Archives for posts with tag: Latin

The Holy Father

By hughdbryant
April 30, 2025 //
0

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No,” said a few people in the crowd.

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

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

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Sermon for Rose Sunday 2025

By hughdbryant
March 30, 2025 //
0

See https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=610162457

Rejoice! Let me speak to you in Latin. ‘Laetare Hierusalem et conventum facite omnes qui diligitis eam: gaudete cum laetitia…’ : it means, ‘ … be ye glad for Jerusalem, all ye that delight in her: exult and sing for joy with her,’..

It says on your pew sheet that today is Mothering Sunday. So what is all this Latin stuff – ‘Laetare’ – all about? This is also, and indeed it has been for a lot longer than it has been Mothering Sunday, what is called ‘refreshment’, or Rejoice! Sunday, which is what the Latin word ‘laetare’ means: laetare, ‘rejoice!’

Traditionally, pink vestments can be worn by the priest on Refreshment Sunday, so it’s also known as Rose Sunday. It’s halfway through Lent, and it’s a chance to relax the rigours of fasting. So if you have been denying yourself, today you have no need to lay off the Ferrero Rocher and vino di tavola rosso di Toscana. Today, you can indulge without feeling guilty.

Mothering Sunday is an old mediaeval concept, which fell into disuse, but was revived during the last century by a lady called Constance Adelaide Smith, a vicar’s daughter, who picked up on plans in the USA to introduce Mother’s Day, which came to fruition in the USA in 1914. Miss Smith wrote a booklet called ‘The Revival of Mothering Sunday’ in 1921, and it started to be celebrated again in the UK around that time, on the fourth Sunday in Lent, Refreshment Sunday.

The rather formidable Miss Smith campaigned for Mothering Sunday to be a celebration of a number of various aspects of motherhood: these were ‘Mother Church’ (the church where you were baptised), ‘mothers of earthly homes’, Mary, the mother of Jesus; and Mother Nature. It is a very wide spread of people and places and things, all to be celebrated as being aspects of motherhood, motherhood to rejoice in on Mothering Sunday.

I think it’s fair to say that these days we mainly think of it as a day to celebrate our mothers, ‘mothers of earthly homes’. It’s a nice opportunity to make a fuss of them, for those of us who still have mothers around, or if not, at least to think about and remember our wonderful mothers.

At this point I must say that in the midst of all this happy celebration, for quite a number of people Mothering Sunday or Mother’s Day are not happy times. If you are a mother who has lost a child, or who has not been able to have a child, this is not a time you want to celebrate. We should pause, and take that to the Lord in prayer. If any of you are suffering in that way, I hope you will excuse my carrying on in a way that may not suit the way you feel. You are not forgotten, and you are in our prayers today.

I don’t think that you really need a homily from me on how to be nice to your mother or to be nice about her. But I would just like to take a minute or two to look at a couple of the things that come up in our Bible readings. I’m struck that in two of them the interesting thing is that the compilers of the Lectionary have selected passages, which come just after, in one case, and just before, in the other, verses which are perhaps more familiar to us and more significant than the ones which have been selected.

The first story, from the first book of Samuel, is the story of the birth of Samuel to his mother, Hannah – obviously today, one of the common themes is stories of mothers – and it is a bit like the story of the birth of John the Baptist to his mother, Elisabeth. Neither woman had been blessed with children for a number of years.

Hannah was praying to the Lord for children, and eventually her prayers were answered. In her prayers, she had said she would dedicate any son who was born to the Lord as what was called a Nazarite. This meant that she would give him over to the priests of the Temple to become somebody who was dedicated, set apart, for the Lord in the Temple. He would not be allowed to cut his hair, touch strong drink, and a whole load of other restrictions, which are all set out in the law of Moses in the book of Numbers.

But the bit which you might expect the story to go on to tell us, is what Hannah did to celebrate, because she sang a song. The song that she sang is very similar to another song in the Bible. She sang:

‘My heart rejoices in the Lord. …

Strong men stand in dismay…

Those who faltered put on new strength …

Those who had plenty sell themselves for a crust,

The hungry grow strong again.’

