Archives for posts with tag: Roman Catholics

Talking to the Archbishop

By hughdbryant
September 7, 2023 //
0

Sermon for Mattins on 3rd Sept 2023 at All Saints Church, Penarth

Romans 12:9-21

Matthew 16:21-28

https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=560606098

What does it mean to be a Christian? Is it one of those organisations that have a rule book or a constitution which you have to keep to if you are going to be a member? Some people say that they think that what’s really valuable about Christianity is that it provides a moral compass that people can live by, especially today, when even in public life people do things and say things that perhaps in the past we wouldn’t have thought possible.

I won’t try to trace that pattern through recent history, in case I say something wrong about one of your heroes; but I think one could mention in passing things like former President Trump continuing to repeat a patently untrue story about having won the last election, for example: and I think it would be fair enough to have in mind some of the things that former prime ministers of recent years have said as well, as being ‘economical with the actualité’, as somebody once described it. You hear people say, ‘Things are going to the dogs’: ‘The policeman are getting smaller’: ‘Nobody knows the difference between right and wrong any more’.

So it’s interesting to come across what almost looks like a rule book for being a Christian, in what St Paul wrote to the Christians in Rome. ‘Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good’. ‘Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers.’ It reminds us of Jesus’s own Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5). St Paul says do not repay anyone evil for evil, for example. Live in harmony with one another – and in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says don’t just go tit for tat, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, but turn the other cheek; if someone wants your shirt, give him your coat as well. If a ‘man in authority’ makes you go one mile, go with him two. Give when you are asked to give and don’t turn your back on someone who asks for a loan. Jesus and Paul are pretty similar. This is the moral philosophy of Jesus Christ. Saint Paul, writing to the Romans, was probably writing before any of the gospels were written down, so it’s pretty clear that what he was saying reflected what all the early Christians held to by way of their moral beliefs.

I was thinking about that when I started listening to one of those radio programmes where the Archbishop of Canterbury interviews various people. I don’t know whether you’ve come across them, on BBC Radio 4, but I heartily recommend them. They are absolutely fascinating. The interviews are with a very wide variety of people. I think it’s true to say that most of them are top people, leaders, in one way or another, but they’re not necessarily people who would immediately spring to mind as wanting to have a public chat with the Archbishop of Canterbury.

A person like that was a lady called Dr Susan Blackmore, whom I’m sure some of you will know far better than I do: she was certainly a new one on me. It turns out that she is a ‘psychologist who is interested in the paranormal and matters spiritual’, according to the BBC, and who is keen on ‘Zen meditation’.

A lot of the people that Archbishop Justin interviews are not actually believers but are atheists, and Dr Blackmore is one like that. What struck me was that she and Justin Welby both seemed largely to believe in the same moral principles: they would both, I think, have recognised the same things as being good and bad; and if you took the labels off I think that Dr Blackmore would have been quite happy with most of the moral ideas outlined by Saint Paul – and indeed, by Jesus himself. She certainly believes that mankind is capable of altruism, going the extra mile and so on, being generous to strangers, and also, to some extent, in being ultimately generous: ‘greater love hath no man’ and all that, sacrificing oneself for your friend.

Then a very interesting moment in the conversation happened. These two people, who appeared to be identikit decent middle-class English people, with plenty of goodwill towards their fellow men and women, suddenly came to something which clearly stopped both of them in their tracks.

That was this: Dr Blackmore asked the Archbishop, “Hey, look: what would happen if it turned out that you discovered that there was good scientific evidence that the resurrection of Jesus Christ never happened, and that Jesus had died just like any one of us – and stayed dead?” Clearly Dr Blackmore expected him to say that it wouldn’t matter too much; that he had a ‘belief in the round’ and that he would still be a Christian even if it turned out that Jesus was just another bloke, perhaps a prophet, as Muslims believe.

