Archives for posts with tag: Methodist Church

Holy Kisses

By hughdbryant
May 12, 2025 //
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Sermon for Evensong on 11th May 2025, Easter 4

Psalms 113, 114

Isaiah 63:7-14

Luke 24:36-49

Peace be with You

You are very welcome, on this sunny afternoon, to the fastest-growing service in the Anglican church. Certainly in numbers attending, Evensong is where it’s at. That might seem a bit counterintuitive, when you think of the success of some of the great big evangelical churches such as Citizen Church here in Cardiff, which offer an entirely different way of worship, but apparently there are statistics to back it up.

I have from time to time tactfully enquired of members of the congregation what they particularly like about Evensong, and one of the more surprising answers which I have received was from a rather formidable lady of a certain age, who said that she particularly liked Evensong because there was ‘none of that shaking hands or kissing nonsense’.

Indeed I read once upon a time that our brothers and sisters in the Methodist Church had a bit of difficulty over exchanging the Peace as it became very popular among the teenage members of the congregation, who certainly weren’t shaking hands.

They could have relied on a theological justification, because all the biblical references which are relied on as the background to this part of the liturgy refer to the exchange of a ‘holy kiss’ – see Romans 16 verse 16, 1 Corinthians 16 verse 20, 2 Corinthians 13 verse 12 and other references in 1 Thessalonians and 1 Peter.

Be that as it may, we will not be exchanging the Peace in this service, although I am sure we are at peace with one another in this happy band of pilgrims here in Saint Peter’s.

But ‘Peace be with you’ – who said that? “Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, ‘Peace be with you.’” That’s in our New Testament lesson this evening. But also those were the first words that the new Pope, Leo XIV, spoke to the crowd at Saint Peter’s in Rome after he had been chosen by the conclave.

What a week to be thinking about peace! We have been celebrating V-E Day, peace in Europe at the end of the Second World War; and we have been hoping and praying for peace in Ukraine and in Gaza, in Sudan, in Syria, and in the Yemen; and most recently, between India and Pakistan.

Peace be with you! This is a message that an awful lot of people around the world need to hear. Peace is the result of expressions of brotherly love, of the kind of love, love for one’s neighbour, that Jesus made such a central part of his teaching.

So it’s entirely logical that the new pope should make this his first message; the new Pope, the new man in the line of apostolic succession, as it’s called, from Saint Peter. I think we’ve all spent a fair bit of time recently boning up on how the apostolic succession works, meaning how the Conclave works, so that excellent film, ‘Conclave’, has been very timely, and some of us have also enjoyed watching again the splendid imagined dialogue between the two previous popes in the film ‘The Two Popes’ with Anthony Hopkins and Jonathan Pryce in the starring roles.

Their real-life successor, Pope Leo, has begun his papacy with a message of peace, just like Jesus. I hope that the context of Pope Leo’s message will be looked back on in almost as wonderful a way as the context to the first time that these wonderful words, peace be with you, were uttered, by Jesus himself; because Jesus went on to demonstrate that he had risen from the dead: he wasn’t a ghost. You could touch him and feel him.

Last week we were reading about Doubting Thomas: Thomas said, ‘Unless I can touch him and feel him and put my hands where he was wounded, I will not believe that he has risen from the dead.’ And then Jesus appeared and gave Thomas the chance to do all those things; so Thomas realised who Jesus really was, that he was the Messiah, he was God on Earth.

This passage that was read to us tonight from Luke’s gospel is Luke’s version of the same story. He doesn’t mention Thomas, so this could be a slightly different way of looking at the miraculous events of the resurrection.

In a way, if you think of the story of doubting Thomas, what he says, and does, is really a way of reassuring you that the story is true. Thomas stands for all of us. We would need proof, especially of something so earth-shattering as raising somebody from the dead.

Luke has it a different way round, and it is possible that Luke’s proof is even more convincing than the live evidence of Thomas, because what Jesus does, to show to the disciples that he isn’t a ghost, that he’s real and that he really has risen from the dead, is to ask them for something to eat, and then to eat it in front of them. Obviously somebody who eats something has a physical presence; he is not a ghost.

