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Not Ontology

By hughdbryant
December 28, 2025 //
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Sermon for the First Sunday of Christmas, 28th December 2025, at Holy Nativity Church, Penarth

Isaiah 63.7-9

Hebrews 2.10-end

Matthew 2.13-end

Lessons: https://tinyurl.com/yrwdhazj 

One of the nice things that happen here is that when we say morning prayers at 9 o’clock most mornings at All Saints, Jimmy and I often pause and talk about what we’ve just been reading in the Bible. Some of these little excursions lead us down very interesting paths. Last week we were beginning to talk about Anselm’s Ontological Argument for the existence of God.

I said that perhaps I could work our thoughts into this sermon today; but in the nicest and gentlest possible way, Jimmy steered me away from that idea, because he said that everyone will be a bit sleepy after so much fun over Christmas and really all that is needed is a simple homily to assure everyone of God’s love and care for us through his son Jesus Christ.

Well obviously I’m a bit sad not to be able to bring ontology into it, but I have to admit that Jimmy may have a point. We need something more straightforward this morning; so the message is indeed that God shows his love for us, because he sent his only son Jesus Christ to take upon himself the burden of our sin and to show us the way to eternal life. 

That’s basically what we say when we say the Creed. The joy, for Christians like us, is that we are celebrating the birth of a baby who was Emmanuel, God with us. God in human form, simultaneously human and divine.

Our lessons today from the Bible give you various angles on that basic position. The prophecy in Isaiah celebrating all the gracious deeds of the Lord, all the things that he has done for his chosen people, the people of Israel, ‘according to the abundance of his steadfast love’, because he said, ‘Surely they are my people, children who will not deal falsely’. 

That is looking forward to the coming of the Messiah, who would be the saviour of the chosen people, if in no other way because the Jews at the time of Jesus were ruled by the Romans as part of the Roman Empire. One thing that they believed the Messiah would do would be to make them independent again. 

But as the letter to the Hebrews makes plain, this Messiah would suffer alongside the people whom he came to save. Unless he suffered in the same way they did, he couldn’t really be their Messiah, their saviour: 

‘Since, therefore, the children share flesh and blood, he himself likewise shared the same things, so that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil,…’ [Hebrews 2:14-15]

And then we had the story in Matthew of Jesus’ escape from the wrath of Herod and Herod’s ‘massacre of the innocents’, as it is called, which is a story which is not found in any of the other gospels, but is in Matthew’s maybe because Matthew thought that something had happened which was very similar to what had happened to Moses in his infancy – if you remember, the story of the baby in the bulrushes, because Pharaoh wanted to kill all the firstborn sons of the Hebrews, the story in Exodus [Ex. 1] in the Old Testament. Perhaps Matthew wanted to write Jesus up in the way he did in order to show that Jesus too was very special, in that he was in the same line as Moses. 

All those bits of our Bible passages are aimed at illustrating how Jesus was at the same time human and divine; he was described as the son of God. It’s very difficult literally to understand that, and even in the earliest times some of the early Christian fathers found it difficult to reconcile the idea that Jesus was God but at the same time that he was the son of God. 

But one thing that we can say for sure is that all these passages would have made very good sense to you if you were a Jewish person living in the first century, brought up on prophecies of the coming of the Messiah. 

But let’s fast forward to today. How much of what we’ve been reading about really makes sense to us today? In one sense we can say we are on the same page as the early Christians. We can say, in the words of the Nicene creed, which dates back to the fourth century, ‘We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth…’ but arguably that’s the only bit that we are reasonably sure of. If we believe in God, we do believe in the creator, the maker of heaven and earth. 

We do believe in Jesus, in the sense that it’s not controversial that he is a historical figure. But apart from that, there’s very little that we can say about him that is historical, in the sense that what we know about the Battle of Hastings is historical. 

Somebody has pointed out that although he lived for about 33 years, the gospels give us details of at most about 40 days of Jesus’ life. Nevertheless, within that very short time, Jesus said and did things which have changed the world and which continue to influence what we say and do, 2500 years later. 