But Archbishop Justin didn’t say that. He said, “Well, if Jesus wasn’t resurrected from the dead, it would be over. All my Christianity would be washed up instantly.” He said that it might be possible, perhaps, that he would revert to a kind of agnostic position about whether there was a God, in the sense of an ultimate creator, but he was quite clear that, just like St Paul, he believes that the whole thing depends on the resurrection of Jesus. In his first letter to the Corinthians Paul says, “If Christ was not raised, then our gospel is null and void” (1 Cor. 15:14).

It isn’t the case that Christians believe in a sort of generalised creator, a creative force, some kind of ill-defined spiritual positive force, what William Paley in the 17th century referred to as the divine watchmaker: a creator, who, sure enough, created the world and everything in it, and just like a watchmaker he had made the mechanism and set it off, and away it went without any further interference from him. That’s not Christianity.

Christianity is about Christ; and that crunch moment is what we see in the story from Saint Matthew’s Gospel, with Saint Peter trying to talk Jesus out of going to suffer and die in Jerusalem. Jesus knew what was waiting for him, and he told the disciples about it. Peter reacted as I think any of us might have reacted if we’d been there. He didn’t want to see this good man, who’d taught him so much and had shown him so many wonderful things, hurt in any way.

But he didn’t get it. Peter acknowledged Jesus as his Messiah, as his heavenly king come on Earth. But he didn’t really know how that worked. He probably had a picture in mind of something more like an earthly king, a King David or a Roman emperor in triumph; and of course, Jesus turned everything upside down, as he always did. The triumph was a triumph over suffering. He had to suffer first, before his triumph, because he wasn’t a king who was above all suffering, but was rather a king who was at the heart of everything, suffering what his people suffered – and worse.

It might be interesting at that point just to look back to the differences between how St Paul saw morality as it affects Christians – and how Jesus himself did ; and to compare it with somebody like Dr Blackmore the psychologist, who denied that there was any such thing as free will, but seemed to be able to recognise good and evil nevertheless. She certainly didn’t acknowledge that there was a God, or that Jesus was in any way divine. I think that, although she didn’t actually say so, she didn’t believe in the resurrection.

But if you say that you don’t believe that people can choose what they do freely, because you’re determined, pre-programmed, so you are fixed by your evolution, your genes and your experience, then is there any real meaning to good and evil? Dr Blackmore is left looking down an empty hole. On the other hand Saint Paul can say, “Hold fast to what is good”, because he can point to what Jesus has said, and through Jesus, in Jesus, Saint Paul recognised ultimate reality, a justification for everything.

Justin Welby said that when he was 19, in his second year at university, a friend had taken him to church and then on to supper, during which the friend had been telling him about the cross and the resurrection of Jesus, and the Archbishop said there was suddenly a ‘sense of presence’ in the room. “I’m not sure how to explain that,” he said, and his friend had apparently said, “What do you want to do now?” The Archbishop had said, “Whatever it is, it is good – and I need to cooperate with it”.

It’s perhaps a bit like John Wesley, walking down Aldersgate Street to a Bible study meeting, to study one of St Paul’s letters, and he said he was feeling a little bit reluctant, perhaps because he had done too much Bible study that day, and then all of a sudden he ‘felt his heart strangely warmed’. He had a strong feeling that Jesus, God, was there and that He did care, personally, for him.

Dr Blackmore by contrast, when she was 19, had one of those out of body experiences – although she did say she was smoking cannabis at the time – but apparently she experienced a very real feeling of going down a tunnel with a light at the end, which is an experience which quite a number of other people have testified to, but which doesn’t necessarily lead you to believe in God.

So what is it that makes you a Christian as opposed to someone who does Zen meditation? The difference is Jesus. The difference is the unique history of Jesus. After this we will say the creed – we’ll say, “I believe”- and there is nothing like it. Maybe there are some bits that you find difficult to understand or even to believe. But taken as a whole it is like the constitutional document for being a Christian.

I believe. I believe in God the father Almighty. I believe in Jesus Christ, who was crucified, died and was buried. On the third day he rose again. There is nothing like it. Frankly we wouldn’t be here, and there wouldn’t be people in church all round the world, if that was some kind of illusion, if it hadn’t happened.

