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The View from the Mountain Top

By publicsquare
March 2, 2014 //
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Sermon for Evensong on the Sunday before Lent, 2nd March 2014
2 Kings 2:1-12; Matt. 17:9-23 – Elijah and Jesus

I’m not quite sure whether you still find some of the stuff in the Bible surprising or not: just in case it did just flow over you, I will just highlight a couple of surprising things which we have heard in this evening’s lessons.

In the second Book of Kings, we heard about the prophet Elijah being taken up into heaven – but first of all, parting the waters of the River Jordan, so that he and his successor Elisha could pass through to the other side: ‘They went over on dry ground’ (2 Kings 2:8). And then ‘a chariot of fire appeared, and horses of fire, and took Elijah up in a whirlwind to heaven’ (2:11).

Then if we turn to St Matthew’s gospel, we have picked up the story, as Jesus, Peter, James and John the brother of James were coming down the high mountain on which they had seen Jesus ‘transfigured’ with Moses and Elijah. A bright cloud had suddenly overshadowed them and a voice came out of the cloud, ‘This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased; hear ye him’ (Matt. 17:5).

And then as they came down the mountain, Jesus cured a man’s son who had epilepsy, by ‘casting out a devil’ which had made the boy have fits. Jesus challenged his disciples by saying that they did not have enough faith: ‘If you have faith no bigger than a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, move from here to there: and it will move. Nothing will prove impossible for you.’

What do you think? Is there any way these days that we could understand Elijah suddenly appearing with Moses and Jesus, in some way ‘transfigured’? I’m not sure what ‘transfigured’ really means. There is that wonderful piece of music by Arnold Schoenberg, ‘Verklärte Nacht’, Transfigured Night, a night of strange light, a supernatural aspect. What do we feel? Are we in the camp which feels, along with C. S. Lewis, that anything is possible for God, and therefore there is no reason why God could not make miracles like the Transfiguration, or Elijah being taken up into heaven?

Elijah being taken up into heaven, of course, is somewhat like the Ascension of our Lord Himself. So are we comfortable saying, ‘Because of the omnipotence of God, there is no reason why, given that Jesus was God, he shouldn’t be able to have transfigurations and ascensions: and no reason that Elijah, as the prophet of God – as the other great prophet with Moses – couldn’t be taken up into heaven in the way described?’

On the other hand, we could be sensitive to the charge of humanists and rationalists, who object that everything that we believe in ought to be subject to the same rules of logic and science, and that you could not make sense of stories such as Elijah being taken up to heaven in a whirlwind or the Transfiguration in the normal way: just contrast the way in which you would describe the arrival of a number 38 bus with the way in which these stories about Elijah and Jesus are told. Quite different.

We can generally agree that if I tell you about seeing a number 38 bus, you will know what I am talking about, even though perhaps what you and I actually see when we look at a number 38 bus might in fact be different. We can’t get into each other’s heads to prove what it is exactly that we are looking at: whether it is the same thing. Nevertheless it’s sufficiently similar for us to be able to communicate about it successfully. What it is for something to be a number 38 bus is sufficiently similar in my understanding to what it is in yours for us to be able to talk about it.

But on the other hand, if we talk about something like Elijah going up to heaven in a whirlwind, or Jesus being transfigured with Moses and Elijah, we can’t necessarily be confident that we will be understood by everyone in the same way.

Jesus adds a twist, by asking whether or not the disciples have enough faith; if they do have enough faith, even the tiniest quantity, it will be sufficient to move mountains.

But – are you going to beat yourself up over the fact that you aren’t able to go out there and transpose K2 for Everest using pure will-power and faith? Nobody else has done it. So what did Jesus mean? Clearly we are in a different area, different from simple mundane questions like whether the 38 bus has arrived or not.

Of course some of the Oxford philosophers of the 50s and 60s, like the late, great, A. J. Ayer, would have said that, unless a statement is verifiable, in the same way that something about the number 38 bus would be verifiable, then it is meaningless. So everything about Moses and Elijah, transfiguration, being caught up to heaven in a whirlwind and so on, is, according to Prof. Ayer and others, meaningless.

So on the one hand you have C.S. Lewis accepting miracles and saying, ‘This is just the sort of thing that an omnipotent god would do’, and on the other, you’ve got a sort of common sense view, either that they’re not true, or that there’s no way in which we could make sense of these stories in any literal way.

Does it matter? We are just about to start Lent. Ash Wednesday is this Wednesday, and in fact our Lent courses are going to start on Monday morning, so that we can get six sessions in before Holy Week. We’re going to be studying St Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians, under the heading, ‘Be Reconciled’.

St Paul wrote, ‘He has made known to us His hidden purpose – such was His will and pleasure, determined beforehand in Christ – to be put into effect when the time was ripe: namely that the universe, all in heaven and on earth, might be brought into a unity in Christ.’ We will be studying all the various aspects of this ‘unity in Christ’, this reconciliation, over the next six weeks.

But for the purpose of this sermon, I simply want to draw attention to the process, to the way that our faith can work. There must be a very strong suspicion that unless something very remarkable did in fact happen, it’s tempting to feel that no-one would have said that Elijah was a prophet, someone through whom God spoke.