It has strong echoes of Mary’s song, the Magnificat, that everybody will remember from Evensong.

‘My soul doth magnify the Lord,
and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.…..

He hath shewed strength with his arm.
He hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.
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.’

Clearly, Mary knew her Bible, and she remembered Hannah’s song from the story of the birth of Samuel. And not only that, but in these songs the two mothers-to-be really forecast the way that God wants us to do things. The last shall be first. The humble and meek shall be raised up. The hungry shall be filled up with good things. A really important message. Think what the world would be like if we really followed it.

And then, in our reading from Saint Paul’s letter to the Colossians, ‘..[C]lothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience..’, all those lovely ideas about how Christians should treat one another. ‘Clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.’

Wonderful words; but the ones, that are not captured by our reading, come just one verse above.

‘There is no question here of Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and freeman; but Christ is all, and is in all.’

No such thing as Jew and Greek. This is the first sign of Christianity bursting out from being just a small denomination within Judaism.

Anybody could become a Christian. Christ was, is, there to become a saviour for anyone. It’s the origin of Inclusive Church, which is a charity that the Ministry Area Committee have decided to register our churches with. Of course, we know that we are inclusive, we welcome everybody: but we will also have signs outside, and we will do lots of practical things, to let everybody know that they can come in, and that they will be welcome.

The Lord is here. His spirit is with us. His spirit is for everybody, whatever they look like, wherever they come from.

I suppose if you go away and do your homework and read the lessons at home, you will come and tackle me to say that, when I was mentioning things that weren’t in the lessons, I should have mentioned not just the bit that comes before our lesson from Colossians. but also the bit after, because it has St Paul’s rather infamous words, “Wives, be subject to your husbands“, and to be fair, “Husbands, love your wives, … children, obey your parents, for that is pleasing to God, and is the Christian way“, and so on. Given that there is nothing really about mothers in the lesson from Colossians that we heard, it is quite important to remember that St Paul did include, in this great letter, his own ideas on what makes for happy families.

But then perhaps in our Gospel reading, there is the most moving reference to a mother in the Bible, the story of Jesus on the cross, and what he said, while the three Marys were standing there.

More Latin – ‘Stabat Mater dolorosa’: ‘His sad mother was standing there’; the Marian Hymn, as it’s called. Some of us will no doubt be able to hear in our heads one or other of the beautiful musical settings, by Palestrina, or Charpentier or Vivaldi, among many others right up to today, including James McMillan and Karl Jenkins.

When I was looking at this heart-rending scene in my mind, it did slightly remind me of another time when his family was mentioned, in Saint Matthew’s Gospel chapter 12, at the end of the chapter, where he was speaking to the crowd when his mother and brothers appeared, and someone said, “Your mother and brothers are here outside, and want to speak to you”. Jesus said, “Who is my mother? Who are my brothers?” And, pointing to the disciples, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers. Whoever does the will of my heavenly father is my brother, my sister, my mother.“

This is different; it’s more simple than that; it’s just the story of Jesus, as he was dying on the cross, making sure that his mother was looked after by the disciple whom he loved, (who is sometimes identified with John the Evangelist). It looks as though his earthly father, Joseph, was no longer there, and had perhaps died already.

What a nice example Jesus was setting. Even in a moment of the most acute pain and suffering, he took time and made sure that his mother was looked after. I don’t think there’s anything I can say to improve on that. ‘I was glad’ – and I hope that today, you mothers, and children of mothers, on this Mothering Sunday, are glad too.

Amen.

Hugh Bryant

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Advent

By hughdbryant
January 28, 2025 //
0

Sermon for Mattins on 1st December 2024, the First Sunday of Advent

Advent Reflections

https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=605091724

Isaiah 51:4-11

Romans 13:11-14

We have lit the first Advent candle and begun the new church year with the beginning of Advent. The word ‘advent’ means coming, or ‘coming towards’ somewhere. It is from an old Latin word.