As the Archbishop himself said, there are today about 85 million Anglicans, let alone the other denominations, Roman Catholics, Baptists, Methodists, Lutherans, Pentecostals, Orthodox, and although in Western Europe and in the northern hemisphere generally, fewer people are coming to Christ, in the world as a whole Christianity it’s still far and away the biggest and fastest-growing religion.

Christ is coming to more and more people. More and more people are being confronted by this amazing story and realising that they can’t make sense of their lives without in some meaningful way coming to terms with it. And they realise that coming to terms with it isn’t necessarily a picnic.

As Jesus himself said, ‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me’. It’s not a prosperity gospel. It can be tough, but once you’ve confronted it – once it’s confronted you – then your life is changed forever. If you do the things that St Paul recommends, your love will be genuine, you will rejoice in hope, you will be patient in your suffering; and, so far as it depends on you, if it is possible, (because Paul is a realist), you will live ‘peaceably’ with all.

That’s a perfect context for this service. What we are doing is celebrating, praising, the God who came to us in the form of a man, went through terrible suffering, died, in the most horrible and undeniable way, and then, on the third day, he rose again. So today we must give him our praise; and we must show our love, love for God and love for each other.

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New Year 2023

By hughdbryant
January 1, 2023 //
0

Sermon for New Year’s Day 2023 at St Dochdwys, Llandough

The Naming and Circumcision of Jesus

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

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

Numbers 6.22-27

Psalm 8

Galatians 4.4-7

Luke 2.15-21

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

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

May the Lord bless you and keep you;

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

– the war in Ukraine,

– the cost of living crisis here at home,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are no longer our own, but thine.

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

Put us to doing, put us to suffering.

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

exalted for thee or brought low for thee.

Let us be full, let us be empty.

Let us have all things, let us have nothing.

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

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

thou art ours, and we are thine.

So be it.

And the covenant which we have made on earth,

let it be ratified in heaven.

Amen.

‘Put us to doing, put us to suffering;

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

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

thou art ours, and we are thine.

So be it.

And the covenant which we have made on earth,

let it be ratified in heaven.’

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

‘Let us be full, let us be empty.

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

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

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

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Uncomfortable Words

By hughdbryant
November 17, 2020 //
0

Commentary on ‘Identities are reduced to politics’ by Angela Tilby, Church Times, 6th November 2020: https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/198908

Hugh Bryant

Angela Tilby has written about being made to feel uncomfortable. She says, ‘We are all gradually being persuaded that to make anyone feel “uncomfortable” is tantamount to a hate crime’.

What she is talking about is not comfort in the sense of warmth or a nice armchair. The contrary – what it is to be uncomfortable, in the sense she intends – is the opposite of being ‘comfortable in one’s own skin’; and that ‘skin’ is not the characteristic of an individual but of a group, of ‘class, colour, ethnicity, or religion’.

In other words, it’s not a good thing to make people feel uncomfortable on the basis of those generic characteristics, of what they are, as opposed to anything which they may have done or said. Tilby says, ‘This is why I regularly feel uncomfortable at hymns and preachy prayers that glare unforgivingly at various social injustices’.

What brought me up short in her article was this reference to a feeling of discomfort at ‘hymns and preachy prayers that glare unforgivingly at various social injustices’.

This is something I have often wondered about. For instance, I have often wondered about people who profess to be Christians in positions of power, who, in the exercise their power, do things which would seem to contradict Jesus’ commandments, (usually the commandment to love thy neighbour as thyself).

A case in point, I have thought, was Prime Minister May, who is said to be a regular churchgoer, but who created and promoted a policy of a ‘hostile environment’ for intending immigrants, leading to various inhumane consequences including the EMPIRE WINDRUSH scandal. What did Mrs May do in church? Was she asleep there? I wondered. The policy which she promoted was something which hurt people, which ruined innocent people’s lives. How could a practising Christian justify doing such a thing?

