Archives for posts with tag: president trump

Hodge and the Nasty Bishop

By hughdbryant
September 21, 2025 //
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Sermon for Morning Prayer on the Feast of Matthew, Apostle and Evangelist, 21st September 2025, at St Dochdwy’s Church, Llandough, and St Augustine’s Church, Penarth

2 Corinthians 4.1-6

1 Therefore, since it is by God’s mercy that we are engaged in this ministry, we do not lose heart. 2 We have renounced the shameful things that one hides; we refuse to practise cunning or to falsify God’s word; but by the open statement of the truth we commend ourselves to the conscience of everyone in the sight of God. 3 And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing. 4 In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. 5 For we do not proclaim ourselves; we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as your slaves for Jesus’ sake. 6 For it is the God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness’, who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

Matthew 9.9-13

9 As Jesus was walking along, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth; and he said to him, ‘Follow me.’ And he got up and followed him.

10 And as he sat at dinner in the house, many tax-collectors and sinners came and were sitting with him and his disciples. 11 When the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, ‘Why does your teacher eat with tax-collectors and sinners?’ 12 But when he heard this, he said, ‘Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. 13 Go and learn what this means, “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.” For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.’

Last Saturday I was in London at Southwark Cathedral. Actually it wasn’t just because I wanted to make friends with their relatively new but already fairly famous cathedral cat, Hodge – named after Samuel Johnson’s cat. Hodge arrived after their definitely famous Doorkins Magnificat died in September 2020. Doorkins got a beautiful funeral at the Cathedral, which you can still see on YouTube [https://youtu.be/sdCtdqmdgtI?si=o6h6htHMFt6xoTn5], led by the previous Dean, Andrew Nunn. 

Incidentally I am on another catty mission, which perhaps some of you could help me with, maybe even come with me, to our own cathedral in Llandaff, where I would like to meet the new cathedral cat there, called Frank. Frank is a black cat and so is Hodge. Anyway, I was delighted to meet Hodge during the day I was in the Cathedral. 

But really, the reason why I was there – with your support, because very generously our Ministry Area paid the registration fee – was to attend the ‘Festival of Preaching’ which was held that day, organised by the Church Times, with the help of the current Dean of Southwark, Mark Oakley, and the vicar of St Martin in the Fields, Sam Wells, both of whom I’m sure you will have come across on ‘Thought for the Day’ on Radio 4 if nowhere else. 

The theme of the day was ‘preaching truth to power’. The keynote speaker, who also led Holy Communion and preached, was the Bishop of Washington DC, Mariann Edgar Budde. 

You will remember, I am sure, that she is the bishop whom President Trump criticised for being ‘nasty’ when she used her sermon at the National Cathedral, in a service for the presidential inauguration, to implore Donald Trump to “have mercy upon” immigrants and LGBTQ+ individuals. 

I’ll read you what was in the Guardian, 22 Jan 2025, under the splendid headline,‘Trump criticises ‘nasty’ bishop ….’. The Guardian’s Anna Betts wrote:

‘[S]he made headlines for urging Trump during her sermon to show mercy to “gay, lesbian and transgender children” from all political backgrounds, some of whom, she said, “fear for their lives”.

‘She also used her sermon to ask that Trump grant mercy to families fearing deportation and to help those fleeing war and persecution.

‘She emphasised the contributions of immigrants, telling the president: “The vast majority of immigrants are not criminals,” adding that they were “good neighbours” and “faithful members of our churches, mosques and synagogues, gurdwara and temples”.

“Our God teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger, for we were once strangers in this land,” she said. [Exodus 22:21, et al.]

This is not the first time that [Bishop Mariann] has called out and clashed with Trump.

During Trump’s first term, [Bishop Mariann] published an opinion piece in the New York Times. In the June 2020 article, she expressed outrage over Trump’s appearance in front of St John’s Episcopal church in Washington DC, when he held up a Bible for a photo after federal officers used force to clear a crowd of peaceful protesters demonstrating against the death of George Floyd.

[Bishop Mariann] wrote that Trump had “used sacred symbols to cloak himself in the mantle of spiritual authority, while espousing positions antithetical to the Bible that he held in his hands”.’

