a project for children who are asylum seekers and refugees. I gave out splendid big stockings full of goodies donated by the supporters of the project and by Elmbridge CAN, our local refugee support group, to 26 young people, teenagers and in their early 20s, who had come from Eritrea, from Syria, Ukraine, from Kurdistan, Iraq, from Afghanistan. Some were black Africans, some were Arabs, a couple were Chinese, and a couple were white Europeans. Many do not know whether they will be allowed to stay.

Some were learning to read and write for the first time; although typically, the ones who hadn’t been able to read and write were amazingly good at mental arithmetic. They were learning English, of course, and learning how to fit in with English society. The first words that they are taught are ‘please’, ‘thank you’, and ‘sorry’, because none of those are necessarily expressions that you come across in some of the countries that they have come from. Part of Father Christmas’ visit was a huge lunch, of Middle Eastern and African delicacies, that one of the volunteers from Elmbridge CAN had made. For about half the children, this would be their only meal that day. One meal, if you’re lucky. This is in Weybridge!

So pictures of the Israelites, in exile and under the oppressor’s boot, could still in certain circumstances be a picture of contemporary life, for refugees and asylum seekers today. Think what life in the refugee camps must be like, in Jordan, for example. No snow there, either!

As well as the mythical snow on this fourth Sunday of Advent, just on the eve of Christmas itself, St Matthew tells us the story of the other half of the Annunciation. This isn’t about Mary but about Joseph her betrothed. Again, the Christmas story is so familiar that we perhaps gloss over the bits that seem rather unlikely. Joseph’s original reaction when he finds out that his wife-to-be is pregnant, although he has had nothing to do with it, is what you might expect. His first thought is that the wedding is not going to happen.

Who is the Angel Gabriel? Have you met any angels recently? Or at all? It seems to depend a bit on where you come from and what you’re used to. In Africa and in Southern Europe, people are much more ready to believe in the existence of angels than perhaps we are. I don’t think that we can explain the Virgin Birth in the same way that we could explain how to bake a perfect soufflé – or whatever it is they do on the Great British Bake-Off.

But look at it functionally. Jesus definitely lived. He was a human being, although during his life and afterwards, things happened which have led us to believe that he was more than human, that he was divine as well as human. So somehow he must have been born, been conceived. All the things that show that he was really born, that he really was human, just like the other miracles, turning water into wine, miraculously healing sick people, raising Lazarus from the dead – none of those can be explained: so Jesus’ conception is equally mysterious and impossible to understand.

But notice how Jesus’ earthly parents, wonderfully, accepted the situation; and of course Mary said the Magnificat, which we’ve just sung together. God has chosen me; God has magnified me; God has made a big thing out of me.

Is it just a pretty story, then? Is it just a convenient excuse to have a nice time at Christmas? Think about what Mary said. Think about the message of the Magnificat, and the message of Isaiah, about the animals on ‘God’s holy mountain’. ‘He has put down the mighty from his seat, and exalted the humble and meek.’ Are we the mighty? Or are we the ‘humble and meek’?

We need to think about it, and to do something. Perhaps the other thing about God’s holy mountain is that a little child shall lead them. Shall we say that that is the Christ Child? You know, in snowy Bethlehem? And another thing. ‘No crying he makes’. This is some baby!

High Flight

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth

And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;

Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth

of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things

You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung

High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,

I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung

My eager craft through footless halls of air….

Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue

I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace.

Where never lark, or even eagle flew —

And, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod

The high untrespassed sanctity of space,

– Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

John Gillespie Magee (1922-1941)

Tags angel, animals, asp, asylum seeker, bear, betrothed, carols, cockatrice, Elmbridge CAN, Father Christmas, gabriel, God, heaven, holy mountain, hungry, Iraq, Isaiah, Israelites, Jesus, Jews, Joseph, kid, lamb, leopard, lion, little child, Magnificat, Messiah, presents, prophets, refugees, snow at Christmas, Syria, Wenceslas, wolf

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No, not him

By hughdbryant

October 29, 2018 //

Sermon for Holy Communion for SS Simon and Jude, 28th October 2018

Ephesians 2:19-end; John 15:17-end

Today along with most of the churches in the western world we are commemorating two apostles whom we know very little about, St Simon and St Jude.