What is a preacher to say? I think that Canon Tilby is really aiming not at certain hymns and prayers, but rather at what is said from the pulpit. I’m not sure what hymns she has in mind – ‘Fight the good fight’, or maybe the suppressed verse in All Things Bright and Beautiful: ‘The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate …’ It might well be uncomfortable to sing that, and it might well be uncomfortable – certainly for the rich man – to hear it. Is there anything wrong in this? Specifically, does the hymn ‘glare unforgivingly at social injustices’? If it did, I feel, contrary to Canon Tilby, that it is a good thing. The injustices deserve to be glared at.

To pray for wrongs to be righted isn’t ‘preachy’, I would suggest. If the prayer is of the ‘Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes-Benz’ type, it’s clearly inappropriate, not because it makes anyone uncomfortable, but because you can’t tell the Almighty what to do. Thy kingdom come: Thy will be done. Thy will. Or see Psalm 115: ‘Our God is in heaven; He does as He pleases’.

Some would say that this is political, and therefore to be avoided. I have to reply that Christianity – and, for that matter, Judaism – is political. The Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55), for instance, is a revolutionary manifesto in twelve sentences, and there are many other examples. Jesus would have us sell our possessions and give money to the poor: would have us welcome strangers: become servants, rather than the masters that many of us are.

It is said, however, that a Church of England congregation often represents the Conservative Party at prayer. Bishops and clergy, by contrast, tend to vote Liberal Democrat or Labour. Perhaps this is because the ministers actually read, study and inwardly digest the liturgy and Bible lessons which they lead, whereas their flock follow, if not blindly, seemingly without much appreciation that acceptable worship does not involve a prosperity gospel!

But what if light dawns, say during a well-expressed sermon, and the hearer realises that the evil which the preacher is criticising – the social injustice, even – is something in which they, the listener, are complicit? This may indeed be uncomfortable. But surely it is all right, for ‘our God is a consuming fire’ (Hebrews 12:29). Unless our devotion is tested in that fire, it may not be worth that much.

But is it a ‘hate crime’ to make someone uncomfortable in that sort of way? The essence of a hate crime, I would suggest, is to do harm to someone because he or she represents a racial or national type and for no other reason. Because someone is black, or LGBTi, say. What Canon Tilby is suggesting is that some hymns or prayers, in praying for relief from certain types of oppression or inequality, themselves oppress some people (or make them uncomfortable).

That would require the person discomfited to be in some way oppressive or otherwise reprehensible, as opposed to their doing something oppressive.

Canon Tilby mentions being a woman; but I cannot think that ipso facto she is worthy of chastisement as such – if at all. If she is being made to feel uncomfortable, it is not because of what she is, but because of something she may feel she ought not to have done – and that she resents being reminded of.

Put another way, as the Roman Catholics say, hate the sin but pardon the sinner. So a prayer or a hymn directed against social injustice is not a ‘hate crime’. It invokes the aid of the Almighty against the evil but does not condemn the person who does that evil. It is not directed against what that person is; but rather it may well call down condemnation on what they do.

14th November 2020

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Billy Goat Gruff

By hughdbryant
November 27, 2017 //
1

Sermon for Holy Communion on the Feast of Christ the King, 26th November 2017, at St John’s, West Hartford, Conn.

[Ezekiel 34.11-16,20-24, Ephesians 1.15-23], Matthew 25.31-46

See http://bible.oremus.org/?ql=378268013 for the readings, and https://sjparish.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Nov-26-Pentecost-25-1030am.pdf for the full service booklet.

It’s really kind of you to welcome me back to St John’s to preach again. Susan, you have been amazingly gracious. Just when you were getting nicely settled in as Rector, Bill and Hope Eakins dropped in the suggestion that you might want to risk having me, this old Brit, to preach at the church – and just after Thanksgiving as well, when you are all celebrating having got rid of us colonial throw-backs. You’re truly kind.

Obviously I have been well briefed. I must stay away from anything too controversial or political. And I can’t really do the ancient Greek orator’s trick of doing a Philippic: you know, saying loudly, ‘I’m not going to say anything about Philip’, and then going on to say what an awful person he is. So no Brexit and Trump, then. Sorry.