We just don’t know how to explain the big miracles, the Virgin Birth, or the Resurrection, or the miracles which Jesus did in healing people and even in one case, Lazarus, bringing someone back to life after they were dead.

So is it just a very beautiful fairytale? You know, pretty much on a level with the beautiful crib services on Christmas Eve; really, stories for the children, but not something that the grown-ups take much notice of. And yet – there are still millions and millions of people throughout the world – and the numbers are growing very steadily, faster than in any other religion – who don’t think that it is just a fairy story.

I heard a really good sermon once, given by an Oxford philosophy professor (1), in which he didn’t go into abstruse detail like the Ontological Problem, but rather he just simply asked, ‘What if it’s true?’

 ‘What if it’s true?’ A really good illustration of that move from just thinking about God and Jesus in the abstract, as some kind of mythical, theoretical thing, to being able to say that the story of Jesus shows that God not only exists but that he actually takes an interest in us, cares for us, is this. 

This is what happened to John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist Church, on May 24, 1738.  This is what he wrote about it in his journal.

‘In the evening I went very unwillingly to a society in Aldersgate Street, where one was reading Luther’s Preface to the Epistle to the Romans. About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.’(2)

His faith changed from being an intellectual exercise to an experience in his heart and soul. He knew without a doubt that he was loved by God and saved through the grace of Jesus Christ.

What if it’s true, indeed? I hope that we will all be able to experience something like what John Wesley experienced, because if the message ‘clicks’, our lives will be changed. 

So do take this thought home with you. 

Think and pray, what if? What if it is true? Then, as St Paul said,

‘Behold, I shew you a mystery: we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed.’ [1 Cor.15:51-52]

Notes 

(1) Prof. Brian Leftow, now William P. Alston Chair And Distinguished Professor of the Philosophy of Religion at Rutgers University, formerly Nolloth Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion at Oriel College, Oxford.

(2)  John Wesley’s Journal Entry 24 May 1738, accessed at https://tinyurl.com/38fj843s on 27th Dec 2025

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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 //
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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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A Dreamcoat or a Rocket?

By hughdbryant
May 6, 2024 //
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Sermon for the second week in Lent, preached on 20th February 2024


Genesis 41.46 – 42.5
Galatians 4.8-20

Can we swap places for a minute? Would you come up here and see things as your preacher does, or maybe on your way out, let me know what you feel? We’ve got to deal with two stories today, the first one being Joseph and the amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.

Joseph’s brothers were jealous of his natty outfit, his coat of many colours, and when they were all on a journey through the desert, they chucked him into a pit, intending to sell him into slavery to the next bunch of traders coming through with their camel train. But unfortunately for them, some other spice traders came across him, pulled him out of the pit and took him away to Egypt. where they sold him to the Egyptian government, to Pharaoh, as a slave.

But Joseph prospered. He did a good job, and eventually, with various twists and turns in the story, he ended up being effectively Pharaoh’s viceroy, running the administration of the country. His secret was that he could interpret dreams. He was a kind of diviner, a seer.

He saw the future in a dream and realised that the crops would fail, and he would need to build up a stockpile of grain, if widespread famine in Egypt was to be avoided; so when the crops duly failed, and the famine broke out, Joseph sold grain to all and sundry and became more and more influential, owning more and more land as people run out of money and had to give him their land in return for food.

Among the people who were affected by the famine was Jacob, living in Canaan. Jacob was Joseph’s father, but he had been told that Joseph had died, torn apart by wild beasts, his brothers having shown their father the coat of many colours, stained with the blood of animals, to simulate the remains of a tussle to the death.

Jacob sent the brothers over to Egypt from Canaan, where they were, to buy grain, not knowing that they were about to buy it from the brother whom they thought they had abandoned to an unknown fate in the desert.