Nasty bishop indeed! I remember watching on TV as Bishop Mariann preached at the inauguration service and being very stirred by how she had indeed spoken truth to power. It’s a challenge that has faced Christians ever since the earliest days when Jesus was with his disciples. Today we celebrate his calling one of them, Matthew, but the story comes with an important challenge to Jesus, about the people he associated with.

‘Sitting down at meat with publicans and sinners’, if you’re old enough to remember how the old Bible used to put it. Because I was brought up a Methodist, I assumed that this was theological authority for taking the pledge, that anything to do with pubs and their landlords – publicans – was reprehensible, and Jesus was being challenged for associating with pub landlords, I thought. Disappointingly, our modern translation says they’re not pub landlords but tax gatherers; still bad guys but possibly less reprehensible. After all, you might be able to avoid going to the pub, but not the taxman. Death and taxes, you know.

Jesus emphasised the need to engage with these unsavoury citizens and not just people who were on his side. He was there for people who had not seen the light. That’s what Paul is on about as well. In a hostile environment ‘we do not lose heart’, he says. ‘…by the open statement of the truth we commend ourselves to the conscience of everyone in the sight of God. … even if … the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ’. 

Nasty people doing nasty things and wrongly accusing good Christians of being nasty. How do we manage this conflict? How do we speak truth in the face of powerful opposition?

Coincidentally, while I was in Southwark Cathedral, not far away a huge demonstration was going on, led by the man who calls himself Tommy Robinson, addressed by Elon Musk by video link on giant screens telling people to be ready to fight; wrapping themselves in Union Jacks and blaming anybody who did not look like them – they were all white – for anything that wasn’t going well in their lives, and shouting that the country was going to rack and ruin. 

They didn’t want immigrants, they didn’t want black people, and it would seem they weren’t very keen on the law, because unfortunately there was considerable violence against the police. I came across numbers of them at London Bridge station on my way home. They were scary. They were nasty too. I could see black people on the platform looking nervous. Fortunately there were policemen around and no trouble actually ensued, but the whole atmosphere was menacing. Theirs was another kind of power. How would you speak to people like this, to them, to the power of the mob? 

Really it was a world away from the civilised discourse at the front of the nave of Southwark Cathedral which I had just come from. Hanging from the ceiling of the Cathedral was a huge installation of paper doves, each one inscribed with a prayer for peace. The only noise, when it came, was the music of the hymns that we sang and the anthems sung by the choir. 

Elon Musk’s participation in the fascist demonstration, by video link, demonstrated how that malign power of the extreme Right had crossed the Atlantic. It was somehow fitting that we had another American to show us how she had, with God’s help, stood up against it. No prizes for knowing which was the nasty American last Saturday.

I have no easy solutions to lay in front of you, but one message which came loud and clear was that it is very important that we should not just shut ourselves in our churches with our heads in our bibles, however faithfully, and not realise the need to engage, the need to preach truth to power.

There is such a lot going on in the world today which would not have gladdened the heart of Jesus. Our voices in the churches, speaking truth to power, need to be heard. We are specially praying today for the situation in the Middle East, for the release of hostages, for the cessation of violence, for the provision of enough food and water and the reconstruction of houses. 

There is going to be a vigil of witness led by ++Cherry at the Senedd on Wednesday at 12.30. If anyone else would like to go, I will be going along with Jimmy and Susannah, and would be very happy to give lifts if anyone needs one. We are planning a vigil for peace in this Ministry Area also, on 5th October in the evening, at  All Saints.

Jesus first, then his disciples, and then his ‘meta-disciple’, Saint Paul, his second-order disciple, the great theologian, all knew the importance of preaching truth to power. Let us pray that we are given the Lord’s help and encouragement in continuing that important work.  Amen.

Hugh Bryant

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Temptation in the House of Louis Jadot

By hughdbryant
March 10, 2025 //
0

Sermon for Evensong on the First Sunday in Lent, 9th March 2025

At St Peter’s Church, Old Cogan

Jonah 3

Luke 18:9-14

https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=608348962

Last Wednesday, Ash Wednesday, I did some shopping in one of our local supermarkets. I accidentally walked down the aisle containing wine and beer, and stumbled across Beaujolais Villages from one of the finest Burgundy producers, rather curiously marked as ‘clearance’ – at less than half the normal price. 

