Archives for posts with tag: Samuel

Sermon for Rose Sunday 2025

By hughdbryant
March 30, 2025 //
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See https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=610162457

Rejoice! Let me speak to you in Latin. ‘Laetare Hierusalem et conventum facite omnes qui diligitis eam: gaudete cum laetitia…’ : it means, ‘ … be ye glad for Jerusalem, all ye that delight in her: exult and sing for joy with her,’..

It says on your pew sheet that today is Mothering Sunday. So what is all this Latin stuff – ‘Laetare’ – all about? This is also, and indeed it has been for a lot longer than it has been Mothering Sunday, what is called ‘refreshment’, or Rejoice! Sunday, which is what the Latin word ‘laetare’ means: laetare, ‘rejoice!’

Traditionally, pink vestments can be worn by the priest on Refreshment Sunday, so it’s also known as Rose Sunday. It’s halfway through Lent, and it’s a chance to relax the rigours of fasting. So if you have been denying yourself, today you have no need to lay off the Ferrero Rocher and vino di tavola rosso di Toscana. Today, you can indulge without feeling guilty.

Mothering Sunday is an old mediaeval concept, which fell into disuse, but was revived during the last century by a lady called Constance Adelaide Smith, a vicar’s daughter, who picked up on plans in the USA to introduce Mother’s Day, which came to fruition in the USA in 1914. Miss Smith wrote a booklet called ‘The Revival of Mothering Sunday’ in 1921, and it started to be celebrated again in the UK around that time, on the fourth Sunday in Lent, Refreshment Sunday.

The rather formidable Miss Smith campaigned for Mothering Sunday to be a celebration of a number of various aspects of motherhood: these were ‘Mother Church’ (the church where you were baptised), ‘mothers of earthly homes’, Mary, the mother of Jesus; and Mother Nature. It is a very wide spread of people and places and things, all to be celebrated as being aspects of motherhood, motherhood to rejoice in on Mothering Sunday.

I think it’s fair to say that these days we mainly think of it as a day to celebrate our mothers, ‘mothers of earthly homes’. It’s a nice opportunity to make a fuss of them, for those of us who still have mothers around, or if not, at least to think about and remember our wonderful mothers.

At this point I must say that in the midst of all this happy celebration, for quite a number of people Mothering Sunday or Mother’s Day are not happy times. If you are a mother who has lost a child, or who has not been able to have a child, this is not a time you want to celebrate. We should pause, and take that to the Lord in prayer. If any of you are suffering in that way, I hope you will excuse my carrying on in a way that may not suit the way you feel. You are not forgotten, and you are in our prayers today.

I don’t think that you really need a homily from me on how to be nice to your mother or to be nice about her. But I would just like to take a minute or two to look at a couple of the things that come up in our Bible readings. I’m struck that in two of them the interesting thing is that the compilers of the Lectionary have selected passages, which come just after, in one case, and just before, in the other, verses which are perhaps more familiar to us and more significant than the ones which have been selected.

The first story, from the first book of Samuel, is the story of the birth of Samuel to his mother, Hannah – obviously today, one of the common themes is stories of mothers – and it is a bit like the story of the birth of John the Baptist to his mother, Elisabeth. Neither woman had been blessed with children for a number of years.

Hannah was praying to the Lord for children, and eventually her prayers were answered. In her prayers, she had said she would dedicate any son who was born to the Lord as what was called a Nazarite. This meant that she would give him over to the priests of the Temple to become somebody who was dedicated, set apart, for the Lord in the Temple. He would not be allowed to cut his hair, touch strong drink, and a whole load of other restrictions, which are all set out in the law of Moses in the book of Numbers.

But the bit which you might expect the story to go on to tell us, is what Hannah did to celebrate, because she sang a song. The song that she sang is very similar to another song in the Bible. She sang:

‘My heart rejoices in the Lord. …

Strong men stand in dismay…

Those who faltered put on new strength …

Those who had plenty sell themselves for a crust,

The hungry grow strong again.’

It has strong echoes of Mary’s song, the Magnificat, that everybody will remember from Evensong.

‘My soul doth magnify the Lord,
and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.…..

He hath shewed strength with his arm.
He hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.
He hath put down the mighty from their seat
and hath exalted the humble and meek. ….

He hath filled the hungry with good things.
And the rich he hath sent empty away.’