I find the story of Jesus eating the fish very interesting, not just as a way of making this earth-shattering event more believable, (as ghosts don’t just eat their food and leave their plates clean in front of people), not just for that reason, but because the nuts and bolts of what Jesus did are very interesting in themselves, I think.

Our reading says, ‘They gave him a piece of broiled fish.’ ‘Broiled’ fish. What sort of fish do you think that is? Have you ever ordered ‘broiled’ fish in a restaurant? If you ordered it in any of our fine Penarth chippies, what would you expect to get?

At first, when I thought about this, I thought it was because we are using a version of the Bible called the New Revised Standard Version, ‘Anglicised edition’; and it’s called ‘anglicised’ because it is in fact an American Bible. Translated originally by an American team of scholars, it has been, or at least it claims to have been, revised in accordance with English English, as opposed to American English, by British scholars led by Professor John Barton.

But although I have a lot of respect for Professor Barton, I’m not sure that he has spotted all the Americanisms. The only broiled thing that I can think of is a type of steak called a New York broil. These days broiling is something you come across only in the USA.

But the funny thing is, if you actually look at the King James version of the Bible (1611), even as early as that, the fish is described as ‘broiled’. I think the explanation is that American English has actually kept some old usages – you know, they use some words which we would think of as archaic; for instance the word ‘gotten’, as in ‘he’s gotten himself into trouble’. ‘Broiled’ is one of those. It’s an old word for ‘roast’ or just generally ‘cooked’, so a better modern translation simply says ‘They offered him a piece of fish they had cooked which he took and ate before their eyes’ [NEB].

When you go back to the King James Bible and look at it, Jesus appears to have eaten an utterly disgusting combination, because in the King James it says that not only did he eat the broiled fish, but he also ate a honeycomb, he ate ‘a piece of broiled fish and a honeycomb’. When you get to the Revised Version (1881), where they have had access to better copies of the original manuscripts, the honeycomb is not mentioned in the main text, but is relegated to a side note, which says: “Some authorities have ‘and a honeycomb’”.

My instinct is that, say, a piece of cod and a honeycomb is a truly disgusting combination – although I have to tell you that Kenny says, from an African point of view, that they are both individually nice-tasting foods; and Africans tend not to mind combining different tastes, so she wouldn’t have any particular difficulty with having a piece of fish and honeycomb at the same time.

But I think the more likely explanation is that an early manuscript contained a mistake. In the original Greek a ‘piece’ of fish and ‘honey’ are both very similar words: μέρος, a piece, μέλι, honey; mer-/mel-… I think it could be that one got mixed up for the other in the text, and so that might be how this mythical honeycomb crept in.

And the thought that what I consider to be a revolting combination, for someone else, is not, but is delicious, is indeed worth considering. We are what we eat. I am a beefeater; you might be a ‘cheese-eating surrender monkey’ and my friend in Hamburg is a Kraut (which is the name for a cabbage in German). So what was Jesus? He ate the fish – so he was alive. And he was a man, ‘a man in full’, as Tom Wolfe would have described him. Not a ghost. What he was offering was peace, brotherly love. And to remember that, we are encouraged to greet one another with a holy kiss.

But before you get too excited, the ‘kiss’ is translated from a Greek word φίλημα which doesn’t have sex overtones but does mean brotherly love and affection, so I think you can maintain proper British reserve next time the Peace comes around. But just think what the brotherhood of man brings, what variety of approaches, of tastes. True peace. So with Pope Leo, with Jesus himself, I say, Peace be with you!

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New Year 2023

By hughdbryant
January 1, 2023 //
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Sermon for New Year’s Day 2023 at St Dochdwys, Llandough

The Naming and Circumcision of Jesus

May God be in my mouth, and in my speaking. Amen.

Before I say anything else, let us give thanks to God for the work of Emeritus Pope Benedict, and pray for our Catholic friends, brothers and sisters in Christ, as they mourn his passing. And although the ball may be the wrong shape, we mourn the passing also of the great footballer Pelé. May both these great figures rest in peace and rise in glory.