They didn’t know it was that long lost brother that they were buying from, and as you will remember, there is a thrilling story full of suspense about Joseph toying with his awful brothers, and making them think that they were going to be wrongly accused of stealing a whole load of grain from Pharaoh so that they would meet a dreadful fate. Then, at the last minute, the tables were turned and Joseph revealed himself as their brother.

You can imagine that it must’ve been a real ‘Oh something moment’ for them, quite a shock. Imagine how they must have felt. They must have thought that the most likely thing would be would be for their younger brother, who was now in such a powerful position, to get his own back on them; that it would not turn out well for them.

The lovely thing is, in this story, that Joseph didn’t do that. In fact he forgave his brothers, and invited them to bring their father over from Canaan to where they could live in Egypt in a land of plenty. Joseph didn’t blame them because, according to the account in the book of Genesis, he reasoned that his whole story, being abandoned and sold into slavery, and then working his way up with Pharaoh so that he became the head of the government of Egypt, was God’s will, was what God had intended, and no humans, certainly not his brothers, were really responsible or to be blamed.

What a wonderful story! That’s one of the two pieces we are looking at this morning. The other one is part of Saint Paul’s great letter to the Christians in Galatia, which is part of modern day Turkey. This reads almost like one side of a telephone conversation.

We don’t really know what Paul was responding to, and what the Galatians were saying to him. We can only try to draw inferences from what he is saying.

You wouldn’t pick this passage in the letter to the Galatians. I think if somebody asked you what the letter is all about, the bits which everybody quotes are the passage where he says that you are all sons of God in union with Christ Jesus. ‘Baptised into union with him, you have all put on Christ as a garment. There is no such thing as Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female. You are all one person in Christ Jesus’. That comes at the end of chapter 3. and then, at the end of chapter 5, he talks about the signs of being led by the Holy Spirit. ‘The harvest of the spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, fidelity, gentleness, and self-control’. These are the qualities that come when you are a good Christian.

But these two famous passages are not what we are looking at today. This bit is all about the Galatians kind-of hedging their bets about what they really believed in.

They would be Greeks living in the Roman Empire, and you would remember that every Roman house had its household gods, Lares and Penates, and of course, in the Greek world, there was the Pantheon, on Mount Olympus; Zeus, and Hera, and all the other gods, each one representing and upholding a particular sphere of influence: so Ares, or Mars, was the god of war, for example.

The big difference between the theology of the Romans and Greeks and Judeo-Christian theology, (because Christianity originated in Judaism – Jesus was a Jew) was that whereas the Greeks and Romans worshipped lots of different gods, the Christians, as well as the Jews, worshipped one God, one true God, and by and large, they did not make statues or paint pictures of the one true God. He didn’t really have a name – ‘I am who I am’, he said – and certainly in the Jewish tradition, only priests could see God and not be burned up in the experience. ‘Immortal, invisible, God only wise’ sums it up.

But the Galatians wanted to have it both ways. They wanted to go back to the old gods as well, just in case. And St Paul got very cross with them. He said it was a retrograde step and that they would no longer be able to be saved and gain eternal life, if they were enslaved by their worship of elemental spirits, as he called them. it could just have been earth, wind, fire, and water, the basic elements, but whatever it was, Saint Paul was very frustrated by the Galatians’ wanting to worship those elemental spirits as well as the one true God as revealed in Jesus Christ.

So on the one hand, we have the story of Joseph and the amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and all the other, a rather bad-tempered rocket written by Paul to the Galatians.

So – imagine you are up here. What do you say about those two passages? What lessons can we draw from them? I would be tempted, I have to say, to draw out how generous Joseph was. He was almost as saintly as Jesus wanted us to be in his Sermon on the Mount. Love your enemies. Turn the other cheek. Certainly not an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth where those awful brothers were concerned.

But I suspect that in the wider sweep of the story of the people of Israel, Joseph’s kindness rather gets blotted out. This is all part of the story of Israel being enslaved, and then freed, and then finding a place in the promised land, building the temple, having the temple knocked down, being enslaved again in Babylon, and so on, until eventually, at the time of the second temple, they are established in Palestine.