It is supposed to be a penitential season in the church’s year, although probably not quite as serious as the period of Lent. Not for the first time you get the slight feeling that in the church we are sailing against the wind so far as the rest of society is concerned. If you watch ITV and pay any attention to the adverts, essentially the thing that we are coming towards is definitely Christmas, and it’s not a thoughtful time at all except to the extent that you may have to spend a bit of time with your diary making sure that you’re in the right place at the right time for all the Christmas parties and, particularly at Christmas, that you haven’t left any of the family out. But that’s not really what the Christian tradition is all about. The ‘coming’ in Advent is the coming of Jesus, and there are really two comings, coming in the sense of his incarnation, becoming a man, being born in the manger Christmas is one coming.

But there’s also be an idea of the end time, of Jesus’s second coming, and you can see from our readings today in the lesson from Isaiah a prophecy addressed to the people of Israel looking forward to the Messiah, the great saviour who would take them out of captivity, effectively for a second time. The prophet reminds them of the escape from Egypt, the parting of the waters and the entry into the promised land. Isaiah is saying that God can do this again. 

And then in Saint Paul’s letter to the Romans he reflects the belief which was common among the early Christians that the end time, that the second coming, and the time of judgement, was just round the corner. Obviously we realise that that’s not the case, and if there is to be an end time of this type, we don’t know when it will be. 

St Paul nevertheless makes a good point in saying that we should always live our lives as though we would be hauled up before the judge eternal in the next day or so. There is a sort of tension here. For all the last 2000 years we have recognised that the Messiah has come, at Christmas time, but still we are waiting, waiting for him to come again. 

In our church in Wales there is a difference in the holy communion service compared with our brothers and sisters in England. In England the church says, ‘Christ has died, Christ is risen,’ and then, ‘Christ will come again’. The church in Wales, perhaps more realistically, says, not, Christ will come again, but, Christ will come in glory. What we can reflect on is that looking towards this second coming, whenever it may be, isn’t just a question of our hanging around aimlessly, as somebody put it that I read recently, this time of waiting is not devoid of meaning, like time spent waiting at a bus stop. 

This ‘in-between time’ is a time for the church to proclaim the gospel to every nation, to make sense of the present, while never giving up the hope that God’s Messiah, Jesus, will have the last word. We have to acknowledge that, in a very real sense, we do still need salvation. There is still an awful lot wrong with the world, particularly today when we see the terrible wars that are going on in Gaza, Ukraine and south Sudan. 

The world hasn’t faced up to the fact that as well as wars and civil strife, there is a huge gap between the haves and the have-nots, between the rich nations of the northern hemisphere and the global South, that means that there is a huge pressure of migration because people may be fleeing not only from war but also because they can’t make a living and they are moving towards the places which are richer and more likely to give them the means to sustain themselves. 

I watched Angela Merkel, the former German chancellor, being interviewed by the BBC’s Katya Adler – It’s a very interesting interview which you can catch up with on iPlayer [https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0025gqj] – and it was really interesting that Dr Merkel identified the biggest problem facing civilisation nowadays as the gap between the rich and poor. If you fix that, there will be far less need for people to migrate, quite apart from all the other benefits that will flow through having a fairer world. 

So we must be awake. We must think and do whatever is needed so that our world looks more like a place where the Messiah has already arrived and less like a place which badly needs him to come again. 

Having said that, I should just share with you that when I was doing my reading in preparation for this sermon, I managed to find one scholarly reference which might tend to suggest that people who see Advent as being just a jolly run up to Christmas might have some historical justification. 