Numbers 6.22-27

Psalm 8

Galatians 4.4-7

Luke 2.15-21

https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=538997803

It’s a bit of an upside-down sermon this morning. Indeed if you’re still waking up after last night, you might have thought that our service was back to front. Our first lesson was the blessing. It is the most beautiful blessing, which is called the Aaronic blessing. It was passed on to Aaron by Moses. But a blessing usually comes at the end of the service. It probably will still come at the end as well – Jimmy may well say it today. This is it, from the Old Testament lesson:

May the Lord bless you and keep you;

may the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you; may the Lord lift up his countenance upon you, and give you peace.

Don’t get up. It’s not the end of the service yet! Because the last bit of it in the lesson from Numbers, just after the blessing, says this:

‘So they shall put my name on the Israelites, and I will bless them’.

It is about the people of God being given their name, Israel, which means literally in Hebrew, people who have wrestled with God. That went back to Jacob, wrestling with the angel. So Jacob became Israel and the whole of the old Testament had a theme running through it, of the relationship between the chosen people of God, the Israelites, and God himself. It was like all the best love affairs, pretty bumpy. People who really do love each other have rows and they do fall out. That was certainly true of the Israelites and their God. They worshipped the Baals and the Golden Calf – and God punished them. (See Exodus 32 and 1 Kings 12).

This story of the Israelites getting their name is at the beginning of their story, and it’s appropriate on 1st January to think of our religious beginnings and where they might lead. Now today we are focusing on the other end of the Bible, on baby Jesus – I was going to say, on Jesus’ ‘christening’ – but that sort of thing worked differently in those days. Instead the baby would be named, and if he was a male baby, circumcised as part of the Jewish tradition. The angel had told Mary that his name would be Jesus. That name means, God saves us, God is our salvation. So we have moved from wrestling with God, Israel, to salvation through God, Jesus.

The mighty God who spoke through the burning bush to Moses, the God who was capable of tremendous wrath and destruction, has now come, with all that power, to be concentrated into a tiny baby. That is the miracle of Christmas. We are perhaps none the wiser about exactly what God looks like, apart from just being a baby. In the blessing, with God lifting up the light of his countenance upon us, we get the feeling that there is someone up there, beaming down with a beautiful smile. But we can’t actually see that God: No one could. But people could see Jesus and they did see him. He certainly lifted up the light of his countenance on everyone he met.

Although we can’t see Him, what is our relationship with God? In St Paul’s letter to the Galatians, God puts us alongside that little baby, so that we are children, children of God, calling God ‘Abba’, which is more like ‘Daddy’ rather than ‘Father’ in the Aramaic we are told. Saint Paul goes on to suggest that, as children, we are heirs; we inherit the blessings of God.

But there is a missing bit. We need to go back a bit to the Old Testament and look again at the people of Israel, the people wrestling with God. The heart of their relationship was what was known as God’s covenant with Israel. What is a covenant? As a lawyer, I can tell you that a covenant is an agreement or a contract. The two parties agree together and they agree to do things one for the other. That’s it. It’s very simple.

The covenant between God and Israel was indeed very simple. The Israelites agreed to worship God as the one true God, no other gods, and in return God promised to bless them and keep them, as the blessing says. And it’s a very useful idea, this covenant.

What can we say at this service, at the beginning of 2023? We have to cope with all these challenges and difficulties in the world ahead of us:

– the war in Ukraine,

– the cost of living crisis here at home,

– the energy crisis, where we are all worrying because we can’t afford to pay three or four times what we used to pay for our houses to be heated,

– and the pay crisis, all the strikes which the public servants, and in particular the nurses and ambulance crews, are involved in, because their pay has fallen back so much that many are now forced to go to food banks, which seems to me to be a very unfair development after all their bravery and sacrifice brought us all out clapping on our doorsteps while the Covid pandemic was on.

I hope that you will not think that this falls outside the bounds of what a preacher is supposed to cover, but it does seem to me that we were, and we are, very happy to rely on these dedicated public servants, and now we must provide them with a decent living. And, most importantly, there are theological reasons for supporting the workers’ fight for better pay and conditions of work.