Without the miracles, the revelations, perhaps no-one would have said that Jesus was not only a prophet – as the Moslems and Jews acknowledge – but was in fact God on earth, the Son of God. But it’s not so much a question how God manifested Himself through Elijah, or became incarnate in Jesus Christ, not a question of how, but that He did. The exact mechanism is beyond our powers of understanding.

One can say that these big miracles, like the Transfiguration, or Elijah being taken up into heaven in a whirlwind, are indeed beyond our power fully to describe or explain. But that doesn’t mean to say that they did not happen in some sense. Because if they did happen, we can recognise through them that God cares for us, that God is involved with us.

And in the light of that wonderful fact, we ought to be reconciled, to be reconciled with God and with each other. Sin is being separated from God: salvation is being brought back together, reconciled.

So much for this rather philosophical excursion. You might be rather scornful that I could stay in this rather rarified vein in the face of all the momentous events which have been happening this week. As Christians preparing to rehearse, to act out, the drama of Jesus’ Passion, prepared to accept the reality of God on earth, how do we look at the conflicts in the world, in Syria or in the Ukraine?

Nearer to home, what do we think about the two criminals who murdered the soldier, Lee Rigby? ‘ROT IN JAIL,’ in bold capitals, read the headline on the front page of the Daily Mirror. What is the Christian perspective? How would we see it if we ourselves had just come down from the mountain with Jesus?

Who are the good people and the bad people in these stories? What happens when the dust has settled? When the Syrians have finally stopped killing each other, and the Ukrainians have decided whether they want to go with the Russians or with the Europeans, where are we going to stand as Christians?

Are the killers of Lee Rigby really condemned to rot? Is there no redemption for them? Clearly now the killers don’t appreciate that what they did was wrong. They have a crooked justification for it. But let’s suppose after years in gaol, they appreciate the wrongness of what they have done, and they repent. What shall we say then? Jesus’ message was a message of forgiveness, not ‘rot in jail’. How would it feel to us if we had just come down from that high mountain?

The same with the civil war in Syria and the terrible divisions in the Ukraine. Will people be reconciled? In these situations the church can speak. The church can remind the world of Jesus’ message of forgiveness and reconciliation: we Christians should be fired up by the thought of that mountain-top experience.

We can be prophets; we can let the Holy Spirit speak through us. Let us pray that, at the end of the conflicts in Syria and the Ukraine – and in all other places where there is a breakdown of law and order, where there is civil war or civil unrest – that there will be a resolution, not based on victors’ justice, but rather on true reconciliation. Truth and reconciliation, in Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu’s words: truth and reconciliation. Come down from the mountain. Be reconciled.

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Hiding your Light under a Bushel

By publicsquare
February 9, 2014 //
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Sermon for Holy Communion at St Andrew’s, Cobham, on 9th February 2014, the Fourth Sunday before Lent
Isaiah 58:1-9, Matt. 5:13-20

It’s funny how words change their meaning over time. When Jesus was speaking to his disciples, at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, he said they were ‘the salt of the earth’. He meant that they were pretty good: that they had a strong flavour: they were capable of doing good things.

They used salt, in those days, to preserve food; so if a piece of meat was well salted, it would stop it going off. But these days, when we say that somebody is the ‘salt of the earth’, we tend to think of them more in terms of Arthur Daley or Eddie Grundy in the Archers: a little bit fly, a bit of a lad. Heart of gold, but the cheque’s in the post. You know what I mean.

So maybe to get the full flavour of what Jesus was saying, you need a slightly different expression. Not ‘salt of the earth.’ How about ‘light of the world’? As we’ve just heard, Jesus told His disciples that they were ‘the light of the world’ [Matt.5:14]. In St John’s gospel he says that He himself is ‘the light of the world’. Here He goes on to talk about the disciples being like ‘a city built on a hill’, which can’t be hidden from view, and that, once you have lit a lamp, you mustn’t hide it away: you mustn’t ‘hide your light under a bushel’.

What does it all mean in practice? Jesus was to some extent contrasting His message with the teaching of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law – the Jewish law, which was the 10 Commandments and the laws of behaviour which you get in the first five books of the Old Testament, and then in the Jewish law as developed by the various rabbis over the years and recorded in the Mishnah and the Talmud.

Jewish Law has a rule for absolutely everything, and the Pharisees were famous for knowing all those rules and punctiliously carrying them out. But of course in the story of Jesus, in the gospels, the Pharisees are not the good guys. They are the ones that opposed Him. They are the ones that Jesus called hypocrites, ‘whited sepulchres’; they looked all right on the outside, but on the inside they were full of awfulness, ‘full of dead men’s bones’.

But it doesn’t mean that Jesus was against the Jewish law. The Jewish law, in its essence, was – and is – a very good set of principles. The bit that we’re familiar with, the 10 Commandments, is a fine ethical code, and Jesus assured the disciples that He wasn’t there to dismantle the Jewish law: not ‘one jot or one tittle’ would be taken away. But, He said, you have to do better than the Pharisees and the scribes if you’re going to have a place in heaven.