Clearly, Mary knew her Bible, and she remembered Hannah’s song from the story of the birth of Samuel. And not only that, but in these songs the two mothers-to-be really forecast the way that God wants us to do things. The last shall be first. The humble and meek shall be raised up. The hungry shall be filled up with good things. A really important message. Think what the world would be like if we really followed it.

And then, in our reading from Saint Paul’s letter to the Colossians, ‘..[C]lothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience..’, all those lovely ideas about how Christians should treat one another. ‘Clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.’

Wonderful words; but the ones, that are not captured by our reading, come just one verse above.

‘There is no question here of Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and freeman; but Christ is all, and is in all.’

No such thing as Jew and Greek. This is the first sign of Christianity bursting out from being just a small denomination within Judaism.

Anybody could become a Christian. Christ was, is, there to become a saviour for anyone. It’s the origin of Inclusive Church, which is a charity that the Ministry Area Committee have decided to register our churches with. Of course, we know that we are inclusive, we welcome everybody: but we will also have signs outside, and we will do lots of practical things, to let everybody know that they can come in, and that they will be welcome.

The Lord is here. His spirit is with us. His spirit is for everybody, whatever they look like, wherever they come from.

I suppose if you go away and do your homework and read the lessons at home, you will come and tackle me to say that, when I was mentioning things that weren’t in the lessons, I should have mentioned not just the bit that comes before our lesson from Colossians. but also the bit after, because it has St Paul’s rather infamous words, “Wives, be subject to your husbands“, and to be fair, “Husbands, love your wives, … children, obey your parents, for that is pleasing to God, and is the Christian way“, and so on. Given that there is nothing really about mothers in the lesson from Colossians that we heard, it is quite important to remember that St Paul did include, in this great letter, his own ideas on what makes for happy families.

But then perhaps in our Gospel reading, there is the most moving reference to a mother in the Bible, the story of Jesus on the cross, and what he said, while the three Marys were standing there.

More Latin – ‘Stabat Mater dolorosa’: ‘His sad mother was standing there’; the Marian Hymn, as it’s called. Some of us will no doubt be able to hear in our heads one or other of the beautiful musical settings, by Palestrina, or Charpentier or Vivaldi, among many others right up to today, including James McMillan and Karl Jenkins.

When I was looking at this heart-rending scene in my mind, it did slightly remind me of another time when his family was mentioned, in Saint Matthew’s Gospel chapter 12, at the end of the chapter, where he was speaking to the crowd when his mother and brothers appeared, and someone said, “Your mother and brothers are here outside, and want to speak to you”. Jesus said, “Who is my mother? Who are my brothers?” And, pointing to the disciples, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers. Whoever does the will of my heavenly father is my brother, my sister, my mother.“

This is different; it’s more simple than that; it’s just the story of Jesus, as he was dying on the cross, making sure that his mother was looked after by the disciple whom he loved, (who is sometimes identified with John the Evangelist). It looks as though his earthly father, Joseph, was no longer there, and had perhaps died already.

What a nice example Jesus was setting. Even in a moment of the most acute pain and suffering, he took time and made sure that his mother was looked after. I don’t think there’s anything I can say to improve on that. ‘I was glad’ – and I hope that today, you mothers, and children of mothers, on this Mothering Sunday, are glad too.

Amen.

Hugh Bryant

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Any Questions?

By hughdbryant
June 17, 2024 //
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Sermon for Evensong on 16th June 2024

Jeremiah 7.1-16; Romans 9.14-26

https://tinyurl.com/5xdpyys2

On Friday night I was nearly on the wireless. On BBC Radio 4. Completely by chance I had heard, when I was listening to the news in the morning, that Any Questions, which is not to be confused with the TV programme Question Time, and is much more venerable – it is apparently the oldest continuously running radio programme anywhere in the world, 76 years old, so it’s even older than me – that Any Questions was coming that same night to Newport to Newport Cathedral, to Saint Woolos’. There were a few places still available in the audience. I quickly booked a ticket and went over there. When you arrive, you are given a card to complete and hand in, with any suggested questions which you might have for the panel. Some of you may well have listened to the programme on Friday night or possibly when it was repeated at lunchtime yesterday.