Frankly our government of millionaires in London needs to think again, quickly, about this. We were all made equal in God’s image: not so rich and so poor, all in the same country – the sixth richest country in the world. Remember Jesus’ story known as Dives and Lazarus, the Rich Man and Lazarus, in Luke 16:19-31. Jesus surely didn’t approve of such a huge gap between the rich and the poor.

So as we embark on 2023, as we see our world facing all these challenges, what do we, as the people of God, the people in the church, do about it?

Quite a lot of Christians do something every New Year, which seems to me to be a great way of preparing themselves to tackle these challenges; and that is, they renew their covenant with God.

It’s an idea which started with John Wesley and the early Methodists. For Methodists the first service in a new year is still known as Covenant Sunday. The ‘people called Methodists’, as they used to call themselves, have recited the same or very similar words every year since 1780 to make their covenant, their agreement, with the Lord. I’ll give you a quick preview, and then we will say the whole of this covenant prayer together later on in this service. So this is just to introduce you to it if you haven’t heard it before. What the Methodists pray goes like this.

We are no longer our own, but thine.

Put us to what thou wilt, rank us with whom thou wilt.

Put us to doing, put us to suffering.

Let us be employed for thee or laid aside for thee,

exalted for thee or brought low for thee.

Let us be full, let us be empty.

Let us have all things, let us have nothing.

We freely and heartily yield all things to thy pleasure and disposal.

And now, O glorious and blessed God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit,

thou art ours, and we are thine.

So be it.

And the covenant which we have made on earth,

let it be ratified in heaven.

Amen.

‘Put us to doing, put us to suffering;

let us be employed for thee or laid side for thee ….

And now, O glorious and blessed God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit,

thou art ours, and we are thine.

So be it.

And the covenant which we have made on earth,

let it be ratified in heaven.’

Those are John Wesley’s words from 1780. They’ve been repeated every year since. That’s it. We have to do what the Lord commands us to do, just as Jesus commanded his disciples; you know, not having two cloaks, letting other people go before us, so the last shall become first: loving our enemies, not turning our backs on poor people like Dives did, on people like nurses, and instead doing things that may not necessarily be that good for us as individuals but which reflect God’s love, and which Jesus told us to do.

‘Let us be full, let us be empty.

Let us have all things, let us have nothing.’

This is the agreement which we are invited to make, and which should be our guiding principle in the year to come. We have moved from Israel, wrestling with God, to Jesus, God is our salvation.

So let’s agree on that. Let’s make that covenant. Let’s do what we have to do in order to keep our side of the bargain. It’s not just a question of words. But if we do, if we do do more than just talk: then, the blessing will come; and now, here, it will be in the right place, at the end of the service, but it will be more than that: it will be a continuing blessing. The Lord will bless you and keep you. The Lord will make his face to shine upon you, so that it will, truly, be a happy New Year.

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Forecasting and Ministering

By hughdbryant
July 2, 2017 //
0

Sermon for Evensong on the Third Sunday after Trinity, 2nd July 2017
1 Samuel 28:3-19, Luke 17:20-37

Like a lot of military leaders in history, before his big battle with the Philistines, King Saul, first king of Israel, wanted to consult a seer, someone who could discern what God’s will would be in the battle to come. Was he destined to win or lose?

Saul wanted to ask God, through a priest or, perhaps more controversially, through a medium, a witch, a ‘woman that hath a familiar spirit’, who would be able to discern the will of God, that is, she would be able to discern what would happen. And he was taken to see the Witch of Endor.

What do you think a ‘familiar spirit’ might be? Perhaps it’s a ‘witch’s familiar’ – usually a black cat. But I think it sounds a bit too high-falutin’: another modern translation suggests that the whole expression is simply a synonym for what we would now call a ‘medium’.

Anyway, divination, foretelling the future by casting lots, or examining the entrails of an animal which had been sacrificed, was common in the ancient world – although even then, there was a feeling that this might be some kind of magic trick, just superstition.

Saul persuaded the Witch of Endor to bring back the spirit of the great judge and prophet Samuel from the dead. The ghostly Samuel duly appeared, and forecast that Saul and the Israelites would be defeated. It was a shock to Saul to hear what was going to happen.