Now on the first day of Lent this was rather a challenge. Could I resist buying it at less than half price? On Ash Wednesday it was the start of Lent, and one of the things which one is supposed to do is to give things up, to fast. What was I supposed to do about this wonderful wine bargain? 

At the same time I was starting to think about this service, and what I would say to you in my sermon. I looked at our Bible lessons prescribed for today, and came across the third chapter of the little book of Jonah.

A little like Louis Jadot’s fine Beaujolais, the passage chosen wasn’t quite what I had expected. That was nothing about the whale. If I asked you what you associate with the name of Jonah, I would be mighty impressed if the name ‘Nineveh’ was on your lips instead of something about a whale. 

Our lesson today tells you about Jonah going and uttering a prophecy to the people of Nineveh who have been misbehaving in a sinful way, telling them that God had warned that they would come to a bad end if they did not mend their ways. The ruler of Nineveh told the people to put on sackcloth and ashes, to put on visible signs of repentance, and to turn back to the true God. But you have to know that this is Jonah’s second go at this task from God. The first time around, when God was telling him to give this bad news to the people of Nineveh, he ran away, bought a passage on the ship and then, as a result of the ship being caught in a storm, he drew the short straw and was chucked overboard so as to lighten the load on the ship and to save it from being overwhelmed by the waves. And he was eaten up by a whale.

At this point when I am talking about the book of Jonah, as an ancient maritime lawyer I always use the opportunity to mention this as an early instance of the legal doctrine of general average, an “extraordinary sacrifice made to preserve the safety of the ‘maritime adventure’”, as the Marine Insurance Act1906, which is still good law, puts it; although general average doesn’t involve chucking people over the side as opposed to cargo or the ship’s tackle, of course, or making a special payment for services to prevent the ship being lost. So I won’t mention that particularly here but rather we should concentrate on Jonah’s encounter with the whale.

I’m not sufficiently up on marine biology to be able to express a view on how plausible this is as a literal account, but I think it is fine as a colourful illustration of how God might intervene to persuade somebody who was a bit reluctant. Jonah having been spat out safely, as you are, if you’re eaten by a whale, after three days, he was indeed persuaded, and he went and undertook his task. He told the people of Nineveh how awful they were, how they needed to change their ways, to repent: a bit like what we are supposed to do in Lent, I suppose. 

You can see why Jonah was reluctant. Being the bearer of bad news is never a popular thing to do, especially when you are speaking truth to power. It’s something we’ve noticed in recent days in the way in which our various leaders are not telling President Trump what time of day it is. 

Not but what Jonah, no doubt emboldened by his whaling experience, did deliver his message to the people of Nineveh, and he received a reception which was entirely different from what he had feared. God had noticed the fact that the people of Nineveh had changed their ways, and he did not punish them. 

So – what should we do? How should we change our ways in the 40 days leading up to Easter? What about fasting? Well, another thing to put into the mix is that we mustn’t crow about whatever it is that we do do; so if you are able to write a cheque for an eye-watering amount of money to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, say, or even, maybe, for the Penarth Ministry Area, such that you make that gift instead of treating yourself to a holiday in Gstaad for skiing, you mustn’t talk about it. You mustn’t crow about it. Think about the Pharisee and the publican. All you should do is to ask the Lord for forgiveness because you are a sinner. Whatever sins you have committed, you just say, quietly and privately, ‘Have mercy on me, a sinner.’

I guess that bears on how you should conduct yourself at charity auctions. Maybe you will have to appoint a proxy to bid for you next time you are minded to go and support Welsh Rugby at some appropriate dinner or other, but I leave that to your discretion.

What about that Beaujolais? Well I offer this as a true story which may or may not inspire you. I know that I am very bad at giving things up, but equally I’m not sure that my giving things up really has any benefit to anybody else except possibly me. But I am enormously comforted by a verse in Isaiah about fasting. Let me quote it to you.

‘Is not this the fast that I choose: to loosen the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin?’ (Isaiah 58: 6,7)

Now I do think that that is more my kind of fast. So what I usually do – and I am going to do it this Lent – is, every time I eat out, (and that includes pies on the motorway), I will keep a note of what I spend; and at the end of Lent I will look at all those bills and work out what it would have cost to invite another person to join me each time: an absent guest, if you like. I will tot up the cost of the absent guests and I will give that to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Maybe that’s a sort of fast that you could undertake too. 