Then Jesus went on to preach His most famous sermon – probably the most famous sermon there’s ever been – the Sermon on the Mount, about going the extra mile, turning the other cheek, loving your enemies. All this is contrary, counter-cultural stuff, which is the essence of Jesus’ teaching.

But He wasn’t going against what the law and the prophets had previously taught. If we look again at the first lesson, from the book of the prophet Isaiah, it’s actually the same kind of message. What do you do in order to show that you’re obedient to God, that you have a proper respect for Him?

Do you cover yourself with sackcloth and ashes, and do some drastic fasting? According to the prophet Isaiah, the Israelites are complaining, because they do do all that, they go through all the ritual of fasting and self-abasement: but they don’t think God takes any notice.

Isaiah points out – and as a prophet he’s speaking the words of the Lord – that the right kind of penitential behaviour is not doing something which only really impacts on you yourself. Instead it is doing something for other people: ‘to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free’. Sharing your food with the hungry: taking the homeless poor into your house: clothing the naked when you meet them, and never sneaking out of looking after your family.

‘Then’, Isaiah says,’your light shall break forth like the dawn.’ If you give of your own food to the hungry, and satisfy the needs of the wretched, ‘then your light shall rise in the darkness, and your gloom will be like the noonday’.

How should it affect us? There are posters for the Alpha Course, where there’s a man looking a bit puzzled and asking himself, ‘Is that all there is?’ Is his normal life all that there is – or is there more to life?’ The course introduces you to the idea that there is more to life, and the reason that we know that there is more to life is because, as Christians, we understand that the meaning of the gospel, the good news of Jesus, is that God does care for us.

But what Jesus is telling us here in his preaching is that this is not just something good for us as individuals. If we’re disciples, the fact of our being a disciple should shine out from us. ‘Let your light so shine … so that they may see your good works, and give glory to your Father in heaven.’

Let’s assume that we are all trying to be good disciples. What does it mean in practice to say, ‘Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works’? What good works? ‘To loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free’. But – are you actually oppressing anybody? What do you think? Do you think that it applies to you in any way today?

Isaiah suggests that the way to set free the oppressed is to share your food with the hungry: take the homeless poor into your house: clothe the naked when you meet them.

Sharing your food with the hungry may be quite straightforward. As the manager of our Foodbank, I’m very grateful that so many people – and that certainly includes lots of people here – have gone and bought extra food when they’re shopping and have given it to the Foodbank.

But what about taking the homeless poor into your house, and clothing the naked when you meet them? Would it be stretching it too far to ask, in this context, how you think that the ‘Bedroom Tax’ fits in with the idea of taking the homeless poor into your house?

Say somebody works for a low wage, and gets housing benefit. In the old days, they would have had a council house at a cheap rent which they would have been able to afford. Unfortunately they don’t have many council houses any more, so now we have housing benefit, to make up for the extra cost of privately rented houses. The poor person’s children have grown up and moved away; so strictly speaking, they don’t need three bedrooms any more.

So the new rules say that their housing benefit will only be paid to cover the cost of a house which the government says is necessary. So they are paid enough to be able to afford a one-bedroomed house – whereas they are actually living in a three-bedroomed house. There aren’t any one-bedroomed houses available. Very soon our poor person won’t have enough to live on.

In effect, Isaiah suggests that we, as individuals, should be doing something about that. The Jewish law, the law of Moses, is pretty clear that society must care for its weakest members. In Deuteronomy ch.14, Moses tells the Israelites to make a tithe on all their wealth, to provide for ‘aliens, orphans and widows’ living with them, so that those aliens, orphans and widows may have enough to eat.

Aliens, orphans and widows. Immigrants, refugees: children in care: people living on their own. It really doesn’t take too big a stretch of the imagination to realise that we still have the same sort of people in our society that Moses was worried about 3,000 years ago.

I’m not telling you what the answers should be. But I encourage you to go away and think about it. Just to suggest one instance: is it right that, when the property market is booming, we should be imposing taxes on the poorest people so that they have to make a choice between paying the rent and buying food?

Or, do you think that things have changed, and in fact these ideas from the Jewish law and from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount are not actually directly referable any more to present-day circumstances? What do you think?

Last week was Candlemas, when we celebrated the coming of Jesus as ‘a light to lighten the Gentiles’, and Jesus said later on, ‘I am the light of the world’. This week, we’re looking at Jesus’ teaching that we, his disciples, his followers, we also are the light of the world.

Our challenge today is to make it a reality, so that our light is not in fact hidden under a bushel, so that it is not just a matter of us feeling a rosy glow: instead the challenge is to us, so that we really do become a light, a light to the world outside.

So I pray, ‘Let our light so shine, so that they may see our good works, and give glory to you, to our Father in heaven’.

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Elijah’s Bake-off

By publicsquare
December 8, 2013 //
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Sermon for Evensong at St Mary’s on the Second Sunday of Advent, 8th December 2013
1 Kings 18:17-39, Matthew 3:1-12

I’m not a very good guide to celebrity baking contests, although apparently I use the same bread-making machine as the Prime Minister. Elijah’s roasting contest with the prophets of Baal is a spectacular story, from which we can certainly draw a message that God backed up the prophecy of Elijah by performing a substantial miracle.