The liturgical scholar Benjamin Gordon Taylor wrote this. ‘Although in historical terms the most recent of the seasons to emerge……, the origin of advent is not clear. It had a penitential character in the middle centuries of the first millennium which may have been linked to epiphany baptism, but neither this nor the alternative view, that it represented a Christianising of the pagan winter fast, can be certain. Contrary to its modern acceptance as the beginning of the liturgical year, Advent may in earlier times have struggled against a persistence in Rome to see Christmas in this role; certainly the emphasis on penitence in Gaul and Spain was contrasted in Rome by a focus on the joyful expectation of the coming of Christ.’ Clearly we are the spiritual successors of the Romans here. 

And he goes on to say, ‘Advent has a rich potential for reflection on powerful themes in the economy of salvation, for example the first and second comings of Christ and, traditionally, the four last things: death, judgement, heaven and hell. And earlier emphasis on penitence, although not universal, tends to be downplayed.’ 

So I think we have scholarly endorsement: it’s okay to enjoy the Waitrose ad, provided you don’t forget all those people who couldn’t afford even to go to Lidl and, more importantly, provided you do something about it. 

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Welcome Aboard

By hughdbryant
July 14, 2024 //
0

Sermon for Evensong on Sea Sunday, 14th July 2024, at St Peter’s Church, Old Cogan

Reading: Psalm 95 https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=587981145

Today is Sea Sunday, the day which many Christian churches throughout the world set aside to remember and pray for seafarers and their families and to give thanks for their lives and work. Charities such as the Mission to Seafarers and the Sailors’ Society conduct fundraisers today.

From our psalm today, Psalm 95:

When we enter into our worship, we remember God as a god of power, this power being expressed in the mighty ocean:

‘For the Lord is a great God: and a great King above all gods.

In his hand are all the deep places of the earth:

and the heights of the mountains are his also.

The sea is his and he made it’.

The Psalmist never forgot the forces of the sea:

‘There go the ships: there is that leviathan whom thou hast made to play therein’. It’s Psalm 104. The great sea monster, Leviathan; nobody knows what Leviathan was like, except perhaps that he might have been a bit like the Loch Ness monster. Nobody could contradict that.

Jesus’ disciples were fishermen. They were mariners; they were seamen on the sea of Galilee, which some people slightly belittle by calling it just a lake. But it was surely a place where storms could get up and the power of the waves was able to strike terror into the seafarers. The story of Jesus stilling the storm comes in all the three synoptic gospels, Matthew Mark and Luke: ‘Who can this be,’ said the disciples, ‘when even the wind and the sea obey him?’

I’m always impressed by the amount of travelling which went on even in biblical times, even though there weren’t any aeroplanes, motor-ships, trains or cars. Nevertheless, arguably the greatest Christian disciple, Saint Paul, was nothing if not a great traveller. In our lesson today, in the New Testament lesson from Saint Paul’s letter to the Romans, he is writing to the Romans explaining why he hasn’t come to see them yet, but reflecting on the fact that he has been on a mission to visit all the Christians who had not already been visited by others of the disciples as they spread the good news of the Gospel.

Paul travelled through Syria, Palestine, Cyprus, Turkey, Macedonia, Greece and Rhodes, and when he eventually did set off for Rome, he was shipwrecked in Malta, but eventually he did make it to Rome. Pretty impressive travelling – and most of it was done by sea.

And talking about maritime matters in the Bible, we must not forget Jonah and the Whale, which may be rather mythical, but again it illustrates the power of God, as shown in the sea and and in the maritime world. As someone who has been in practice as a maritime lawyer I am particularly partial to the story of Jonah, not because of its physiological and veterinary aspects, but because it illustrates a very early example of the concept of general average, an extraordinary sacrifice made to preserve the ‘maritime adventure’ as a whole, as it is put in the Marine Insurance Act 1906.

And we worship, we make our journey of faith, by ship. How so? You might ask. Look up – not to heaven on this occasion – but just look up to the ceiling of this lovely church. You are sitting in that part of the church which is called the nave, and the nave, that word, comes from the Latin for a ship, navis. If you look up to the roof, the ceiling of the church, you will see that it looks like the upturned hull of a ship. It’s not an accident. The sea is central to our faith.