The panel was a distinguished group, mostly Welsh people, two socialists, one Plaid Cymru and the other, less socialist, Labour; Boris Johnson’s press spokesman (who actually had had a long and distinguished career as political correspondent for the BBC before working for the Conservatives), a champion of industry with a strange name, and the Conservative Secretary of State for Wales who had apparently had a career as an amateur boxer, fighting under the name the Tory Tornado. It was all chaired by Victoria Derbyshire.

It came out that all the panel had gone to Oxford, except, of course, for the ‘Tornado’. Presumably most of them had gone to Jesus College, so there was a high degree of courtesy and comity between them, despite some very different views. Shortly before the programme began the producer appeared and called out eight names of people who had been selected to put their questions to the panel. I was very excited to learn that my question had been chosen, and I was number six. So we sat at the front clutching little bits of paper on which our questions had been nicely re-typed by the BBC; but alas, by the time they had dealt properly with question number five, the hour was up and I, together with the last two questioners, was left on the bench.

Before my turn there had been some very interesting questions, one involving bets on the likelihood of a conservative victory and the willingness of the panel members to ‘have a flutter’; on whether the allegedly inferior performance of the NHS in Wales was to be attributed to underfunding from Westminster or to mismanagement, by the party of Nye Bevan; about the potential effects of imposing VAT on private school fees; about which party’s manifesto would provide growth and stability; and finally, before my turn, there was this question.

A lady called Julie Pearce asked, ‘Where have honesty truth and integrity gone in politics, and do you think politics has deteriorated as a result?’The politicians on the panel predictably danced on pinheads, and perhaps the apologist for the most egregious immoralist in recent politics, Boris Johnson, produced the most ingenious evasion, when he turned immediately to discussing the merits and demerits of Lloyd George 100 years ago, whom he praised as the greatest Welsh prime minister, even though he was at the same time spectacularly immoral, he said.

Interestingly, none of the panel identified either themselves or other members as exhibiting any tendencies towards vice. Exceptionally, they were all as pure as the driven snow, we were asked to believe. As I sat there in the cathedral, I pondered what we as Christians at All Saints might have said in response to this question. Our Bible readings today are very relevant. The passage from Jeremiah is a prophecy in which God puts words into the mouth of the prophet chastising the men of Judah for their immoral behaviour. Although they went to worship in the temple, they still needed to mend their ways and their doings, the Lord said. Deal fairly with one another, do not oppress the alien, the orphan, and the widow, shed no innocent blood, and do not chase after false gods.

That could be very relevant even today. Deal fairly with one another: don’t just go for the cheapest thing on the internet and do our local shops out of business.

Don’t oppress the alien, the orphan and the widow: surely refugees – aliens – ought to be welcome and we should recognise that immigration is a good thing; after all, quite apart from whether we should offer safety and sanctuary, immigrants supply much-needed skills in industry, in the NHS and in our social services.

Does the policy of a ‘hostile environment’ and sending people to Rwanda in breach of the Refugee Convention amount to ‘oppressing the alien’? What do we do for orphans and widows? How does the two-child benefit cap fit in? What about social care and nurseries?

God isn’t having any. This is what he says: ‘You steal, you murder, you commit adultery and perjury, you burn sacrifices to Baal, you run after other gods whom you have not known; then you come and stand before me in this house, which bears my name, and say, ‘We are safe’; safe, you think, to indulge in all these abominations.’ And he says he will ‘fling them away out of his sight’ as he previously thrown away the people of Ephraim. No prayers would avail to save them.

That was the fierce prescription in the Old Testament. Did things become softer and more understanding after the coming of Jesus? St Paul’s letter to the Romans suggests not. But Paul comes at it from a different angle. Does God’s willingness to punish immorality mean that God is unjust? Paul says that it is up to God whether or not to punish somebody, and it does not depend on what he calls ‘man’s will or effort’. So why does God punish some people, or rather, allow them to be harmed? What are the rules? Is God just capricious, harming some people without a good reason?

Interestingly Paul doesn’t answer that. Instead, he suggests that it’s almost impertinent for us to ask that kind of question. ‘Who are you, sir, to answer God back? Can the pot speak to the potter and say, ‘Why did you make me like this?’? Surely the potter can do what he likes with the clay. Is he not free to make out of the same lump two vessels, one to be treasured, the other for common use?’

We have to recognise that God is bigger than we can understand, beyond our comprehension. As Jesus showed and taught, things are sometimes not what they seem, and values can be turned upside-down. The last shall be first … And being the chosen people of God may not protect you. Again, there are things happening today which might fit into this kind of analysis.