On the second Sunday in Advent, which today is, we are focusing on the prophets, and starting to look at John the Baptist. There are a lot of parallels between Elijah and John. Moses and Elijah, the greatest of the Old Testament prophets, were of course said to be ‘transfigured’ with Jesus later on in the Gospel (Matt. 17), and John the Baptist’s message was ‘Repent’ – μετανοιειτε in Greek, which means literally, ‘change your minds’.

So much of the New Testament involves changing one’s mind: the word I think of in this context is ‘counterintuitive’. The whole of the Sermon on the Mount is counterintuitive. Turn the other cheek: go the other mile – or in St Ignatius’ prayer, ‘Render to no man evil for evil.’ This week, the person who springs to mind, when we talk of those kind of counterintuitive standards, is of course Nelson Mandela.

Counterintuitives abound when you talk about Nelson Mandela. He was perhaps the greatest world leader in the 20th century – but for 27 years, he was imprisoned as a terrorist. Quite a lot of the politicians now joining in the the chorus of praise for him have in the past condemned him as a terrorist. I suppose that the answer is that it depends on your point of view. One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.

Can you imagine what it must have felt like when he walked out of jail free, after 27 years? Not only was he free, but he was walking more or less directly into government and into the presidency of his country. The ideology which had locked him up, which he had fought, apartheid, had been utterly defeated.

So often, when there has been a mighty struggle – even a struggle to the death – the victors exact terrible vengeance. Indeed, in the passage immediately after our Old Testament lesson, when the fire of The Lord consumed the burnt offering which Elijah had prepared, the people fell on their faces and sang, ‘The Lord indeed is God’. Elijah said to them, ‘Seize the prophets of Baal; do not let one of them escape.’ And they seized them, and killed all of them, all 450 of them. It was terrible vengeance. I’m tempted to say that 27 years in jail must have felt far worse to Nelson Mandela than it felt for Elijah having a celebrity bake-off with the prophets of Baal. If anyone might have been expected to inflict victors’ justice on the defeated parties, it would have been Nelson Mandela.

It was a very bizarre coincidence that on the very day that Nelson Mandela died, a new film, a biopic about him, simply called ‘Mandela’, opened in London. In our Spiritual Cinema, we had a very good film called ‘Goodbye Bafana’, which was about the way in which a hard-bitten Afrikaner prison guard, James Gregory, who was appointed to be the warden of the prison on Robben Island, because he could speak the Xhosa language, which Mandela and his fellow-prisoners spoke. He was supposed to eavesdrop on them for the government.

Gradually he became more and more influenced by what he saw and heard. He and Mandela became very good friends. He evolved from a narrow-minded bigot to be a sensitive, humane critic of social injustice. Nelson Mandela seemed to inspire everyone he met.

One of his greatest friends, of course, was Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Nelson Mandela was certainly a Christian. He was educated in a Methodist school, and some people think that he was a Methodist. Other people believe that he was a Jehovah’s Witness. He definitely was a Christian.

Nobody is very sure. But one thing that was very well-known is that he was very good friends with ‘the Arch’, Archbishop Desmond Tutu. With Archbishop Tutu he conceived the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, as a way of dealing with the excesses of the apartheid era, and the inhumanities which had been shown by both sides in the struggle. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission brought together people who had hurt other people and people who had been hurt.

The offenders had to confess the truth and accept responsibility for what they had done. In some cases they received an amnesty, but in many others they didn’t. The real work of the Commission was not as an alternative to the justice system, but to bring the communities together in reconciliation.

Again, how extraordinary to think that the people who had suffered under the apartheid rule, where they were clearly not treated as being fully human, were invited to meet and forgive their oppressors. ‘Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven, for He makes His sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous’.

The whole story of Nelson Mandela, the greatness and generosity of his heart, is so reminiscent of the teaching of Jesus, and of the preparation for that teaching, which John the Baptist gave: μετανοείτε, repent, be reconciled.

So often people dismiss the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount as being Utopian, impractical: no real human being could keep up that level of business, they say. People say, when it comes down to the hard choices in life, the Sermon on the Mount just isn’t practical. And yet, it looks as though Nelson Mandela really did do it; for him, the Sermon on the Mount was a reality, and he carried out what Jesus recommended.

For Nelson Mandela it really wasn’t an eye for an eye or a tooth for a tooth. He really did turn the other cheek, and he really did go the second mile. He put up with his unjust incarceration. He didn’t complain. He even made friends with his jailer.

For John the Baptist, the coming Messiah was going to sort the wheat from the chaff, and he was going to chuck the chaff into the ‘unquenchable fire’; but when Jesus came, he wasn’t a fire-breathing horseman of the Apocalypse – he was a baby: a helpless baby. Counterintuitive again.

So our second Advent signpost points to the Prophets and to John the Baptist, and invites us to adopt his message: μετανοιειτε, change your minds, repent.

Just think: if Nelson Mandela had not pursued the path of forgiveness and reconciliation, would he be so revered today? Certainly he would have been recognised as a great leader – but would he have been called the greatest leader? He didn’t stand up for himself. No Nuremberg trials for South Africa.