Instead I want to get to grips with the sheep and the goats. Are you a sheep, or a goat? It’s a rigid division. On the right side, the Elysian Fields await you; but if you’re Billy Goat Gruff, nothing so nice.

That’s the thing I want to explore, with the sheep and the goats: divisions. People divided: divided, because they disagree. They disagree about what is best to do. And then, perhaps, do they have those divisions confirmed, ratified, by the Judge eternal?

At Thanksgiving you are celebrating independence from the colonial power that we were, the young nation standing on its own feet. It was a journey started by the Pilgrim Fathers, Puritans, who found themselves different from, at odds with, divided from, the society they were leaving in England. So I want to look at that division. It stemmed at least in part from the religious ferment and turmoil of the Reformation.

Apart from those things I’m not talking about, the other thing this year that has been of special note, not in our political, but in our spiritual life, has indeed been the Martin Luther 500th anniversary, 500 years since he is said to have posted up 95 points where he was at odds with the Roman Catholic Church, on the church door at Wittenberg in Saxony, which is the event which started the Reformation.

The Reformation led to civil war and persecution: the particularly ghastly thing about it was that the favourite way of getting rid of opponents was to burn them alive at the stake. We often spend time on Good Friday, during the Three Hours, reflecting on the dreadful mechanics of death by crucifixion. Death by burning seems to me to have been equally dreadful. And the penalty was so arbitrary and undeserved.

Think of Thomas Cranmer, the great scholar and Archbishop who created the first Book of Common Prayer in 1549, and gave the new Church of England liturgy, forms of worship, which were for the first time in a language that could be ‘understanded of the people’, as they said, in English instead of Latin, although they were in fact based on, and continued the tradition of, services which in some cases could be traced back to the earliest Church Fathers. But even Cranmer was eventually burned to death, at the hands of the original ‘Bloody Mary’, Queen Mary, who brought back the Catholic faith for the duration of her reign.

This happened because Cranmer was a Protestant, at a time when it was no longer the right thing to be. We don’t know whether he met Martin Luther – some scholars, such as Diarmaid McCulloch, think he might well have done – but he certainly spent time in Zürich with Zwingli and Bucer.

It is fascinating to see how Cranmer reflected the new Reformation ideas, in the way in which he dealt, (in the Book of Common Prayer that he largely authored), with what was happening in the Holy Communion, at the point when the bread and the wine are shared.

The Roman church, the Catholics, believe in what they call ‘Transubstantiation’, the ‘Real Presence’ of Jesus’ body and blood in the bread and wine of the Holy Communion. Many of the Reformers did not believe in Transubstantiation. For them the bread and the wine were just that, bread and wine; just symbols of a greater thing.

The words in Cranmer’s Prayer Book changed, from the 1549 original, where the bread and wine are treated in the Catholic way, as actually being Christ’s body and blood, to his revision in 1552, perhaps after he met the other reformers: ‘Take and eate this, in remembraunce that Christ dyed for thee, and feede on him in thy hearte by faythe, with thankesgeving’ , which means they remain just that, bread and wine, just symbols, until, long after Cranmer’s awful death in 1556, in 1662 the final version of the Prayer Book (until the twentieth century revisions, here and in England), the 1662 Book has it all ways: ‘The body of our Lord Jesus Christ, broken for thee: Eat this, in remembrance that Christ died for thee, and feed on him in thy heart by faith with thanksgiving.’ In the first bit, the body, the actual body: but then a ‘remembrance’, a symbol: feeding, but by faith, not literally. Now, you can be anywhere on the Catholic – Protestant spectrum, and find spiritual resonance somewhere in those words, which we will still use, albeit in a slightly different order, in our service today.

But, the point is that, then, people were dying for those differences. Or feeling so alienated by them, that they opted to make a perilous voyage to a largely unknown land, and make a new life – as the Pilgrim Fathers did. It’s frankly strange – repugnant, even – to us today to think that the State could mete out the ultimate punishment, death, to a learned theologian such as Cranmer. But it did.