What about the war in Gaza? Does it make a difference that today’s Israelis say, as some of them surely do, that Hamas is like the Amalekites, previous occupants of the Promised Land, whom God told Saul and the Israelites, as told in the first book of Samuel [1Samuel 15:2-4], utterly to destroy – and God took them to task when they left some of them alive? Does that justify what the Israeli army is doing in Gaza?

Or we should consider what Paul points out in what the prophet Hosea said; [Hosea 2:23]: he said, ‘As it says in the Book of Hosea: ‘Those who were not my people I will call My People, and the unloved nation I will call My Beloved. For in the very place where they were told “you are no people of mine”, they shall be called Sons of the living God.’

The message is that just because one goes through the motions of worship, or goes to the temple, to the biggest cathedral, to the poshest church, it doesn’t somehow sanitise the things we do. We must love our neighbours, and worship just the one true God.

And we mustn’t use God as an excuse either. Fergal Keane, the veteran BBC war correspondent, was interviewed recently, and he said this: “It takes human beings to inflict injustice, pain, and cruelty on others. And it is too much of a cop-out to say ‘I blame it all on religion.’ That allows us, people with freedom of choice, off the hook. There are many places where faith has been manipulated, used as a banner, a suit of armour, as something to drive people on to hate their neighbours.” [https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/246585]

Perhaps that’s all a bit deep for Any Questions. But we should keep asking questions – and saying our prayers.

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GWR

By hughdbryant
August 1, 2023 //
0

Sermon for Parish Eucharist on the 8th Sunday after Trinity, 30th July 2023 at All Saints, Penarth

1 Kings 3:5-12

Romans 8:26-39

Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=557551823

‘Can I have a second-class single off-peak with a Senior Railcard to the kingdom of heaven?’ A second-class single off-peak with a Senior Railcard to the kingdom of heaven. That’s what I said to the man in the booking office here in Penarth. 

‘I beg your pardon?’ he said.

Now the fact that he was a bit stumped is, I should hasten to add, not a reflection on how useful it is to have a booking office at the station, as I am sure you will know very well from listening to Mick Lynch. But if we’re on this journey to the kingdom of heaven, where is it? What sort of a place is it? 

The first thing to say is that it’s a kingdom. We’re in the United Kingdom here in Wales. I think that I am risking having some of you shoot me on the way out if I add to my Mick Lynch reference with any ‘Yes Cymru’ allusions, so I won’t. 

But is the set-up in the kingdom of heaven like that of the United Kingdom? We can look at the story of the beginning of King Solomon’s reign over the people of Israel; it may not exactly be the kingdom of heaven, but surely it might give us some pointers. Solomon chose wisdom rather than long life or riches. No big increases in the civil list for King Solomon! 

But in one important respect he was similar to our king, and that is that actually, King Solomon wasn’t the top man. King Solomon got his authority and his power from God; our king, our Monarch, gets his power from the people. He is a constitutional monarch. In these senses, neither he nor King Solomon are absolute monarchs. In both cases they look to a higher authority. But in the kingdom of heaven, the king is the king. The king is God.

Remember that originally, in the story of Israel, the prophet Samuel was pestered by the leaders of Israel to appoint for them a king. Initially he was very reluctant to do so because he thought that a king would exploit his people in all sorts of ways. 

So Solomon was a pleasant surprise, as he chose wisdom over riches, although as you will no doubt remember he wasn’t perfect; he was what used to be called a ‘ladies’ man’, having at the last count 700 wives. They are supposed to have distracted him a bit from the duties of government, somewhat unsurprisingly.

So I think we can infer that the place we are going to is run by a good king, somebody who has all the wisdom of Solomon, without his bad side. That makes sense, because we understand God to be all-powerful and all-knowing.

But have we got the right ticket? Are we going to be on the right train? Will we get to this marvellous place? It looks from Saint Paul’s letter that perhaps the train to the kingdom of heaven is something like the Orient Express, very exclusive – although of course, if it starts from Cardiff Central, it will run on the GWR, God’s Wonderful Railway.

But look what St Paul says. ‘For those whom he foreknew he also predestined… [T]hose whom he predestined he also called’. You need to be ‘predestined’. So it looks a bit as though not everybody can ride on this train. It isn’t really up to you whether you can book that kind of ticket. So is that really the case, that unless you are somehow given a golden ticket, you can’t get on the train? Is that what it means to be predestined, to be called? 