Today, this year, there is some academic celebration of another sea, the Sea of Faith, the name of the TV series which went out on BBC television in 1984 under that name, Sea of Faith, presented by the great Cambridge theologian and philosopher, Don Cupitt. He took his title from a very well-known poem by Matthew Arnold, the son of Thomas Arnold, the first headmaster of Rugby School.

Matthew was at some time a fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, and he retired to live in Cobham in Surrey. He was briefly churchwarden of St Andrew’s church there. I rather warm to him, not necessarily because of the excellence of his poetry, but because my elder daughter went to Rugby; I went to Oriel; I lived for 30 years in Cobham; and I too was churchwarden at St Andrew’s. I feel we have something in common!

Possibly Matthew Arnold’s best known poem is called Dover Beach. I’ll read it to you.

The sea is calm tonight.

The tide is full, the moon lies fair

Upon the straits; on the French coast the light

Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,

Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.

Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!

Only, from the long line of spray

Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,

Listen! you hear the grating roar

Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,

At their return, up the high strand,

Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago

Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought

Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow

Of human misery; we

Find also in the sound a thought,

Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

‘The Sea of Faith …. Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world’. He wrote that in 1867. The ‘sea of faith’, he thought, was retreating in the face of the rise of secularism and modern science. Well, that’s 150 years ago and we’re still here. We still debate the ideas which Don Cupitt among others promulgated in the 1960s.

That new understanding of our relationship with God, and our understanding of God himself, led to the other great theological text of the 1960s, Bishop John Robinson’s ‘Honest to God’. It gave people who were beginning to be put off the Christian faith, because they found it difficult to reconcile with modern scientific understanding, it gave them a way of making sense of faith, without them having to believe in things which they had come to think of as nonsensical.

That’s for another day and another sermon, I expect. My point today is simply that it’s a good idea to look at our faith and to reflect on God against a maritime background from time to time. Our God is the God who ‘made heaven and earth, the sea and all that in them is.’ [Exodus 20:11] When we pray, perhaps we should be asking whether we have ‘permission to come aboard’. I think that we can be confident that, as we embark on this boat, we are welcome. Welcome aboard! Amen.

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Mansions

By hughdbryant
November 11, 2018 //
0

Sermon for Evensong on the 24th Sunday after Trinity, 11th November 2018

Isaiah 10:22-11:9, John 14:1-29

Drawing Hands (1948) lithograph by M.C. Escher

This is Evensong on the 24th Sunday after Trinity. That is the rather esoteric description which you find in the church calendar. It is also a very special Remembrance Sunday, the 11th day of the 11th month of the hundredth year since the end of the First World War. That conflict was so terrible, and the human consequences so great, that many people lost their faith in God. How could a good and loving God allow such terrible things to happen?

To some extent that is a question, or was a question, that didn’t really touch individuals. It was really about the great affairs of state. To what extent could God guide the great leaders of the nations? How could a good God for instance countenance the use of poison gas? Theologians have wrestled with those difficult questions ever since, and the answers reached have tended to argue that there is evidence of God’s benign activity in the world as well as all the awful things; that the bad things are not God’s fault, as we have been created with a degree of autonomy, free will. God has not created us as robots; there would be no meaning to the ideas of the right and the good if it were not possible also to have evil, and that, in their relations with the Almighty, people can either be faithful, doing what God wants, or they can be sinful, which means separated from God.

But that was this morning, that was all about Remembrance Sunday, the hundredth Remembrance Sunday. But what about tonight? Tonight we are looking at two visions, Isaiah’s vision of the coming of the Messiah and the effect of it – ‘they shall not hurt or destroy on God’s holy mountain’ – and all these wonderful new friendships, animals that usually eat each other becoming friends at peace with each other: the wolf and the lamb, and the little child leading them.