Oh – and, yes, about the Beaujolais. I bought three. 

Amen.

Hugh Bryant

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Hope and Ash

By hughdbryant
March 10, 2025 //
0

Sermon for Ash Wednesday, 5th March 2025 at All Saints Church, Penarth

Joel 2:1-2, 12-17

2 Cor 5:20b-6:10

John 8:1-11

Psalm 51:1-17  

https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=608110117

‘Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. Turn away from sin and be faithful to Christ’. That’s what Jimmy and Craig are going to be saying to you in a minute, when the ‘ash’ in Ash Wednesday is imposed on your forehead. The imposition of ashes is a symbol, a sign of the spirit of penitence, of repentance for sins; and also it is a symbol of our mortality – ‘ashes to ashes, dust to dust’. You will remember those words from funerals. These symbols lead us into the next 40 days of reflection and repentance in Lent. 

The prophet Joel writes all about the day of the Lord, the coming of the Lord, the moment of the Messiah. It’s portrayed as a pretty terrifying event. The day of the Lord is coming, it is near; a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and thick darkness. In the darkness will come a great and powerful army. 

Joel is prophesying about the coming of the Lord against a backdrop where Israel, the chosen people, have not waited for salvation but they have gone their own way in many instances and worshipped other gods. In Joel’s prophecy, and in the way that Saint Paul emphasised similar ideas, it’s important that we shouldn’t separate ourselves from God. We shouldn’t pretend that we don’t need God, and we should acknowledge that we have strayed from the straight and narrow and we have been sinners in many ways. 

Although the book of Joel begins with the description of a plague of locusts, Joel believes in the end there will be a rapprochement between his chosen people and the Lord; a rapprochement, a coming-together again. ‘Return to the Lord your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love; who relents from punishing.’ 

St Paul picks up the idea of the day of the Lord: ’At an acceptable time I have listened to you and on a day of salvation I have helped you’ – it is a quotation from the book of the prophet Isaiah – and Saint Paul says to the Corinthians, ‘See, now is the acceptable time; see, now is the day of salvation!’ The Day of the Lord. 

Almost using the language of Joel, St Paul writes to the Corinthians, ‘We entreat you on behalf of Christ to be reconciled to God, to come back from sin’. He puts himself alongside the prophets, doing a rather similar job. ‘We are ambassadors for Christ’, he says, ‘since God is making his appeal through us’. That’s pretty well what the Old Testament prophets like Joel was doing. They were putting the voice of God into the human language. 

St Paul appeals to the Corinthians to be reconciled to God. He feels they have gone away from God. Saint Paul tells the Corinthians that he and his team have been through tremendous trials as a result of their trying to proclaim the gospel. But it is worth their suffering. Now is the crucial time: now is the moment, now is the moment about which the prophets were prophesying, so now is the time to turn away from sin and be faithful to Christ. 

If you read these passages while you are thinking about the situation in Ukraine or in Gaza, for example, you might well feel that one of those visions of the day of the Lord, the day of vengeance, the End Time, might be an apt description; especially if you reflect on the thought that nobody is really considering a wider perspective, or a higher perspective, than the relative strengths of the humans involved in any of these terrible situations. 

The Israelis can go on killing Palestinians, quite irrespective of any questions of principle, let alone the Ten Commandments. Is it right to do so? Does it break international law? They really don’t seem to be interested. As they see things, it is a question of self defence; although it seems more likely that it is retaliation, and it is extraordinary that in order to attack Hamas they don’t appear to be worried about killing thousands of Palestinians, at least half of whom are children, who haven’t ever done anything to harm them. 

Similarly in Ukraine, if you are at the court of Donald Trump, it doesn’t appear to be a question of what is right or wrong, but rather the only consideration is that might is right. President Trump and his team have said that Russia is entitled to keep the land they have seized from Ukraine, because they have ‘lost a lot of men in the process’. There is nothing about whether it was right or good to invade another country. 