No. I don’t think it is. St Paul says, ‘We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.’ God’s covenant, God’s agreement with his people the Israelites, is based on their love for him; to love God and love your neighbour. If you love God and follow his commandments, then, St Paul says, God will choose you; you can get on the train. And it will indeed be a very special ticket. ‘If God is for us, who is against us?’ 

And who is going to decide whether God is for us and whether we will get a ticket? That is what Jesus does. St Paul says that Jesus intercedes for us, that He speaks up for us. ‘And who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or the sword?’ 

Then we will have this wonderful, blessed assurance that we are on the train. ‘I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord’.

I may have tried to buy a second-class ticket with a senior Railcard, but it looks as though actually I am in an all-first-class Pullman, on the up main line to heaven. And what’s the station for the heavenly destination like? Is it one of Brunel’s temples of steam, Paddington or Bristol Temple Meads perhaps? Or Santa Maria Novella in Florence or Zürich Hauptbahnhof or the Gare du Nord in Paris? Perhaps I’m not on a Pullman, in fact, but on the Train Bleu, headed by Pacific 231, speeding towards the Côte D’Azur. Whatever – but for sure, we are approaching a divine destination.

But you have to realise that God’s Wonderful Railway came a little bit later than Jesus; and during the time of Jesus, He wasn’t into locomotion in the way that some of us like me are today. 

When Jesus was describing what your destination would be, He offered other sorts of images, comparing it with a market garden with a mighty mustard seed, or yeast in a loaf of bread or a trader on the Silk Route dealing in pearls, or on a deep sea trawler, with a hint that in the Kingdom of Heaven only the best fish would get on to the overnight train to Billingsgate. 

Now it is just about possible that one or two of you might not immediately picture this wonderful railway, and it is possible that you might see heaven without steam locomotives or even Trains à Grand Vitesse; and I think that you will all have rumbled the fact that, just like the man in the booking office, I can’t say exactly where the kingdom of heaven is to be found, at least in the sense of pinpointing it on Google Maps or finding it in Bradshaw.

That’s true: but Graham Kendrick, the great hymn writer today, has written a hymn, or perhaps it’s more properly called a worship song, which could give you another clue. It’s called ‘Heaven is in my Heart’. One thing is for sure. 

That is that when you do get there, nothing will separate you from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.  

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Confectionary

By hughdbryant
November 20, 2022 //
0

Sermon for Evensong on 20th November 2022 at All Saints, Penarth: Christ the King

1 Samuel 8:4-20: John 18:33-37: Psalm 72. See https://tinyurl.com/ydmp6t26

This Sunday the church celebrates ‘Christ the King’.

Kings. God save the King! King’s Counsel: King Charles III – and now today, in the church, we are celebrating Christ the King. Actually, the church has only had a feast of Christ the King since 1925, when Pope Pius XI first made it a festival in the Roman Catholic Church; and in 1969, Pope Paul VI determined that the right time for the festival would be the last Sunday before Advent, at the end of the church year.

Now, never mind whether you are a Catholic or an Anglican or a Methodist or a Baptist, you will probably be using the same readings from the Bible this weekend for the various services in your church, and thinking about Christ the King. We Anglicans have something else, earlier than the feast of Christ the King, to celebrate at the same time. I’ll come back to it.

You might think that I was going to pick up on what Samuel has said in our Old Testament lesson about the the disadvantages of kings, of absolute monarchy. If you were reading it in the King James version, you would see that Samuel warns the Israelites that if they make somebody a king, among other bad things, he will “take your daughters to be confectionaries”. In the rather more down-to-earth version which we have been using, the confectionaries have become “perfumers”, but either way you wouldn’t want your daughter to become perfumers or confectionaries to the King. That sort of king has a distinct whiff of slavery about him.

Now today, I think if you read some of the newspapers, the ones that have a rather bigger section about the royal family than my beloved Guardian, there are quite often articles which speculate on what in the old days the Queen, and now the King, might be thinking about the various things that the government is getting up to. And perhaps people might start to think that a wise king would be preferable to yet another Prime Minister. But then we remember that we have a constitutional monarchy. For us the King is just a figurehead, even if he is an inspiring one.