And so we pray, with Nelson Mandela, that wherever there is conflict, there will be reconciliation. That will, truly, prepare the way of the Lord.

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A Turkey

By publicsquare
November 29, 2013 //
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Sermon for Holy Communion for Thanksgiving at St John’s, West Hartford, 28th November 2013
Deut. 8:1-3, 6-10 (17-20), James 1:17-18, 21-27, Matthew 6:25-33

Carved on the inside of the pulpit at Holy Trinity Church, Cambridge – I should say, ‘Cambridge, England’ – carved by the great preacher Charles Simeon, were the words, ‘Sir, we would see Jesus’ (John 12:21). In other words, the preacher’s job is not to leave you with an impression of the preacher, but to try to leave you with an impression of Jesus.

That having been said, I think I ought to tell you a little about myself, so that you can decide whether indeed I am qualified to be addressing you today. The bad news is, of course, that if you come to an unfavourable conclusion, I am standing here, six feet above contradiction …

In your notices for today, your Rector, Hope, kindly introduces me as a ‘maritime lawyer in England, a lay Reader from St Andrew’s in Cobham, Surrey’, who went to the same college as your Assistant Rector, and ‘who has charge over the chaplains at Guildford Cathedral.’ I have to admit that my legal practice ceased seven years ago now, so I’m a very bad guide to the ins and outs of the DEEPWATER HORIZON oil spill or the COSTA CONCORDIA tragedy; not only that, but it have also recently stopped organising chaplains at the Cathedral.

The reason for that is that I am now heading a team which is setting up, and will on 13th December launch, a food bank in Cobham, Surrey – from where I bring you greetings from the congregations at St Andrew’s in Cobham and St Mary’s in Stoke D’Abernon, which are the two parishes where I minister as a Reader. I’ll come back to the food bank in a minute.

The elephant in the room is that I am an Englishman, which probably disqualifies me from preaching to you Americans on one of your two greatest holidays, which are quintessentially American. We do eat turkey, but only at Christmas. Self-destructive urges are referred to as ‘turkeys voting for Christmas’. Christmas. Do your turkeys vote for Thanksgiving? Maybe they do. There is a Presidential pardon, I hear, so there must be votes in it somewhere.

So having said all that, which I suppose amounts to a rather laboured disclaimer, let’s turn our minds to the Word of God for today.

We are here to give thanks to God for His bountiful gifts. Although Moses in Deuteronomy speaks to the Israelites looking forward to the Promised Land, we’re already there: we have reached the Promised Land. You certainly have. Part of your history certainly involved a great journey from England to reach your Promised Land, and now here you are enjoying it. It is indeed a good land, where you will ‘eat bread without scarcity, where you will lack nothing’, so obviously you shall ‘… bless the Lord your God for the good land He has given you.’

But here’s the bit which I want to talk about this morning. Moses said, ‘Do not say to yourself, “My power and the might of my own hand have gotten me this wealth”, but remember the Lord your God, for it is He who gives you power to get wealth.’ In the Letter of James, ‘Every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above; coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.’ We have just sung the wonderful hymn based on that passage, ‘Great is thy faithfulness, … there is no shadow of turning with Thee’.

In St Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus says, ‘Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap, nor gather into barns, and yet your Heavenly Father feeds them. …. Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.’

The question is whether it is us who are the authors of our own success or failure. Moses in Deuteronomy says very clearly that it was not because of the Israelites’ excellence or hard work, or whatever it was, that they had been saved from Egypt; it was because God had blessed them.

When I was in Hartford last, Hope and Bill asked me whether I had seen a film about Margaret Thatcher, called ‘The Iron Lady’. They said it was a very good film, and that Meryl Streep had done a wonderful acting job.

Now one of the things that I’ve noticed in my travels is that our friends in different countries very rarely see each other’s leaders in the same light as they are seen domestically.

Actually, perhaps we would all agree about President Kennedy. And yes, I can remember where I was when the news came through. Even at the tender age of 12, I remember the feeling of shock and disappointment which those events in Houston 50 years ago caused. I think that we probably would all agree that he was a great man, cut down in his prime, and that he had not been in office long enough to realise all the things he promised.

But when Hope and Bill told me what a wonderful film ‘The Iron Lady’ was, I had a different reaction. They, like all my friends outside the UK, thought Lady Thatcher was someone who should surely be celebrated, and that the film had done a good job of celebrating her. But I surprised them: I said I had no intention of seeing the film, however excellent it might be. Far from celebrating Lady Thatcher, I really thought she did a great deal of harm.

That is perhaps rather a harsh thing to say from a pulpit, but I stand by it. I can expatiate for a long time on the reasons. In essence, Margaret Thatcher believed that everyone had the seeds of their own success or failure within them: it was up to you whether you prospered or starved. She did not care for people who were not able to be active in the market, perhaps because they were old, or ill, or disabled, or not intelligent enough, or just poor. She even said to a journalist once, ‘There is no such thing as society’. She ruthlessly suppressed the powers of the labour unions, greatly reducing the protection available for ordinary employees. Thousands were put out of work. Industry was decimated.