It’s very tempting to try to draw parallels with what’s happening in the same area today. Just imagine what the possibilities would be if Mr Netanyahu took a leaf out of Joseph’s book and showed compassion and forgiveness. But if you and I swapped places and you had drawn that conclusion, I’m not sure that people would give you an easy ride as they were shaking your hand on the way out at the end of the service. They might say you’d stretched things rather a lot.

And what about Saint Paul and the Galatians? Apparently, according to Paul, they were volunteering to be enslaved again by worshipping the elemental spirits, rather than the one true God. What would you say about that? It’s a different kind of slavery from the slavery which the Israelites endured in Egypt and in Babylon. This is more an intellectual slavery, abandoning their principles and hedging their bets spiritually.

And, in passing, you might want to observe that Saint Paul’s letters, particularly this sort of letter where he takes a congregation of Christians to task for something that he thinks they are doing wrong, is a sort of communication which I don’t think we would get in today’s world. Because St Paul is in effect telling the Galatians what to believe.

We go to great lengths to ensure that we don’t interfere with everyone’s freedom to believe whatever they want to. We regret the history of the missionaries. Who would say now, ‘Don’t believe in Scientology or Mormon, but stick to the real stuff?’ Alternatively, when we are thinking of Islam or Judaism, we are at great pains not to say that people mustn’t be Muslims or Jews, but that people should be only Christians.

No, instead, we emphasise that all three religions, called the religions of the book, effectively worship the same one true God. We just approach that one true God in slightly different ways. So we wouldn’t be tempted to write the sort of letter that St Paul has written if we found, for example, that somebody had converted from Christianity to Islam. Nevertheless, in certain countries the reverse move, from Islam to Christianity or Judaism, is something which is condemned, indeed, sometimes bringing the death penalty.

That happens in Pakistan or Iran, but we don’t tell people what to believe. We have to some extent therefore changed from Saint Paul’s approach. What do you think? What do we make of that?

So those are your reflection points for this second week of Lent. What lessons could we draw from the story of Joseph and the amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and what do you think St Paul was up to in his frankly rather tough letter to the Galatians? Would it wash today? Let’s swap places and you can tell me the answers.

Amen.

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The Fall and the Freebie

By hughdbryant
February 19, 2024 //
0

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 Answer, ‘Because I told you not to.’

‘ Why not?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You adjust something so that it fits. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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An Eye for an Eye

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

By Hugh Bryant

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Lawfulness of Love

By hughdbryant
October 16, 2023 //
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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.

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A New Ministry – a Sermon on the Occasion of the Grant of Permission to Officiate in the Church in Wales, Penarth Ministry Area

By hughdbryant
February 20, 2023 //
0

Sermon for Evensong on the Sunday before Lent, Quinquagesima, 19th February 2023

2 Kings 2:1-12

[Matthew 17:1-23]

https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=543147410 (Authorised Version)

This story begins, it says, ‘just before Elijah was taken up to heaven in a whirlwind’. Taken up to heaven in a whirlwind, as you are. As you do. Or maybe not. Something is going on which is rather different from something which flashes up on Apple News on your phone. Maybe it’s a bit like some of the Apple News things which point you to an article which is hidden behind a paywall. So however tantalising it is, you never get to find out what the story was, at least not from Apple News.

But one suspects that it’s not just a question of getting the story from the right medium. If Elijah is supposed to have been snatched up to heaven in a whirlwind, it doesn’t matter whether Apple News or the Guardian or the Mirror or even the Times reported it, it’s something quite different from our normal experience. I think we would tend to say that it was a story, a legend, and even that perhaps it wasn’t literally true. But maybe it was a story with a message.

It was about Elijah. Elijah is said to be the second most important prophet in the history of the Israelites, after Moses. And just like Moses, there aren’t any books actually written by Elijah but there are lots of stories about what he did, in the Bible. I recommend that you have a look at the 1st book of Kings to read about all the doings of Elijah.