President Zelenskyy is supposed to agree to a form of capitulation because, according to President Trump, he ‘doesn’t hold many cards’ – or maybe, any cards  (I’m not quite sure what was said, because everyone was shouting). Because he doesn’t hold any cards: again no question whether he is doing the right thing, whether it is legitimate to defend your country when it is attacked, but rather just a question whether his relative strength is less than the aggressor. Might is right, although they do not actually say this. If you re-read the passage in Joel about what the Israelites were doing wrong, following other gods, turning away from the true God, it could be a way of describing what is happening now in Ukraine. 

Joel suggests that, if people repent, the Lord will forgive them. But we watch and we see no signs of repentance: so we begin to fear that there is no way out of this. President Trump accuses President Zelenskyy of playing with the possibility of a third world war and it is believable that a third world war would be a form of apocalypse, that it might be the end of human life as we know it. 

In a way, therefore, no wonder that we are at least metaphorically in sackcloth and ashes over this situation. It shames the whole human race. Is it really going to be the case that we are dust, and to dust we shall shortly return? You might wonder how Jesus would deal with such an awful situation. What would Jesus do? When something has gone horribly wrong, when people have clearly behaved totally sinfully, what would Jesus do? 

This is where we have this wonderful story, (which nobody really knows where it properly belongs in the Bible, because it’s in different manuscripts in different places, and indeed is completely missing from some manuscripts), the story of the ‘woman taken in adultery.’  The very words, in their archaic ghastliness, tell you that something extraordinary is going to be played out. The context is a provision in the Jewish law which you will find in the book of Deuteronomy chapter 22 according to which adulterers were to be stoned to death. 

When you read about all the awful punishments that were used in the ancient world and indeed are still sometimes used in the Middle East today, the true horror of what was being proposed might escape us; but this was a truly awful form of killing, right up there with crucifixion in its cruelty and inhumanity. But it’s not necessary to go into all the ghastly details in the story in order to understand that it is another example where Jesus turns things on their head in a marvellous way. 

Who will guard the guards themselves? I wonder if Albert Pierrepoint, the last British executioner, was a good man who never did anything wrong. Jesus is saying that there is room for mercy and room for repentance. The only thing that he asks the woman to do is not to sin again. Don’t miss the mark again; stay close to God. However awful, whatever it is you’ve done, whatever it might be, there is room for forgiveness. 

That’s the second half of the message with the ash. Turn away from sin and be faithful to Christ. That’s good advice. It’s the best advice. But let’s just look again at the beginning. ‘Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return’. Do you remember what comes next? In the funeral service it is the ‘sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life through our Lord Jesus Christ’. So in our Lenten reflections this isn’t just a time for despair: a time for sadness and fear; a time for regret, although we may have all those things; but it is also a time for that sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life. For the sure and certain hope of Easter. 

So even in the face of a world which seems to have abandoned the Lord and to be headed for that day of darkness and gloom when ‘like blackness spread upon the mountains a great and powerful army comes’, even so we can have a sure and certain hope that ultimately Jesus will be the winner, Jesus will be the conqueror, the conqueror over death and sin. So we are invited to return with all our hearts, with fasting, weeping and mourning; but not to do it just for show: to ‘rend our hearts but not our clothes’. Because ‘the Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love’. Brothers and sisters, we must not lose hope. 

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Blessings

By hughdbryant
July 14, 2019 //
2

Sermon for Evensong on the Fourth Sunday after Trinity, 14th July 2019

Genesis 32:9-30, Mark 7:1-23 (see https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=430034390)

I could tell you a good story about Jacob and Esau and the beginnings of the nation of Israel: how Jacob cheated his brother Esau, as we heard last week; how he in turn was cheated by Laban, his relative, father of Leah and Rachel, so that eventually Jacob managed to marry both of them: how Jacob in his wandering prospered, again through some sharp practice, this time getting his own back on old Laban. He said Laban could have goats and sheep, provided they had certain markings on them, and Jacob would have the others, although quietly he was making sure that he was breeding only the sheep and the goats that had his markings on.

So Jacob became rich and prospered. Still, his brother Esau was out to get him, for taking away their father’s blessing, his birthright. So Jacob went out with a huge gathering of cattle and various other presents for his brother to appease him, and to make him forgive him.