But it’s interesting to look back at the argument about the pros and cons of being a king that was going on between Samuel and the elders of Israel. They said, ‘Give us a king to govern us’. And then there is this fascinating sentence, “Samuel prayed to the Lord, and the Lord said to Samuel, ‘Listen to the voice of the people and all that they say to you. For they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them.’’’ It’s God speaking – and He says that the people have rejected the idea that He, God, should be their ruler, their king.

The way that they thought about God in those days was that He was much more like a kind of Marvel comic superhero than what we think God is. Having the Lord on your side in those days was a huge advantage, for instance in a battle, and they didn’t seem to be worried about the thought that He might be much bigger than just a superhuman supporting one side against the other. So a king could even be God. God could be a king. It gives a historical background to the idea of the ‘divine right of kings’ – that the first King Charles claimed, for instance.

So it wouldn’t have seemed strange to the Israelites to hear that God had said that they had rejected him, God, from being their king over them. But it’s strange to us. We would think of God as being bigger than any king.

Now when Jesus is being questioned by Pontius Pilate, it’s perhaps a rather different kind of strangeness which we notice. Surely it is pretty strange to ask somebody whether they are a king. I think it’d be pretty hard to miss, certainly in normal circumstances. I mean, I am not assuming that people who were kings went around with crowns on their heads so you’d be able to recognise them as royals, but even so you would have thought that it would have been pretty obvious to Pontius Pilate whether Jesus was a king or not.

Indeed, Jesus does query this. ‘Was that a question that occurred to you or has somebody else suggested it?’ And Pilate, who always seems to me to be a pretty common-sense sort of person, says that he doesn’t really get it. He says, ‘Your own nation, the Jews and chief priests, have handed you over to me. It looks a bit of an unlikely thing to do to a king. So what have you done?’

Jesus replies that he’s not a temporal ruler, a ruler in this world, a political figure, in which case he says he would certainly have been able to call upon his followers to fight off the Jews, and keep him from being handed over to them. In the normal course of things if he was at risk of being seized by the Jews in some ignominious way, it wouldn’t sit very easily with the idea that he was, or might have been, the king of the Jews.

So you’ve got two angles on being a king. One in the Old Testament, and the other one from the time of Christ; but in neither case does the idea of what it was to be a king at that time really square with what we understand about kings.

In the Old Testament, a king could also be a God, or even God himself. Bear in mind that the Jews were unique in worshipping just one God, whereas most of the others, like the Egyptians or the Babylonians, worshipped lots of different gods. The Jews worshipped Yahweh as their God, just the one God.

We have learned that when a new king was consecrated in Egypt or Babylon, the priest would declare an oracle from one of the national gods over the new king, and what he would say was, ‘You are my son, I am your father.’ That’s the god speaking through the priest. So in Babylon and Egypt, they believed that being a king was even being the son of a god.

That is the same formula that the prophet Nathan used when he consecrated David as the king of the Jews. If you look at 2 Samuel 7:14, through the prophet Nathan, God says about King David, ‘I will be a father to him and he shall be a son to me’. So King David is expressed to be a son of God.

So that’s the background to what on the face of things is rather an odd conversation between Pontius Pilate and Jesus. Pontius Pilate, who is just a normal bloke in this, doesn’t understand that in the Jewish tradition, to be the king means much more than just being an earthly ruler.

In a sense, Pontius Pilate stands for all of us. He saw this remarkable man, who had no crown, no entourage, no motorcade, no trappings of majesty about him – rather the reverse – but nevertheless, he was being accused of holding himself out as being the king of the Jews.

What made it so serious was that to the Jews it would have meant Jesus was holding himself out as being the son of God. Since they didn’t recognise him, they thought that it was blasphemy. Everybody got it wrong. It’s another illustration of the way that Jesus was a king, but a king in an entirely different sense.

Think of the idea of the Servant King in Isaiah 52:13 – 53:12, picked up in St Mark’s gospel 10:45 where Jesus says that ‘the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve’, for example, and what Jesus said about the first becoming the last and the last becoming first (Matt. 20:16).

The more I think about this, the more I realise this is like so many other things that we learn about Jesus. In a sense, he was a king, but in other senses he was much more modest. I think we can learn from him on all sorts of levels as a result. God isn’t like superman. He doesn’t necessarily weigh in on one side or another. But equally he is not a normal king. He doesn’t have the trappings of office and he doesn’t rule in the sense that King Charles rules, or even like an actual absolute monarch – as King Zog of Yugoslavia did, perhaps.