The Witch linked Saul’s imminent defeat to the fact that he hadn’t obeyed the voice of the Lord, and hadn’t ‘executed his fierce wrath against Amalek’, so God would foresake the Israelites.

And then you heard the story, in St Luke’s Gospel in the New Testament, of the Pharisees wanting Jesus to forecast the future: what day will the Kingdom of God – or perhaps the end of the world – come? Jesus firmly told them that you couldn’t tell the answer by ‘observation’ – a translation from a Greek word which has a connotation of close observation in a superstitious sense – ‘reading the runes’ or some sort of divination, like going to see the Witch of Endor.

Jesus said, in effect, that you could not discern the will of God by reading tea-leaves or ghastly rituals with the innards of dead animals. The kingdom of God wasn’t ‘out there’ to be observed or divinated for. ‘For behold, the kingdom of God is within you,’ he said.

We could just pause at that point, and reflect on the whole business of fortune-telling and divination. I think that it is open to a logical, philosophical challenge.

If you go back to Saul calling up the spirit of Samuel from the dead – and any of those military examples, somehow asking God how the battle would go the next day – the logical problem is that, unless you believe that we have no free will – unless you think we are rigidly programmed, so that whoever discovers the programme can predict what we’ll do in a given set of circumstances – then at least in theory, you can always react to the prediction, to the prophecy, so as to avoid the outcome predicted.

I’ve always thought it was rather a weak bit of that film ‘Gone with the Wind’ when Scarlett O’Hara tells her father not to chase after someone on his horse, because if he does, he’ll fall off and kill himself: so he chases after the man, falls off, and kills himself. He could have avoided that, I’ve always thought.

So Saul could have decided not to fight the Philistines. But he didn’t, in fact; he didn’t take avoiding action, and so the prophecy actually came true. There was perhaps an extra factor, in that God’s will had resulted from his anger at what Saul had been doing, so arguably it wouldn’t have made much difference if he’d decided to pick another quarrel.

This is about how we discern the will of God. What does God want of us? According to the prophet Micah, ‘He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?’ [Micah 7:8]

It isn’t a question of going to Mystic Meg or reading the horoscopes at the back of the News Chronicle. When will the kingdom of God come in? For those Pharisees addressing Jesus, of course, the kingdom meant victory over the occupying power, over the Romans, kicking them out of Palestine. But Jesus offered another vision, that the kingdom had come really, when someone accepted him into their hearts, when they were converted. ‘The kingdom of God is within you!’

How do we encounter the kingdom of God? Should we look out for mediums and diviners? I think not. Who is like a prophet today? Surely we should look to our spiritual shepherds, who look over us as a flock – our ministers in our churches. Of course it’s not the case that only through a priest that we can approach God: since the Reformation we have had the idea of the Priesthood of all Believers too.

This is an especially apt weekend to think about who our prophets and pastors, our shepherds, are. It is the time known in the Church as Petertide, after the feast day of SS Peter and Paul on Thursday. It is traditionally the time when priests and deacons in the Church of England are ordained. In Guildford Cathedral today and yesterday, yesterday morning was a service for the ordination of priests, and today there were two services, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, for the ordination of deacons. You will remember that when people are ordained, they are first ordained Deacon, which is a sort of L plate ministry – you can’t celebrate Holy Communion or marry people – and a year later you are ‘priested’, you are made a priest, fully ordained and fully able to celebrate the sacraments.

Why the link with St Peter? It’s because of what is called the ‘apostolic succession’, the originally Catholic idea that Christian ministry is derived from the earliest apostles, chief among whom was St Peter. The idea is that πρεσβύτεροι, elders, presbyters, ministers, are appointed by laying on of hands by the Pope – who is said to derive his authority under God from his direct line of succession from St Peter – and so they are all in a line of ministry which comes down from St Peter.

The authority of priests in the Church of England is said by Roman Catholics not to be in the line of apostolic succession, because of Henry VIII. It is the fact that Henry refused to acknowledge the authority of the Pope, but instead made himself ‘fidei defensor’, ‘defender of the faith,’ which is what FD means on coins, after the Pope, rather prematurely, had given him this title), rather than that the C of E is a Protestant church. Our theology is said to be ‘catholic but reformed’. But despite what the Roman Catholics might say, in the C of E, we also think that our bishops and priests have been ordained in a due apostolic succession from St Peter.