There were two Judes, two Judases. We’re not quite sure who this one was, because in the four Gospels he is described as being various things. In St Matthew and St Mark he is not called Judas but Thaddeus, which might be a surname; it is only in Saint Luke and the Acts of the Apostles that he is called Jude. St Jude was not the same as Judas Iscariot, although his name in Greek is the same, Ιουδας. People historically haven’t chosen him to invoke in prayer, because they think he might get mixed up with Judas Iscariot. So he is called the patron saint of lost causes – ‘If all else fails, offer a prayer through St Jude’. The little letter of Jude in the New Testament was not written by this Jude, according to many scholars. In St Luke’s Gospel Jude is described as the son of James the brother of Jesus. ‘Jude the Obscure’, which was the title of one of Thomas Hardy’s novels, is an apt name for him.

Simon – not Simon Peter – had been a terrorist – a real terrorist. He had been a member of the Zealots, who were a Jewish extremist sect that believed that the Jews were supposed to be a free and independent nation; that God alone would be their king, and that any payment of taxes to the Romans or accepting their rule was a blasphemy against God. They were violent. They attacked both Romans and any Jews who they thought were collaborating with the Romans. Simon had been one of them.

So the Apostles were a motley assortment. Humble fishermen; a tax collector; a terrorist (although of course, depending on your point of view, one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter); James and John, the ‘Sons of Thunder’, whatever that means. It certainly doesn’t sound meek and mild. And of course, Judas Iscariot; the other Jude. Jesus wasn’t choosing people whom we would think of as saintly.

But there isn’t an awful lot that we know about Simon the Zealot and Jude – Jude-not-that-Jude. So our Bible readings today, the message from St Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, ‘You are no longer aliens in a foreign land,’ and the message from St John’s Gospel, about Christians not belonging to the world, are not about them, but rather they are a reminder of some of the teaching that Jesus – and after him, St Paul – gave to the Apostles and to the early Christians.

Paul’s letter to the Ephesians has a great theme of ‘reconciliation’: St Paul’s great mission was to bring the Gospel to the non-Jews, the Gentiles, so that Christianity wasn’t just a subdivision of Jewishness. ‘You are no longer aliens in a foreign land.’ Perhaps it’s not so topical for us nowadays.

But in Jesus’ own teaching, from St John’s Gospel (chapter 15) that we heard this morning, packed into these few lines there are some really deep meanings which still help us to understand the nature of God.

Jesus said, ’Because you do not belong to the world … For that reason the world hates you.’ In Jesus’ day and in that Roman world, being a Christian was definitely dangerous, simply because Christians didn’t worship the Roman emperor as a god. In the reign of some emperors, for example Diocletian, it meant that large numbers of Christians were fed to the lions.

It’s still to some extent true today, in parts of the Middle East and in Northern Nigeria, that Christians are persecuted. But by and large in our part of Surrey, it’s not really controversial to say that you are a Christian. But I do think that perhaps we still should reflect on what it means ‘not to belong to the world’. You don’t ‘breathe the same air’, as people sometimes say. Are we sometimes tempted to keep our religious belief out of things, for fear of offending people? But Jesus said here, don’t be afraid of being different.

What about the next proposition in this teaching passage, ‘Servants are not greater than their master’? The translation is actually wrong. The word isn’t ‘servant’, but ‘slave’, δουλος in Greek. This word also means what was called a ‘bondsman’, somebody who was indentured, bought. In the Roman empire, bondsmen, indentured slaves, could buy their freedom. Their bonds could be remitted, they could be ransomed.

It seems to me that these words surely have echoes of the idea of redemption, that by Jesus’ sacrifice he has purchased our remission from the slavery of sin. Jesus has bought us out, redeemed us. We are no longer slaves. Earlier on in chapter 15, indeed Jesus does say, ‘I call you slaves no longer’.

‘The people who hate you’, Jesus said, ‘do not know the one who sent me’. Again: ‘… the one who sent me.’ This is a reminder of the way that Christians understand God ‘in three persons’, as the Holy Trinity, father, son and Holy Spirit. (Jesus comes to the Holy Spirit later on, when he talks about sending what he calls the ‘Advocate’, the spirit of truth, after he has gone. Here, it’s just him and the One who sent him).

Here we can see what caused some of the controversy in the early church, which ended up in the Council of Nicaea in the fourth century, and in our Nicene Creed. If God ‘sent’ Jesus, the Son, was Jesus also God, or just another creature? And depending on the answer to that question, where did the Holy Spirit come from? God, or God-and-Jesus? And again, was the Spirit, is the Spirit – remember, ‘His Spirit is with us’, we say – is the Spirit made by God, or is it God itself?