There are things that you will immediately notice about him. First of all, he is a prophet – and we will come back to that in a minute. Second, that he is in competition. Wherever he goes he bumps into more prophets, and not only that, but also as a prophet, passing on the word of God, he finds himself in competition, not only with other prophets, but with other gods. Competing with other gods.

The Israelites had been commanded to love the one true God, and they sort-of did, but some of them hedged their bets by also worshipping the Baals and making the Golden Calf and worshipping that. In the books of Kings you will see that each king is rated by whether or not he had stayed true to the one true God or whether he had followed the Baals and chased after idols.

Now usually, when you are listening to a sermon, you can rely on the preacher doing a quick review of what the Bible readings are, and maybe telling you a little bit more about them, and then trying to relate them to our lives today. What would Jesus do? Would we have made the same mistakes? Would we have touched the forbidden fruit, and if not, why not?

But here? Prophets? Going up to heaven in a whirlwind? I’m not at all sure it’s something we can really relate to.

Let’s look at it again – after the striking beginning, ‘Once upon a time, before the whirlwind came’, Elisha asks Elijah for an extra helping of his prophetic mojo, and Elijah says that he will only get it if he gets sight of him as he goes up to heaven. Then comes this tantalising bit of the story – I don’t know whether you would agree with me – but for a while, we don’t know whether Elisha did actually manage to see Elijah going up in the whirlwind, because it looks a bit as though the chariot and horses blocked the view. Let me read it again for you.

And it came to pass, as they still went on, and talked, that, behold, there appeared a chariot of fire, and horses of fire, and parted them both asunder; and Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven.
And Elisha saw it, and he cried, My father, my father, the chariot of Israel, and the horsemen thereof. And he saw him no more …

What do you think? Did he get a clear look at him?

Well fortunately, the author, the chronicler, the writer of the books of Kings, puts you out of your misery a few lines further on, because it says that he has definitely taken over Elijah’s powers. But what were these powers? What was special about Elijah? He was a prophet. We have said that. But what sort of prophet?

I don’t think we have today any prophets like Elijah or Moses. If we talk about prophets, today we talk about people who claim to be able to forecast the future. Suppose we say that so-and-so has prophesied that Manchester United would win the Cup, for example – or if Jimmy was giving this sermon, of course you’d have to substitute Arsenal, and then – well then, the illustration wouldn’t work.

But you know, seriously, a prophet will tell you, or will claim to tell you, what’s going to happen next. But that’s not the sort of prophet that Elijah was. Elijah didn’t just foretell the future.

What he did was to become, or to pass on, the voice of God. The words of God, the idea of God. Elijah didn’t just foretell the future: but arguably he didn’t even do that.

What he did do was to tackle the people of Israel and try to put them back on to the straight and narrow, back on the road to salvation. So instead of acting essentially like a warm-up man at a TV studio and rousing the masses to celebrate in unison, singing anthems together like a football crowd, as the prophets of Baal did, instead of doing that, Elijah, and Moses before him, were not afraid of tackling Israel head-on and telling them what they were doing wrong.

So what about the message for us today? In Elijah’s time, the prophets were in direct touch with God, and then more recently the priests were the only ones allowed in the holy of holies in the Temple, able to withstand the fire of God. And then in the 16th century along came John Calvin with the idea of the ‘priesthood of all believers’. For him, you didn’t need priests in order to be with God. Take it to the Lord in prayer. Anyone can do it.

I think that maybe as a Reader I’m in that tradition, in the sense that I’m not a priest: not ordained, I haven’t got a dog collar. I’ve studied theology, and I’m not shy about trying to share my faith, to give you ideas about the Kingdom and perhaps occasionally to take a leaf out of the book of the prophets, by steering you gently away from doing things which I don’t think Jesus would approve of.