Now, this week, this Petertide, there’s been a happy new development in relation to apostolic succession.

John Wesley – who was an Anglican vicar all his life – found that there were no bishops to ordain ministers for service in the new American colonies, when he visited in 1738, and so he eventually decided to ordain some ministers himself. This led to his ‘Methodist’ societies becoming a separate denomination in the church, although they had started as something rather like bible study groups, home groups, within Anglican parishes. You would go to the parish church in the morning, and to the Methodist ‘class’ in the afternoon.

There have been various efforts to bring Methodism and Anglicanism back together. The two churches believe the same things, and some theological colleges teach Anglicans and Methodists alongside each other – for example The Queen’s Foundation in Birmingham. There was an attempt to join the two churches in 1972, which was turned down by the Anglican General Synod, and in the early 2000s there were Anglican-Methodist Covenant meetings, aimed at paving the way for unity – not losing each church’s separate identity, but recognising the validity of each other’s ministry and teaching. A stumbling-block was the question of apostolic succession. Except in the USA, the Methodist Church does not have bishops. There are ‘circuit superintendents’ in Methodism, who function much like bishops. The former Methodist minister in Cobham and Leatherhead, Rev. Ian Howarth, is the Chair of the District of the Methodist Church in Birmingham – effectively, he is the Methodist Bishop of Birmingham, in all respects except for the fact that he has not been ordained by the laying on of hands by a bishop.

Now this week a new report has been published by the ‘Faith and Order’ bodies of both churches, called ‘Mission and Ministry in Covenant’. It is a set of proposals to make each church’s ministers fully equivalent. [See https://www.churchofengland.org/media/4002173/ministry-and-mission-in-covenant-revised-final-draft-formatted.pdf%5D

The churches have agreed to recommend to their governing bodies – to General Synod for us and to the Methodist Conference for them – that there will be Methodist bishops, originally ordained by three C of E bishops, and then, as more and more Methodist bishops are ordained, eventually the apostolic succession will extend to both churches. In time there will be Methodist ministers serving as vicars in parish churches, and C of E priests leading Methodist congregations.

I’m very pleased. Both my grandfathers, and one great-grandfather, were Methodist ministers, and I was brought up a Methodist. My last Methodist ‘class ticket’, as the membership card is called, is dated 1997. We used to have an evening service every third Sunday which alternated between Cobham Methodist Church and St Andrew’s. For various reasons, eventually I decided to become an Anglican: I’m not alone in Cobham. There are at least two Methodist Local Preachers, which is their name for Readers, at St Andrew’s.

We had a very friendly Anglican-Methodist Covenant discussion group: I hope we do it again. It will be a joyful way to show how ‘these Christians do love each other’.

So let us remember that God will not show himself to us through Mystic Meg: that the kingdom of God is ‘within us’, and that means at least partly here in our churches. And the great news is that at least two of the churches are moving closer together in love and fellowship. What a splendid witness that will be.

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That would be an Ecumenical Matter

By hughdbryant
January 19, 2014 //
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Sermon for Mattins on the Third Sunday after Epiphany, 19th January 2014, at St Mary’s
1 Corinthians 1:1-9 – The Week of Prayer for Christian Unity

In Father Ted, whenever anyone asked Father Jack a question he couldn’t answer, he would say, ‘That would be an ecumenical matter’. What is an ecumenical matter, really? It means a question of the organisation, the οικουμένη, meaning the world, the set-up, of the church. We use the term ‘ecumenism’ to cover the whole question of Christian unity.

At four o’clock this afternoon I will be going – as I hope some of you will too – to the Methodist Church in Cedar Road, for the annual service, arranged by Churches Together in Cobham and Oxshott, to mark the beginning of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity.

In our first lesson today St Paul begins his first letter to the church at Corinth, addressing them all as ‘saints’, ‘saints, with all that in every place call upon the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, both theirs and ours.’

‘Both theirs and ours’ – their and our what? The modern translations, for example the New English Bible, say, ‘their Lord as well as ours.’ But the Greek says literally that Paul is writing to those who are called together in Corinth, called to be saints, with all those who call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ in every place, of theirs and of ours.