One of her ministers suggested that, if one was out of work, one should ‘get on one’s bicycle’ and go where there was work. This was highly offensive, because the people who were out of work – at least metaphorically speaking – had no bicycles, and there was no work for them, anywhere.

According to Mrs Thatcher, it was up to you if you succeeded. According to Moses, and indeed according to Jesus, it isn’t. As we heard from Deuteronomy, Moses said, ‘Do not say to yourself, “My power and the might of my own hand have gotten me this wealth”, but remember the Lord your God, for it is He who gives you power to get wealth.’ Jesus said, ‘Look at the birds of the air’.

And that brings me to the food bank. When I was preparing to come here, Hope sent me an advance copy of your notices for today, which I’ve referred to already. In it, I see that last Sunday you an interfaith Thanksgiving service, joining with the Congregation Beth Israel from down the road. The offering suggested was an offering of non-perishable food for the West Hartford Food Pantry.

It might surprise you to know that, in the UK today, there are over 400 food banks. In the Borough of Elmbridge, where my home, Cobham, is, (which is said to be the second most prosperous borough in the country after Kensington and Chelsea), our food bank in Cobham will be the third food bank in that rich borough.

In England we used to have a ‘welfare state’. We had a safety net, and we prided ourselves on it. Nobody would starve if they were out of work, or disabled, or old, or suffering from anything else which prevented you from being able to have enough money, from your own efforts, to buy food. The state would provide a safety net. You would never starve. ‘Consider the lilies of the field’. It made sense.

That has gone. The present British government has so reduced the scope and effectiveness of our welfare state that there are large numbers of people who need to go to food banks for emergency non-perishable food: in other words, they are starving. There are people starving in Britain. I hope you find that as shocking as I do.

So we are following your good example, and setting up food banks. It is a very Biblical thing to do. In his letter, James says, ‘Religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father is this; to care for orphans and widows in their distress’. Earlier on in the same passage, ‘Be doers of the Word, and not merely hearers.’

So after all, I think that, where I come from, we’re not that different from you. Christian people are trying to be ‘Doers of the Word’, we are trying to look after the orphans and the widows in their distress. And I pray that God will bless us – and you – in this work. At this wonderful time of Thanksgiving, with God’s help, let us all continue to ‘do the Word.’

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What it is to be a King

By publicsquare
November 24, 2013 //
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Sermon for Evensong at St Mary’s on the Sunday before Advent, 24th November 2013
1 Samuel 8:1-20, John 18:33-37 – What it is to be a King

‘He will take your daughters to be confectionaries, and to be cooks, and to be bakers.’ Confectionaries – from our first lesson, from the First Book of Samuel. I love the idea of one’s daughters being makers of confectionery, sweeties; Yum Yum.

But we’re not talking about the Mikado, but rather, about kings. This is the Sunday next before Advent, when we also celebrate Christ the King, so our hymns are all about crowns and kingship, and the second lesson has Pontius Pilate asking Jesus whether He is a king.

The relevance of this is in the very interesting conversation which Samuel the old prophet has with the elders of Israel, about the best form of government. At that stage in their early history, the tribes of Israel did not have an overall leader, a king. They just had their tribal elders, and they had judges. The judges did what judges do today. ‘Samuel judged Israel all the days of his life, and he went from year to year in circuit, to Bethel, and Gilgal, and Mizpeh, and judged Israel in all those places’. [1 Samuel 7:15f]

When Samuel got old, he appointed his two sons as judges under him. This is a forerunner of what we understand as the rule of law. Moses had received the law: the prophets and the judges who came after him interpreted the law and prayed directly to the Lord.

So in this discussion between the elders of Israel and Samuel, all sorts of things come up, which are still directly relevant and very topical today. You will remember the interview that the comedian Russell Brand had with Jeremy Paxman recently, when he said that he didn’t think there was any point in voting. There’s a lot of disillusionment with politics today.

It’s interesting to look at the list of things which Samuel brings up for discussion in this context. ‘You are old, and your sons do not follow in your way’. The sons were corrupt: they ‘turned aside after lucre, and took bribes, and perverted judgement.’ So the elders said, ‘We don’t want the judges any more to create policy for us: we need a king.’ I think they were proposing something like what Bismarck arranged in Germany and what Garibaldi arranged in Italy – and perhaps what the Romans did in relation to the city states of the Greeks.

Whereas in the time of Moses, the nation of Israel was made up of the 12 tribes, and there was no overall leadership, now Samuel is being asked to appoint a king, who will oversee all of them together, so that collectively they can be stronger.

Notice that there’s no discussion of democracy. Democracy came pretty late. It’s usually said that it started in classical Athens around 500BC, whereas this discussion with Samuel took place before 1,000BC. Interestingly, the ancient authors were not particularly enthusiastic about democracy. They thought it had tendencies to be populist, rabble-rousing rather than a wise way of governing.

So here the difference was between having a king, a monarchy, an absolute monarchy, and continuing in their small tribal units. The Lord told Samuel that the Israelites had rejected Him, the Lord; even though He had saved them from the Egyptians, they had turned aside and worshipped other gods.