On the night before he was due to meet his brother, (and both of them were accompanied by private armies), he met a mysterious man, with whom he wrestled all night, and who dislocated his hip for him. He wouldn’t tell Jacob his name, although the mysterious man said that Jacob’s name would not be Jacob any more, but Israel, which means ‘God strove’, or ‘God struggled’, so Jacob deduced that he had had God as his opponent. Jacob called the name of the place Peniel, meaning, ‘the face of God’.

I could tell you all that story; Oh, and I could also mention Jacob’s dream, of the angels ascending and descending a ladder to and from heaven.

In the story there’s a real intimacy between Jacob and God. It doesn’t seem to be particularly the case that God is upholding Jacob because he is a good and moral man – which he clearly isn’t; and even after Jacob has stolen his brother’s birthright, nevertheless his father Isaac, too, seems to treat it as just one of those things. He blesses Jacob and he sends him out to start a family. I could tell you that story.

Or, I could go into the other story today in our Bible readings, about washing one’s hands before you eat, and various other Jewish rules which were not part of the law of Moses, which Jesus condemned as forms of hypocrisy.

The part about washing hands doesn’t translate very well into a modern context, but the other half of the story, where Jesus goes on to tick the Pharisees off for relying on the small print, relying on get-out clauses allowing them to avoid having to do good, to avoid having to care for their parents as it is laid down in the Law of Moses, is something we can easily understand.

Apparently a practice had grown up according to which people could get out of looking after their old Mums and Dads and devoting resources to it, if they had first set aside the bulk of their savings for a sacrifice, or sacrificial offering, to God. This is what was called ‘Corban’.

Whatever was set aside as Corban was no longer available to be used to benefit one’s family, one’s aged parents, and so you were excused from having to look after them.

I could spend a long time teasing out all the various bits of meaning in our two Bible lessons. On one level you might possibly find it edifying, even enlightening; just as you would do, if you were watching a documentary film or going to one of the Art Fund lectures at the Yehudi Menuhin School.

But then I think, an hour or so after you come out of church, you might have a moment of dismay, because those stories just don’t bear on all the important things that are going on in our lives.

What on earth has wrestling with a mystery man in the night, or seeing angels climbing up and down to heaven, got to do with our worries about naval threats in the Gulf of Hormuz, or the unpredictability of Pres.Trump and his refusal to follow the norms of statesmanlike behaviour?

What do Jacob’s wanderings and Jesus’ teaching about hypocrisy really have to say to us in today’s world? Some of it is, on its face, out of date or inappropriate. Our children really ought not to think that Jesus says it’s OK not to wash your hands. (I know it’s about ritual washing, but that’s even further away from real life).

We are worried about knife crime. The terrible murder on the train at East Horsley. It was a shock. It seemed to be something that could have happened to any of us who commute on that line, on our local line to London. What has God got to do with that?

What will happen about ‘Brexit’? Our country has already been greatly diminished in the eyes of the rest of the world and the preparations for Brexit have cost billions. Where will it end?

Austerity, over the last ten years, has not made our economy any stronger. But is has meant that the poorer people in our society are now desperately poor, and food banks are everywhere. Our own food bank will supply over 3,000 food parcels, locally, here in this area, in the next twelve months. What would Jesus say?

During the ITV debate between the two candidates for the Conservative leadership, when one was asked about his Christian faith, he said: “I sometimes pray. I’m like regular Church of England folk: it’s part of my life and my identity, but I don’t think it defines my politics.” [https://twitter.com/churchtimes/status/1149735677430390784?s=21]

Why doesn’t his faith in God define his politics? Is there anything more important? How worrying is that? I’m not concerned about who the politician was or that it was one party or another: this could have been said by almost anyone. But he was an MP, an important person, a minister. Why shouldn’t such an MP’s faith influence his politics?

In the Bible, Jacob could talk to God and lament that he had not followed God’s commandments; but nevertheless God kept faith with him. They had this regular contact. In his dream he saw the angels climbing up and down a ladder, Jacob’s Ladder, into heaven. And God met him at night to wrestle with him. Was that a dream as well? Whatever it was, Jacob felt that he had seen the face of God; he had been close to God.

But we, we don’t seem to experience anything like that. Perhaps like the Pharisees, we’ve become too regimented in our approach to God. Perhaps our prayers are too formulaic. Perhaps we are not open enough to see the face of God any more. Perhaps we’re like that politician. Like the one who said, “I sometimes pray. I’m like regular Church of England folk: it’s part of my life and my identity, but I don’t think it defines my politics.”