It perhaps doesn’t make a vast difference, but what it means is that there were different bodies of Christians in different places, even in the earliest days. There was a church at Corinth, and it had some distinctive features.

Well, today I shall go, I shall go back, to the Methodist chapel. I was brought up a Methodist. Both my grandpas and one great-grandpa were Methodist ministers; and indeed I worshipped in the Methodist Church, was a member of the Methodist Church, until 1996. So in some senses, going to the service this afternoon will be like coming home.

But it won’t really be, because the service this afternoon is actually going to be run by another of the churches in Cobham, which uses the Methodist chapel as their base for worship too, and that is Cobham Community Church, which describes itself as a ‘congregation of Bookham Baptist Church’. Although they don’t say so very obviously, they are Baptists.

In Cobham, Oxshott and Stoke D’Abernon there are Anglicans, Catholics, Methodists, Baptists, United Reformeds, Scottish Presbyterians: six different denominations, just in our little group of villages. This Churches Together area includes about 17,000 people, of whom about 4,000 claim to belong to one or other of the churches here.

I expect that, this afternoon, the worship may be strange – well, strange to me: and, dare I say, not something that I will necessarily find very congenial. But I’m certainly ready to be pleasantly surprised. I should say straightway that going to church is not a matter of entertainment; so to some extent it’s not relevant whether I like the worship or not.

A better question might be whether the worship is worthy; whether it is a proper sacrifice of praise: if it is a sacrament, whether it is ‘an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace given unto us’, [The Book of Common Prayer, A Catechism, p.294].

For some reason the first lesson, from 1 Corinthians, set for today in the Lectionary, stops at verse 9, and is just the opening greeting from St Paul’s letter, where he praises the Corinthians, acknowledges them to be saints, and says that they are ‘enriched by the grace of God, so that they come behind in no gift.’ They are not mere runners-up in the the race for gifts.

But if you read on, you immediately get to the passage which is much more commonly used in the context of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity: ‘Now I beseech you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that ye all speak the same thing and that there be no divisions among you, but that ye be perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgement.’ He goes on to say, ‘Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were ye baptised in the name of Paul?’

In other words, Paul started to criticise the fact that even then, the church had factions in it. I’m not sure when a faction becomes a denomination, or indeed, when a faction becomes a schism, but it does seem that, even in the very earliest church, there were differences of opinion about how best to express the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Today, as we have seen, even locally, we have a whole variety of denominations. The denominations stand for different interpretations of the gospel of Christ. Even within the Anglican church, there are a wide variety of shades of opinion about our faith. There are threats of schism, splits in the church, over the question what we should believe about human sexuality, for example.

The African Anglicans, in general, and the North Americans, are diametrically opposed, and we Englishmen try to sit on the fence. And so, each year, we embark on the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. Dare I say that I don’t think that we are approaching this question of Christian unity in quite the straightforward way that St Paul recommends?

He says, ‘I beseech you that ye all speak the same thing, and that ye be perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgement.’ But I have to confess that I don’t have the same mind and the same judgement as my friends in the Catholic Church, or my friends in the Cobham Community Church, or in the United Reformed Church. I probably do have the same ‘mind’ as my friends in the Methodist Church, because by and large they believe the same things that we Anglicans do. John and Charles Wesley were Anglican vicars till they died.

Although even saying that, an amber light goes on in my brain, because we Anglicans have such a wide variety of belief: so it might be better to say that the Methodists and some Anglicans share common ground.

Of course, historically, the two biggest splits in the church were those between the Western and Eastern Orthodox churches first of all, between Constantinople and Rome, and then between the Protestants and the Catholics. Article XIX of the 39 Articles says,

‘The visible church of Christ is a congregation of faithful men, in the which the pure Word of God is preached, and the Sacraments be duly administered according to Christ’s ordinance in all those things that of necessity are requisite to the same.

As the Church of Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Antioch, have erred; so also the Church of Rome hath erred, not only in their living and manner of Ceremonies, but also in matters of Faith.’

So said Archbishop Cranmer in 1542. It’s still officially the belief of the Church of England.