Belief, opinion, learned opinion, was a life-or-death affair. Now we can look back 500 years and shake our heads sagely, regretting how brutal life was then: we’re far too rational to let ourselves get into that kind of overreaction.

But I wonder. I promised not to talk about Brexit and Trump. But I will just say that it seems to be true both back home in England, over Brexit, and, dare I say, here, where Pres. Trump is concerned, that a climate has built up recently where people on each side not only feel strongly, very strongly: but they have stopped talking to each other. Certainly at home in the UK, the referendum on Brexit has divided people, divided people in a serious way. Old friends are avoiding each other; families are divided. There’s no sense of the old way of managing differences: so that we would say ‘Old so-and-so thinks such-and-such: I know he’s wrong, but it doesn’t matter. We’re still the best of friends.’ That really doesn’t seem to be working any more.

Time was, even recently, when we could disagree about quite serious things, and still be friends; it really was a case of hating the sin and loving the sinner. So what did Jesus the King do? The sheep and the goats are to be separated out, they are to be divided: but not by what they have thought, but what they have done. Jesus wasn’t requiring the elect, the people who were saved, the sheep, to subscribe to any particular world view. He was looking for acts of kindness, not manifestos.

‘I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.’ (Matt.25:35-36).

Hungry; thirsty; a stranger; no clothes; ill; in prison. You can construct all sorts of scenarios, which may well broadly reflect your political outlook, to explain how a person can be in any of those situations – and we might disagree.

Hungry and thirsty because they’ve made bad ‘life choices’, perhaps; a stranger, because they live somewhere that I don’t go to – and perhaps they don’t live the way we do; no clothes, probably not literally, but scruffy, down-at-heel, when – ‘if they cared about their appearance… ‘ You know.

Or they might be refugees, from a poor country. Are they ‘genuine refugees’, or just ‘economic migrants’? That’s a question which I suspect you would answer much more sympathetically than many of us Englishmen have been doing. The USA’s prosperity is built on the labour of economic migrants – but we are now trying to keep them out.

Or what if you are sick, if you are ill? You know one of the differences between us in England and you is that, I think, we have more restrictive rules about when you can fire people. Basically, our law says that an employer has to show that he has a fair reason for terminating someone’s employment, and it is presumed that it was not fair. But a fair reason, in English law, is if you are ill, ill for too long.

That’s one where I expect there might be disagreements. You know, on the one hand, you can’t run a business if you have to pay a salary for someone who’s not there: and on the other, think what it will do to your powers of recovery if, when you are in the depths of illness, you lose your livelihood. What’s your point of view? Which side are you on?

Jesus says, when I was in hospital, you came and visited me. Dare we say, you visited me, and didn’t bring me any bad news? I hope so. Here in the home of the US insurance industry, of The Hartford and the Aetna, let me dare say it – surely long-term sickness might be covered by an employer’s insurance. Or maybe that’s too much. I was ill, and you visited me. That’s what Jesus said.

I was in prison. You came to me. I was a criminal. I didn’t deserve anything. I had done something terrible. But surely there are limits? Some criminals are just beyond the pale. At home, the man called the Moors Murderer, Ian Brady, has died, and there was controversy where his remains should be buried. He killed a number of children, in appalling circumstances. Here, Charles Manson has died. Both of them I have heard called ‘evil personified’. But Jesus isn’t judging them. Jesus’ judgement, separating the sheep and the goats, is not about whether someone has been bad, been a sinner. Jesus would have visited them. He sat down and ate with sinners.

That’s the clue. That’s how it is with Jesus. Not what you’d think; perhaps not particularly reasonable. But good.

So I suspect that if we acknowledge Christ as King, and as judge eternal, as we are invited to do today, on this festival of Christ the King at the end of Thanksgiving, we may find a way to deal with our differences: even, dare I say, those real, deep differences over Brexit and Trump. Ultimately those differences may not really be that important. Instead we need to think sheep and goats. Acts of kindness, not manifestos.

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Forecasting and Ministering

By hughdbryant
July 2, 2017 //
0

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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