Instead Jesus defined his kingship in relation to something he called the truth. ‘Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice’. And Pontius Pilate came up with the sort of thing that you might hear from Piers Morgan: ‘What is truth?’ It’s a good challenge.

That’s all very interesting, you might say. All that stuff about being a king. But at the beginning you did say that the Feast of Christ the King is a celebration. How are we supposed to go about celebrating? You get the answer in the first collect, the first prayer of the day, which Beth will say. It goes, “Stir up, we beseech thee, Lord, the wills of thy faithful people”. So today is not just Christ the King Sunday. It is sometimes called “Stir-up Sunday”. This is the day when you are supposed to start mixing the Christmas pudding. That is something to celebrate. I wonder, if you are stirring up a Christmas pudding, if it makes you what Samuel called a ‘confectionary’. Why not be a confectionary? A confectionary for King Jesus, indeed. Keep stirring!

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Forecasting and Ministering

By hughdbryant
July 2, 2017 //
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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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Handmaidens

By hughdbryant
December 20, 2015 //
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Sermon for the Fourth Sunday in Advent, 20th December 2015

Luke 1:39-55

Not long ago there was a feature running in our parish magazine ‘Together’ about favourite hymns. Today I want to talk about another hymn, which wasn’t mentioned: perhaps the favourite hymn in all of Christianity. This is far bigger than ‘Shine, Jesus, Shine’ or ‘Love Divine’.

In the Gospel, that I have just read, we heard it. It’s the Song of Mary, which is often referred to by its old Latin name, Magnificat. ‘Magnificat’ means ‘magnifies’, ‘makes bigger’.

Every evening, about 6 o’clock, in every cathedral in this country, a really good choir (because all our cathedrals have super choirs) will sing this beautiful song, using the words from the Book of Common Prayer – words which were written half-way through the sixteenth century, as a translation from the Latin of St Jerome, which was itself a translation from the Greek that St Luke the doctor actually wrote his Gospel in.

And every Sunday at Evensong, at six o’clock at our sister church, St Mary’s in Stoke D’Abernon, there too, we sing the Magnificat. It could be the number one hymn in the Church of England – and versions of it are sung by churches all over the world. Magnificat might even be the most-loved hymn in Christianity.

Evensong in cathedrals – which is broadcast as Choral Evensong on BBC Radio 3 on Wednesdays and Sunday afternoons – it’s on this afternoon at 3, if you want to listen, this time from Chester Cathedral [ http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06rwy7p%5D – is reported to be the service where the congregations have grown most in the Church of England in recent years: not, actually, a modern service, but a service which can trace its origins back to the fourth century, and which was first set out, in the form we use today, in 1549.

The music which they sing is really beautiful. Choral Evensong, in every cathedral, every night, with a wonderful choir in every one, is a secret gem. More and more people are discovering it.

These are the words of the Magnificat that they sing:

My soul doth magnify the Lord :
and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.

For he hath regarded :
the lowliness of his handmaiden.

For behold, from henceforth :
all generations shall call me blessed.

For he that is mighty hath magnified me :
and holy is his Name.

And his mercy is on them that fear him :
throughout all generations.

He hath shewed strength with his arm :
he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.

He hath put down the mighty from their seat :
and hath exalted the humble and meek.

He hath filled the hungry with good things :
and the rich he hath sent empty away.

He remembering his mercy hath holpen his servant Israel :
as he promised to our forefathers, Abraham and his seed for ever.

OK, some words we ought to explain a bit. ‘He … hath holpen his servant Israel’. ‘Holpen’ means helped.

He has ‘regarded the lowliness of his handmaiden’: he has looked favourably on her, he has held her in high regard, we might say.

And presumably you all know what a handmaiden is. Mary was a ‘lowly handmaiden’. She wasn’t one of the great and good.

‘For he that is mighty hath magnified me’. There’s that ‘magnifies’ word again. This time it’s not Mary ‘magnifying’ God, but her saying how God has magnified her.

And then the ‘purple passage’.
‘He hath put down the mighty from their seat :
and hath exalted the humble and meek.

He hath filled the hungry with good things :
and the rich he hath sent empty away.’