Just as these ancient Israelites didn’t know about democracy, we don’t really know about theocracy; theocracy, which is, being governed by God. In the ancient world, nobody would do anything serious without consulting an oracle, or in the Jewish tradition, without consulting a prophet, to find out what the will of God was: whether in fact the proposed course of action was what God wanted.

The Lord accepted that the people of Israel were not going to continue to come to the tabernacle and worship in the old-fashioned way. The people of Israel were rejecting the idea of trying to discern the will of God as their main method of government. They simply wanted a king.

Today we in the west try to keep a separation between matters of religion and matters of politics or government, although the line does get blurred. In France they are very keen on saying that they have a secular state – but the state pays for the upkeep of the churches. In this country, of course, the Church of England is the ‘established’ church, the state church, and the Queen is the head of the church, so church and state are very much bound together.

God tells Samuel to warn the elders of Israel about all the things that could go wrong if they had a king over them. This is where ‘making your daughters to be confectionaries’ comes in. More seriously, he will ‘appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties … He will take the best of your fields and your vineyards and olive orchards, and give them to his courtiers. He will take one tenth of your grain, and of your vineyards, and give it to his officers and his courtiers.’ The King would lord it over the people.

Now we have Russell Brand and Jeremy Paxman agreeing with each other to turn their backs on politics. I wonder if there could be the same sort of conversation if we had a prophet today, or if Jesus himself came among us and saw how we were getting on. Would the rulers of the world today, and in particular our rulers, be guilty of any of the things that Samuel was warning about? Or does democracy tend to rule out the worst excesses of an absolute monarch? Did King John at Runnymede get it right in Magna Carta, with the separation of the powers?

With the movement to have independence in Scotland and the popularity of UKIP, wanting to pull us out of the European Union, are we yearning for an era where we were like the tribes of Israel, small, standing by themselves with no overall king?

Remember that what was wrong with the Israelites at that point was that they had forgotten that they did have a King in heaven, that God was their King, and that they were supposed to worship the one true God alone. They had forgotten that, and they were worshipping all sorts of other gods who were not real.

So then we come to Pontius Pilate’s famous dialogue with Jesus.

‘So you are a king?’ ‘Art thou a king then?
‘Thou sayest that I am a king’. You say that I am a king.

Jesus points out that if He were the sort of king that Pontius Pilate had in mind, then his followers would be fighting for Him, to stop Him from being handed over to the Jews. Instead of which, of course, His followers had melted away: none more so than St Peter.

I wonder if Prince Charles is thinking about all this. Or Prince William, indeed. What is it to be a king today? Perhaps it’s sensible for anyone who is going to be in government, in any way, to think about all the reflections which these passages produce.

The government has a balance of power with the rule of law, the judges. It’s important that judges should not be corrupt. It’s important that the rulers shouldn’t oppress the people – take their sons and put them in the Army, forcing them to fight wars. Will the government take your daughters to be confectionaries?

What is the right tax rate? One tenth of your grain and in your vineyards to go to the civil service. The best products that you make, the Rolls-Royces, the Jaguars, pressed into government service. ‘In that day you will cry out because of your king whom you have chosen for yourselves, but the Lord will not answer you in that day.’

Do we think that Russell Brand was being somewhat prophetic, and that perhaps the original conversation between God and Samuel is the one to listen to – that the best way of government is a government that listens to God and forsakes all other gods?

As Jesus said, ‘For this I was born and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.’ Let’s hope that our leaders will listen too.

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The Generosity of Cyrus the Great

By publicsquare
September 22, 2013 //
0

Sermon for Evensong on the 17th Sunday after Trinity, 22nd September 2013
Ezra 1; John 7:14-36

‘By the waters of Babylon, we sat down and wept: when we remembered thee, O Sion …
How shall we sing the Lord’s song: in a strange land?'(Psalm 137). The Israelites had been enslaved by Nebuchadnezzar, and they had spent fifty years in a strange land, Babylon, from 587BC until they were freed by King Cyrus, Cyrus the Great of Persia, who defeated the Babylonians and generously decided to allow the Israelites to go free, to go back to Jerusalem and to rebuild the temple.

That’s the story we hear from the book of the prophet Ezra, written in the fourth century BC, Ezra being the great prophet of the Second Temple, the temple which was rebuilt following the return to Jerusalem under the Persians.

The great story of Israel, leading up to the Christian gospel, is one of obedience to the Law, to the Law of Moses; and the question whether the Israelites were faithful to one god. ‘Thou shalt have none other gods but me.’ When the Israelites turned aside and did worship other gods, Baal and Moloch for example, as a result they were deserted by God and the Temple was destroyed.

You can read all this story very succinctly in the Acts of the Apostles, in the sermon delivered by St Stephen in Acts 6 and 7, or in one of the ‘history psalms’, such as Psalms 78 or 106. The Israelites regarded the Temple as being of huge importance. They made a house for God to live in. It was the same idea that the apostle Peter had at the time of the Transfiguration, to make tabernacles, little houses, for Jesus, Moses and Elijah. (Matt. 17:4)

But Stephen in his sermon explained that Jesus had changed things. ‘Howbeit the most High dwelleth not in temples made with hands; as saith the prophet, Heaven is my throne, and earth is my footstool; what house will ye build me, saith the Lord: …. Hath not my hand made all these things?’ (Acts7:48f)

In our New Testament lesson from St John’s gospel, Jesus is pointing out that the Jews are very literal in their adherence to the Law, so there are certain things that the Law allows them to do, for instance carrying out circumcisions, on the Sabbath, but not, according to them, healing the sick.