It doesn’t sound like we have followed St Paul’s instructions to the church in Corinth. But I’m bound to say, the question which occurs to me is whether it matters. Never mind, for a minute, the divisions between Christians: think about the divisions between the various religions – or certainly, the so-called religions of the book, that is, Judaism, Islam and Christianity. All of them make claims to be the exclusive way to the true God. ‘No man cometh unto the Father but by me’ [John 14:6].

The problem is that this whole area is of the highest importance. Nothing could be more important than that we correctly understand, and have the right attitude towards, God, the creator and sustainer of everything. That then leads on to the question, ‘What is true, what is truth?’ Clearly there’s room for a lot of disagreement and different understandings.

In 1834, Thomas Arnold, who became the famous headmaster of Rugby School and was at some time the Regius Professor of Modern History in Oxford and a fellow of Oriel College, wrote to the Professor of Moral Philosophy, R.D. Hampden, saying, ‘Your view of the difference between Christian Truth’ – capital C, capital T – ‘and Theological opinion is one which I have long cherished.’ Hampden had said that he made a distinction between religion, or divine revelation on the one hand, and theological opinions on the other, suggesting that Christians were in broad agreement over the first: everyone broadly recognised the basic revelation of God in Jesus Christ, but only human interpretations of divine word caused Christians to differ over the second, over theological opinion of what the gospel meant. [Catto, J., ed., 2013, Oriel College, a History: Oxford, OUP, p.336]

But of course, if you say that every word in the Bible is literally true, then there are all sorts of difficulties. You may have to believe that the world was created in 4004 BC, and that Methuselah was over 900 years old, for example. Blood-curdling consequences arise if you follow literally the prescriptions in Leviticus and Deuteronomy. A rebellious child can be stoned to death (Deuteronomy 21:18): men can be polygamous. Abraham, Jacob, David and Solomon all had several wives: slavery is acceptable (Lev. 25:44-45).

So there is in the Church of England a helpful compromise, according to which our understanding of Christian truth in the Bible can be informed by reason and tradition. But, however reasonable that sounds, not all Christians would agree.

So these days, we tend not to be so exercised about the divisions of the church. The ecumenical movement, things like the World Council of Churches, which had a general assembly recently in South Korea, doesn’t worry so much about trying to merge the various denominations together, but rather there is an understanding that all of us ‘live in more than one place at once’ as Canon John Nurser, of the ecumenical group Christianity and the Future of Europe, put it recently. [John Nurser, book review, ‘Christian unity reconsidered’, in Church Times, 17th January 2014, p. 23].

Ecumenism now works in trying to reconcile the churches, not only one with another, but also with the challenges outside. So the World Council of Churches was united in its resistance to apartheid in South Africa and the oppression of poor people in Latin America. More recently, the World Council has become concerned with reconciling lifestyles in the West with the sustainability of creation. We can all agree that we must respect God’s creation: but we may not agree on the details of how we go around it, because we are ‘differently situated’. [Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women]

It’s easy to talk about drawing a distinction between divine revelation and theological opinion; but ultimately everything comes to us the lens of our human experience. We are all different; we all have different experience. Therefore even our understanding of religious truth is likely to be different.

Actually, St Paul’s advice to the church in Corinth may be capable of a rather more mundane explanation, namely, that he thought that they had forgotten that the Gospel came from Jesus Christ, from God, and not from Paul and Apollos, or the various other preachers. Remember, said St Paul: the preachers were preaching the Gospel of Jesus; they weren’t themselves divine.

Thomas Arnold’s distinction between Christian Truth and theological opinion may not be a final answer, but I think that it is still quite a useful way for us to look at our friends in the other churches. There is a core of belief which Christians all share. But the theological interpretation of that belief, of course, goes in all sorts of different ways. We should, I suggest, not try to change each other, but simply respect each other’s differences. After all, those of us, who have experienced mergers at work, know that mergers and takeovers are very rarely an unmixed blessing.

I do hope that you will join me this afternoon at 4 o’clock. We will join with our fellow Christians from Cobham, Stoke and Oxshott, to worship God together. It will be different from what we are used to. But that’s all right.

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