When Jesus told the Pharisees not just to go through the motions, not just to follow the rules for the sake of following the rules, I think he could have been talking precisely about the ‘regular Church of England folk’ that this politician said he belonged to. The Pharisees went through the motions, but they didn’t actually do anything. It didn’t ‘define their politics’.

I think what Jesus is teaching us in relation to washing one’s hands and setting aside resources that might have gone to look after your parents, is that this is sham love, and it is no good. Jesus wants us to show risky love, real love, the sort of thing he preached about in his Sermon on the Mount.

The love that Jesus was recommending, going the extra mile, loving our enemies, turning the other cheek, being like the Good Samaritan, is generous love and it’s a love which is not calculating in any way. Paul wrote about it in 1 Corinthians 13. ‘Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant’. It isn’t necessarily love which you can easily afford. It could be like the widow’s mite. Not much, but it could be more than you can easily afford.

But when you do see that kind of giving, giving which does not count the cost, at work, when, (and this seems especially apt today, which is Sea Sunday), when you see the risks that Captain Carola Rackete, the young German sea captain, took in order to rescue refugees in the Mediterranean and take them to a safe port, even though it might result in her going to jail; or more mundanely and closer to home, when you see someone give their entire trolley of purchases from the supermarket to our Foodbank, all for their poor neighbours: it may not be a sensible gift: it may be really extravagant: but it is loving. It is a blessing. A real blessing, and I think we may begin to see the face of God in it.

Just as Jacob was really concerned to be blessed, to have his father’s blessing and then for God to bless him – he said, ‘I will not let you go until you bless me’ – we need to look out for our blessings. If we count our blessings, I am confident that we are going to find, not that we are alone, but that God really is still at work among us.

So may God bless us and keep us, and make His face to shine upon us.

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A Bishop-and-a-Half

By hughdbryant
February 5, 2017 //
0

Sermon for Evensong on the fourth Sunday before Lent, 5th February 2017, at St Mary’s, Stoke D’Abernon
Amos 2: 4 -16, Ephesians 4:17–32

Beloved. That’s how Bishop Richard Chartres, who is just retiring as Bishop of London after 21 years, starts his sermons. I have just been to a marvellous Eucharist for Candlemas this Thursday evening at St Paul’s Cathedral, when the cathedral was completely full, with several thousand people inside and a ‘pop-up cathedral’ with many more, outside in Paternoster Square.

At this service of Holy Communion, Bishop Richard celebrated and preached his last sermon as Bishop. Anyone who tells you that the Church of England is declining and falling apart should just have been at that wonderful service, which was full of spirituality, vitality, beautiful music and inspiration. Signs of decline? Not there! Not at St Paul’s this Candlemas!

It was a wonderful antidote to the constant chorus of gloomy news about President Trump and Brexit. Bishop Richard cuts a most imposing figure and when, in his beautiful red robes, with his mitre and crozier, he brought up the rear of the long procession of clergy and dignitaries, other bishops and representatives of all the other churches, I did think that there, there indeed was a real bishop, a bishop-and-a-half, you might say.

Before I went to Bishop Richard’s Candlemas Eucharist, I was a bit afraid that tonight I was going to have to do rather a gloomy sermon about the tough message that the prophet Amos was giving to Israel about 730 BC about all the things that they had done wrong:

‘… they sold the righteous for silver, and the poor for a pair of shoes; that pant after the dust of the earth on the head of the poor,’ – the last bit of which is rather opaque, but which I think means that they grind the faces of the poor into the dust – ‘and turn aside the way of the meek’. It sounds a bit like our consumer society today, where people know the price of everything but the value of nothing, and some of the newspapers are always very scathing about poor people. Fortunately, however scornful they are, they don’t stop hungry people from coming to our food bank.

But actually I got diverted by what Bishop Richard preached about the Nunc Dimittis – ‘Now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace’; it was a very appropriate text, as this was Bishop Richard’s last sermon as Bishop: he is departing in peace. ‘Now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace’. Bishop Richard preferred those traditional words to the more modern translation, ‘Now you are letting your servant depart’, which, he said, he thought sounded like a ‘divine sacking’ (http://bishopoflondon.org/sermons/master-now-you-are-dismissing-your-servant/), whereas, he said, he was still looking forward, looking forward to great things in future, ‘To be a light to lighten the Gentiles: and to be the glory of thy people Israel’.