And then in St John’s Gospel we have this great passage in chapter 14, ‘In my father’s house are many mansions’. I think that ‘mansions’ is far better than the bathos of ‘In my father’s house are many rooms’ – or ‘dwelling-places’, which is the way some modern translations of the Bible put it. In Greek, ‘mansions’ is translated from μοναι, from μενω, I remain – the ‘… -main’ bit in ‘remain’. It turns into ‘maneo’ in Latin, from which there is a noun ‘mansio’, a ‘staying-place’: a mansion. The Vulgate, the Latin translation of the Bible in the 4th century, largely by Jerome, which the Roman Catholic Church used till 1979, has ‘in domo Patris mansiones multae sunt’. William Tyndale’s translation in 1525, on which the King James Bible is based, just transliterated the same word, from ‘mansiones’ to ‘mansions’. Obviously the meaning of ‘mansion’ in English has evolved since the early 16th and 17th century, certainly since1611, when the Authorised Version came out. But it’s much more memorable than ‘rooms’, I feel – and it leads to a theological reflection.

Leaving aside the etymology, I have always loved the puzzle of contemplating how a house can itself contain mansions. It is almost as though the two up-two down cottage, in which I originally lived in Anyards Road when I first came to this area in 1990, somehow contained three or four of Eaton Park Road’s finest footballers’ palaces. If the kingdom of God is like that, a house with many mansions, I’ve thought, surely there is a strong message there, that the kingdom of God is literally beyond human comprehension, beyond the bounds of our logic!

If that was all there was in this Gospel, I think we would tend to give up on it. We would just throw up our hands in horror and say, ‘It’s all beyond me’. No one knows; and what no one knows no one tends to bother about. And that is, perhaps, Doubting Thomas’ point. ‘Lord, how can we know the way?’ What is it? Jesus answers, ‘I am: I am the way, the truth and the life’.

We can’t fully understand the workings of God. The world we live in is not one of these impossible pictures by MC Escher. Not a staircase that you climb, only to find that you are at the bottom of the same staircase. Not a hand holding a pencil, drawing a picture of a hand holding a pencil, drawing a hand… and so on. Nightmarish perfection, in which there is no beginning and no end.

We believe that Jesus was God – is God, in that he is beyond time. But crucially, he was, for a while, placed in space and time. He came to Palestine and he spent 33 years, living as a human being. He had a human family, a mother, a father, brothers and sisters. For three momentous years he went around with his 12 disciples lecturing to enormous crowds of people. If he had been around today, he would have become an Internet sensation, with millions of followers on YouTube and Twitter.

We believe that he was both God and man, because of the evidence that he went beyond what a mere man could do, most crucially, in coming back from the dead. But also, in all the other various miracles which Jesus did, he demonstrated his divine nature.

That may be a controversial proposition. If you don’t believe that Jesus was more than just human, then St John chapter 14 is not going to mean very much to you. Jesus is asserting that if you know him, then you know God.

There is another ‘dimension’ to God, if you like, which Jesus describes as being his Father, or ‘heaven’, even; it is beyond our comprehension, but nevertheless, real. I am the way, the truth and the life. If you follow me, you will get into one of those mansions, those mansions which look impossible but which are, really, to be found, on the holy mountain where the wolf lies down with the lamb.

So what does all this have to do with remembrance? In a sense, of course, remembrance is just as impossible for us as making sense of MC Escher. How can we remember, when we were not there? It isn’t so much remembrance as history, but that doesn’t make it any less real, and moreover, ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’, as George Santayana wrote. We could also say that history need not repeat itself, because if we know what is coming, we can avoid it.

If we look at the industrialised slaughter of the First World War and indeed the way in which the unfairness of the Treaty of Versailles led to the rise of Nazism and the Second World War, we might think that these great affairs of state, those great seismic movements in history, are outside the scope of what any of us as little individuals can possibly influence; but we can reflect that, just as the greatness of God is ineffable, immeasurable, unknowable, still God has come down as one human being on God’s holy Mountain, the kingdom of heaven, where ‘they shall not hurt or destroy’. The lion will lie down with the lamb and be friends. There are no nationalities in the kingdom of heaven. But there is love.

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