If Elijah and Elisha, as prophets, were the mouthpieces of God to the Israelites, today our preachers, even humble Readers like me, have to try to bring you the word of God in the Bible and in our theology and tradition. The great preacher Charles Spurgeon had a sign on his pulpit which said, ‘We would see Jesus in you’. We want to see Jesus.

I hope that I can rise to that calling. Here, today, I need to be properly cautious and humble in the face of the Almighty. I don’t know how that whirlwind worked. I sort-of suspect a Doctor Who-style mechanism isn’t really doing it justice, and then again I remember that Nikita Krushchev asked Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, who was a Christian, to tell him whether he found anybody above the clouds, and Gagarin said, no, he hadn’t seen a man with a white beard and a golden throne anywhere in the stratosphere.

But nevertheless it is a great vision, a great movie, a great prophecy. Elijah caught up in a whirlwind, and his apprentice, his successor, Elisha the young prophet, believing that he is only going to be able to carry on the mission with the necessary strength if he doesn’t blink and doesn’t miss Elijah going on up, and then, in just the same way things happen in our lives, things get in the way, a chariot and horses comes thundering in and blocks the view.

What it means for me, as your new Reader, is that I have to try to see clearly, not have my vision blocked. I have to be close to the Lord, and to pass on His word: not only that, but also I have to be willing to call things out, if I think I can hear Jesus muttering in the background.

I hope that you will pray for me: indeed that you will pray with me, as we embark on the spiritual journey through Lent. This Wednesday is Ash Wednesday. Let’s pray and reflect together in these days in the wilderness, in the wilderness in so many ways today, and let us try, together, to follow Jesus’ commands of love.

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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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The Beatitudes – Humble Saints

By hughdbryant
November 5, 2020 //
0

Sermon for Holy Communion at 1030 on Wednesday 4th November 2020 at St Mary Oatlands

Matthew 5:1-12

See http://bible.oremus.org/?ql=471270293

If you had to say what was the real essence of Jesus’ teaching, the true essence of what it means to be a Christian, I think that a good place to start would be Saint Matthew’s Gospel chapter 5, the Sermon on the Mount.

In his great sermon, Jesus built on the foundations of the Old Testament. He put himself in the tradition of the prophets, like Moses. For instance, Moses went up on Mount Sinai to meet God, and Jesus, who was God, also went up a mountain to give his most important teaching.

Jesus highlighted the old teaching, according to which, if somebody did you harm, you should pay back ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’. Jesus took that much further by saying you should turn the other cheek, go the extra mile; again under the old Jewish law, the rule was to love your neighbour and hate your enemy, but Jesus taught that you should love your enemy and pray for your persecutors.

Jesus said that he had ‘not come to abolish the law but to fulfil it’. He was not rejecting the old Jewish law, but rather developing it. It would be a mistake for us to ignore what is in the Old Testament, but Jesus went much further.

The ‘blessed are they’ sayings, these Beatitudes, are at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount. I’ve always thought the first one was rather difficult to understand. ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.’ Or, as the New English Bible translates it, ‘Blessed are those who know that they are poor.’ Poor in spirit – what does that mean? Is it really that they ‘know that they are poor’?

I’m not really sure what it means to be ‘poor in spirit’. It might have connotations of lack of character, being weak-willed or spineless, not, on the face of things, what Jesus might want to give a prize for, in the kingdom of heaven.

The Greek word which many Bibles translate as ‘spirit’, as in ‘poor in spirit’, is the same word, πνεύμα, that is used for the Holy Ghost, sometimes as a translation for the Hebrew word ‘ruach’, meaning a sort of rushing wind, reminiscent of the events on Whit Sunday, when a sort of rushing wind came upon the assembled disciples, lighting tongues of fire on their heads (which didn’t burn them, just as the burning bush which Moses came across was not burned up: again, another parallel between Old and New Testaments in the Bible: it’s a sign of God’s presence.)