Bishop Richard has been a very successful Bishop of London. Numbers of people belonging to the various churches in the diocese have increased considerably – by nearly 50%, and he has succeeded in keeping together in the diocese a wide variety of different styles and types of churches, all belonging to the Church of England, from Anglo-Catholics to charismatic evangelicals. In effect he has managed to accommodate a diocese-within-a-diocese, in the form of the Holy Trinity Brompton and Alpha ministries, with their extensive church planting activities. He told us that one of his last tasks would be to license a Chinese minister to lead a new congregation of Chinese people at St Michael’s, Cornhill, in the City. He has the knack of being at home in all sorts of contexts, but he never stops being the Bishop.

In the Christian tradition, before the bishops came the apostles, among them the apostle for the Gentiles, the apostle for us, St Paul. St Paul was in prison in Rome when he wrote his Letter to the Ephesians, that cosmopolitan city where he had met with opposition from Demetrius the silversmith who made statues of the Greek god Artemis, Diana: ‘Great is Diana of the Ephesians’, they had shouted.

Paul didn’t want the Ephesians to descend to the depths of depravity which the prophets had decried in the Israelites of old. He used this famous figure of speech, about how Christians should ‘put on the new man’, as though being a Christian was like putting a best suit on. If you wore that suit, you should:
Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, and be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you. [Eph. 4:31f]

In the Letter to the Ephesians there’s also a sort of version of the Ten Commandments, where Paul takes the place of the prophet. What is the message of all this for us? Does it still work to put on the Christian suit?

I started out, in this sermon, with a sly nod towards all the news and controversy, which the election of Mr Trump in the USA, and the Brexit stuff here, has been creating. What should a Christian think and say about these issues in our life today?

When the President of the USA comes out with ‘executive orders’, seemingly without any checks and balances, one of which arbitrarily bans entry to Moslems from some, but not all, Moslem countries: or when our government seems to have adopted a view of life outside the EU which places more weight on cutting immigration than preserving our access to the single market; as a country, we are terribly divided and confused. What would Jesus have done?

I think that he might well have agreed with St Paul – and Bishop Richard – that we must go forward, putting on the ‘new man’. For St Paul’s idea is that God, in Christ, has created a completely new social order.

In Galatians [3:27-28] he wrote,

‘For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ.’
There it is again – the Christian suit. Put it on.
‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.’

 

You are all one.

 

‘Now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace’. There have been a lot of departures, recently. Not only Bishop Richard, but also our own Rector, Robert Jenkins, going, and soon Folli Olokose will have to go off to another parish – we hope, as their vicar. And the vacancies for Bishop of Dorking and Vicar of Oxshott have only just been filled.

Soon a team will have to set to in order to draft a ‘Parish Profile’ for St Andrew’s. It should really have a section in it about St Mary’s – and it probably will have one, because we are a ‘united benefice’ – but really the job is at St Andrew’s. What will our fellow church in the benefice be like, with its new vicar? What will we at St Mary’s be like, alongside them?

This is where the people in each church need to have a look at what St Paul is saying in his Letter to the Ephesians: because this letter, more than any other part of the Bible, deals with the building up of a church. Fundamental to that is the abolition of boundaries and divisions. There is room for everyone.

Bishop Richard ended his sermon by adapting the Te Deum, from Mattins. He said, ‘May God bless each and every one of you; the glorious company of my fellow priests; the goodly fellowship of Churchwardens, Readers, Lay Workers, Youth Ministers, Faithful Worshippers, and the noble army of Pioneers in Paternoster Square’.

I think that is a wonderful image. There’s room in the church for a glorious company, for a goodly fellowship, indeed for a noble army; room for all those different people; and they will all do their jobs differently: and so each church is a bit different too, as we all feel that different things are important in bringing the best of ourselves in worship to God. But at bottom, we are all one.

And Trump? So, yes, also in the world outside the church, and by the same token: Trump’s immigration ban is wrong, and Brexit, if it is anti-immigrant, is wrong. ‘For [we] are all one in Christ Jesus.’ All one. Beloved.

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