So the Jews were questioning Jesus about what authority, what basis he had, for challenging them, and Jesus answered that he wasn’t simply a man, but that he got his knowledge also from his divine origin. St John’s gospel has a major theme, which is that Jesus was the Son of God.

It’s interesting how these theological questions evolved. In 600BC, 2,700 years ago, it was a live issue whether there was one god; but it was already part of the Jews’ vision that that one god had to have a house, and the house had to be magnificently furnished. The idea of God being beyond time and space had not really taken hold; but it was true that the Jews understood God as not being something made, like a golden calf – God was not a ‘brazen idol’. He was the Creator and sustainer of the world.

It is perhaps a bit salutary to realise that these steps in the history of our own civilisation – the Persians conquered the Babylonians, the Greeks conquered the Persians, the Romans conquered the Greeks and the Romans conquered Britain – those early steps took place in those mysterious and rather feared places which perhaps today we would see on the map and say, just represent threats and trouble: Iraq, Iran, Israel, Syria. That’s where it happened. It is perhaps difficult for us to remember that these places together represent the cradle of our civilisation.

It does look as though things have regressed from the time when the great king of Persia, Cyrus, could be so generous to the Jews living in exile in Babylon. The dreadful use of chemical weapons recently looks to be an innovation in brutality – but if you look at Herodotus’ Histories, you will realise that even in the days of Cyrus there were some ghastly inhumanities going on.

I don’t think it’s appropriate to go into the gory details here, but suffice to say that man’s inhumanity to man seems to have been a hallmark of this part of the world, at once the cradle of civilisation and at the same time the scene of bestial cruelty. That was true even in these heroic times, when the Jewish exile was coming to an end.

The idea that God did not live in a particular place was not something which Jesus started. ‘Heaven is my throne and earth is my footstool’ is an idea which comes from Isaiah chapter 66. So Jesus’ preaching was not that revolutionary – it was simply emphasising what was in the prophets’ teaching already – but, as often seemed to happen, the Pharisees didn’t understand, and thought that Jesus was some kind of a charlatan.

I think it’s not very fair that we should have this idea that the Pharisees were all bad. I think we have to have some fellow-feeling. What would we have thought if we’d been there? For instance, if we’d heard a rumour that Jesus might be the Messiah, but we’d compared it with what we could remember had been prophesied about the Messiah: ‘You won’t know where he has come from.’ But we did know exactly where Jesus had come from.

Would we have been clever enough or trusting enough to become disciples? Or would we have stood on the sidelines, going with the flow, like the majority of the Jewish people? Would we have recognised all the miracles that Jesus did and realised that He was who He claimed to be?

But hang on a minute. Isn’t that all really rather academic? What possible difference could any of that stuff make to our lives? How does the fact that we go to church and we call ourselves Christians affect how we look at what’s happening in the Middle East today? Or if we come across people who are in need, or suffering from disabilities; do we put it down to their ‘lifestyle choices’, as a government minister did the other day?

Where is God in all this now? Is God speaking to us through His Holy Spirit, or has He left us to sort things out by ourselves? I think Jesus would be cross with us, just as He was cross with the Jews, if He saw us not taking care of the hungry, the weak, the poor, those who are not as fortunate as ourselves in our society: not, in other words, loving our neighbours as ourselves.

Jesus was clearly right in saying that the Pharisees had forgotten the law of Moses, because they were setting out to kill him. They had conveniently forgotten ‘Thou shalt not kill’. He was absolutely serious when He pointed out that, even on the basis of conventional wisdom, on the basis of the Law of Moses, ‘Thou shalt not kill’. That was true in the early years of the first century, when Jesus said it (or at least when Jesus implied it); and it’s true today. The right answer to the crimes of someone like Mr Assad of Syria is not more killing.
Nearer to home, Jesus’ emphasis, when faced with the fact that many people are hungry today, even in England, even in the rich borough of Elmbridge, in Stoke and Cobham, Jesus’ emphasis would surely be on feeding those people rather than trying to blame them for somehow bringing hunger upon themselves.

I can’t help the feeling that, although I don’t think Jesus actually said it in words, what is implied by his great commandment to love our neighbours as ourselves – which is in the Law of Moses; it’s in Leviticus, chapter 19 verse 18 – is that you have to take people as you find them. The Good Samaritan didn’t check to see whether the man, who had fallen among thieves and was lying injured on the road, he didn’t check whether the man had been imprudent or had not gone out properly prepared, or even had perhaps said the wrong thing.

None of that mattered. The only thing that mattered was he was hurt and in need. That should surely be our motivation too. Remember what Jesus said that the eternal Judge would say at the day of judgement: ‘Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.’ (Matt. 25:34f).

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