If you don’t think of God as a nice old chap with a beard sitting on top of the clouds – and since the sixties, at least, since Bishop John Robinson’s wonderful little book, ‘Honest to God’ [Robinson, J. (1963), Honest to God, London, SCM Press], we mostly don’t – how can we understand the Holy Trinity? Try the logical, a priori, back to logical first principles, way that Professor Richard Swinburne, the great Oxford philosopher of religion, has set out in his book ‘Was Jesus God?’ [Swinburne, R. (2008) Was Jesus God? Oxford, OUP, p.28f]. It goes like this.

There is a ‘divine person’ who is omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly free and eternal. Let us call that person ‘God’. Because He is omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly free and eternal, God is perfectly good.

God could exist alone, but being perfectly good means he won’t be selfish; He will have to have a object for His love. Perfect love is love of an equal: a perfectly good person will seek to bring about another such person, an equal, with whom to share all that he has. That other person is the Son.

But the Son didn’t, in fact, come after the Father. As a matter of logic, because they are perfect, ’At each moment of everlasting time the Father must always cause the Son to exist, and so always keep the Son in being.’

But then, Swinburne says, ’A twosome can be selfish’. ‘The love of the Father for the Son must include a wish to cooperate with the Son in further total sharing with an equal; and hence the need for a third member of the Trinity’ And that is the Holy Spirit.

For the same logical reasons, the Spirit isn’t something ‘made’ by God. As we say in the Creed, the Spirit ‘proceeds from’ the Father, or the Father and the Son. (Saying ‘proceeds from’ is perhaps a philosophical cop-out. We can’t say exactly how the Spirit gets here). The Three-in-One are, is, there. The Trinity is in a sense caused by the One, by God. But it is one with God. The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Three ways of being God.

One more nugget of theology. Jesus says, at verse 24, about the heathen, the worldly people, ’If I had not come and spoken to them, they would not be guilty of sin; but now they have both seen and hated both me and my Father’. It seems that Jesus has a different concept of guilt or criminal responsibility from the one we’re familiar with. We say that ignorance is no defence. Something is either lawful or it isn’t. You might think that sin worked the same way. Something is either sinful or it isn’t, surely, isn’t it sinful, irrespective whether you know it or not? But Jesus has this different idea – you’ll find it also in St Paul’s letter to the Romans [7:7] – that heathens, who know nothing about sin, are not sinful. What makes someone sinful, or capable of being sinful, is being ‘fixed with knowledge’, as a lawyer would put it. So it looks as though ignorance is a defence, where sin is concerned.

But that is perhaps an indication that to ‘sin’ is not the same thing as to do bad things, to do evil, even. The point about sin is that it is a separation, a turning of your back on, God. And you can’t do that, if you don’t know about God in the first place. Of course, if you are sinful, if you have turned your back on God, you may well do bad things. If you are saved by grace, you will show it by your good works. If you aren’t, if you are lost, you will show it by the bad things you do. St Paul sets it out in Galatians chapter 5.

What a concentrated lesson for his disciples it was from Jesus!

– What it means that the Father is ‘the One who sent me’;

– what it means that because of me, the Son, you are no longer servants, or really slaves; and,

– what it means that Jesus will get the Spirit to come to you. (That is the ‘Advocate’, what the Prayer Book and the Authorised Version of the Bible calls the Comforter, ό παρακλητος).

The common thread, the theme of Jesus’ teaching here, might perhaps be relationships, relationships between people, and with God. And the currency used in those relationships. Hate – ‘the world hates you’; service – Jesus has bought us out, redeemed us, so we are no longer slaves; comfort, the Holy Spirit, the Comforter; and love – love from ‘the one who sent me’. And ‘the greatest of these is love’, as you know. [1 Corinthians 13]

Sometimes it’s good to think about these lessons that Jesus taught, never mind who was listening to him. It could even be you, as well as Simon-not-Peter or Jude-not-Judas.

Tags 1 Corinthians, Acts of the Apostles, advocate, apostles, bondsman, Christians, collaborators, Comforter, council of nicaea, Diocletian, Ephesians, father, galatians, gentiles, gospels, guilt, heathens, Holy Spirit, Holy Trinity, Honest to God, ignorance, παρακλητος, Ιουδας, δούλος, Jews, John Robinson, Judas, Judas Iscariot, Jude the Obscure, knowledge, lions, manumission, middle-east, nicene creed, Northern Nigeria, reconciliation, redemption, Richard Swinburne, Romans, Simon Peter, Sin, slavery, son, Sons of Thunder, St John, St Jude, St Luke, St Mark, St Matthew, St Paul, St Simon, Stern Gang, Thaddeus, Thomas Hardy, Zealots

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