That word in Greek, πνεύμα, is related to the word that you have in French for a tyre, pneu, or for something inflated like a tyre, pneumatic; they all involve wind or breath. So, what are the poor blessed in? – they are blessed for being short of wind. Blessed are the people who don’t know which way they’re blowing, don’t know whether they’re blowing hot or cold, say.

Or is it in fact better translated the way the New English Bible has it,‘Blessed are those who know that they are poor’? There, the translation has taken the ‘in spirit’ bit and turned it into a sense of consciousness, knowledge. They know that they are lacking, deficient – but deficient in what? On this interpretation, it doesn’t say. They are just ‘poor’.

But the word which means ‘poor’ in this passage goes grammatically with the word for ‘spirit’ the other way. You are not spiriting out the poverty, the being poor, but being poor, deficient, in spirit. In Greek it says, ‘Blessed are the deficient in wind’. To say they are simply ‘poor’ isn’t really right. They’re not short of money, but short of puff.

On Sunday, the preacher said it meant, ‘Blessed are the humble’. Humble. Not people who think they are big-shots. People who know their limitations. Again, that’s not what the Greek says literally, but you could argue that it’s closer to what the words really imply. In need – lacking; in spirit – in self-esteem, say: so, humble, lacking in self-esteem.

Blessed are the poor in spirit. Think about it a bit, and think what it means for you. Are you humble? Are you running out of puff? Never mind. You are blessed.

But when are you blessed? The other thing you can say about the Beatitudes, and obviously specifically about this first one, is that they are a vision of the future, a vision of the kingdom of God, which Jesus is promising to his followers, but which hasn’t happened yet.

Things may be awful now, but in the world to come it’ll all come right. There might be a snag in this; because you might think, on the basis of this passage, that it was all right to tolerate slavery and oppression in this life, keeping people oppressed, but pacifying them by giving them an assurance that they are on target to inherit heavenly blessings later. That would conflict with what I think is the the heart of the revolutionary message that Jesus gives us.

Those bits of the Sermon on the Mount don’t mean, put up with bad things now because you will be all right later in heaven; but rather, you must do this extra thing, go the extra mile, and not just pay back evil for evil: you must even love your enemy. And the reason for doing that is because it’s the right thing to do, not because it leads to a payoff in heaven.

People often say that the Sermon on the Mount is all very well, but it is just not practical. It demands more than mortal man is capable of. But then you read about people like Nelson Mandela. People can do those impossibly generous things that Jesus recommended. They really can. Really? People like that must need to be saints, you might say.

It’s a good point to make, especially at this time in the Christian year, when we do think about saints. Sunday was All Saints’ Day and the list of the various Beatitudes is, if you like, a list of the things which mark out a saint. Saints – in Latin the word is ‘sancti’ – are people who are marked out, distinguished, holy – holy, which is another word which means the same thing, separate, kept apart from the general run of people. But not necessarily marked out because they’re exceptionally virtuous.

The things that Jesus blesses are all characteristics of saints; but they aren’t superhuman; they are ordinary characteristics, ordinary virtues. Anyone can be a saint. Anyone in any of our churches could be a saint.

St Paul addressed his letters to the ‘saints’ in the various churches he was writing to, and it’s clear that he was just writing to the people in the pews. For example in his First Letter to the Corinthians he wrote: [This is from] ‘Paul, …. unto the Church of God which is at Corinth, to them that are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints’. Sanctified – there’s the ‘sancti’ word – but I don’t think there’s any suggestion that he was only writing to part of the congregation, just to the good guys. He was writing to all of them.

When you work through the list of the Beatitudes you will realise that it is far from being a catalogue of success or perfection; it’s a catalogue full of weakness and need, the sort of thing that ordinary people suffer from. Jesus is affirming that. He is saying that in the kingdom, people like that, ordinary people, will be saints. Just as they are, they will go marching in.

So be a saint: be a peacemaker; be gentle in spirit, care about justice; you are allowed to be sad; people may make fun of you or even actively persecute you for trying to do all these things as a Christian. But don’t worry; you are a saint; you are blessed, and you do have a place in heaven.

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