Can you, really, see Mary, a teenager, a simple country girl, singing this song? Are they the sort of words which would just come tripping off the tongue of a teenager?

Not for the first time our Bible doesn’t really put this – even in a modern translation, like we used for the lessons – in the sort of language we would use today. ‘Tell out, my soul, the greatness of the Lord’, in Bishop Timothy Dudley-Smith’s hymn which we’ve just sung, isn’t actually a very good translation either – although Bishop Timothy got it from my favourite modern Bible, the New English Bible.

The meaning is really better expressed by what a teenager today might say: ‘Deep in my heart, I big up the Lord’. I big Him up: that’s exactly right. Mary isn’t saying that she is somehow making God bigger – because God is bigger than anything – but she is bigging Him up, she is telling out His greatness.

Giles Fraser, who often does Thought for the Day on the Today programme, who was at one time philosophy tutor at Wadham College, Oxford and Canon Chancellor of St Paul’s, who got fired for trying to make friends with the Occupy protesters camped out on the Cathedral doorstep, he, Giles Fraser, reckons that the Magnificat is one of the most powerful revolutionary texts. In September, he Tweeted, ‘BTW I don’t think [that] the Red Flag [is] anywhere near as revolutionary as the Magnificat’. [https://twitter.com/giles_fraser/status/643049147919110144]

Remember what Mary said. It could indeed be rather revolutionary.

‘He hath put down the mighty from their seat :
and hath exalted the humble and meek.

He hath filled the hungry with good things :
and the rich he hath sent empty away.’

In these short lines, Giles Fraser thinks there is a revolutionary blueprint. There are some shades of Jesus’ encounter with the Rich Young Man. Jesus turns everything on its head. The last shall be first and the first shall be last [Matt. 20:16].

I said earlier that perhaps Mary didn’t think up her famous song all by herself. As a regular worshipper in the synagogue, she would have remembered the song that Hannah, the mother of the prophet Samuel, sang, thanking God for his birth. You can read it in the first Book of Samuel, chapter 2. ‘My heart rejoices in the Lord,’ she sings. ‘The Lord makes a man poor, he makes him rich, he brings down and he raises up. He lifts the weak out of the dust, and raises the poor … to give them a place among the great, …’

It’s very like the Magnificat. There is the difference that Mary uses a past tense: God did these things, he put down the mighty from their seat, and so on, whereas Hannah uses the present tense, he does these things. God is capable of bringing the rich and powerful down, and he is capable of building up the poor and meek. Hannah’s emphasis is more on what God can do, rather than on what he has done. Mary on the other hand says what He has done.

Both songs are songs, hymns, of praise for God. They are hymns of gratitude: ‘Now thank we all our God.’ And given that Mary undoubtedly started on one of the bottom rungs of society, it’s not surprising that from her point of view, she emphasised how God has humbled the rich and powerful from time to time.

So – do sample Choral Evensong, either on the wireless or – better – by going along in person, on Sunday evening to St Mary’s, or indeed on any weeknight to Guildford Cathedral. And when you hear, indeed when you sing, the Magnificat, do spare a thought for the handmaidens, spare a thought for the people who have to come to the Foodbank. You could be surprised at what might happen.

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John the Baptist – what?

By hughdbryant
December 13, 2015 //
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Sermon for Evensong on the Third Sunday in Advent, 13th December 2015
Isaiah 35; Luke 1:57-80

So where are we up to in Advent? This is the third Sunday, and we are thinking about John the Baptist. Our second lesson was about Zacharias and Elisabeth, the faithful old couple who were way past having children when an angel visited Zacharias and told him that Elisabeth would have a son and that they would call him John.

Not surprisingly, Zacharias was rather worried that this was all not real. He asked the angel for some sign that he was telling the truth, and the angel said that he would be struck dumb until the boy was born. At about the same time, the angel Gabriel went to see Mary.

These were instances of special children, children with links to God, being born to women who had previously been unable to conceive, which had happened before in the Old Testament, in the book of Samuel. Hannah was infertile, but she prayed in the temple that if God granted her a son, she would give him up to be a priest. According to the book of Samuel, this happened.

So: John the Baptist. The angel had said that ‘he shall be great in the sight of the Lord and shall drink neither wine nor strong drink; he shall be filled with the Holy Ghost … And many of the children of Israel shall he turn to the Lord their God. And he shall go before him in the spirit and power of Elias, to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just; to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.’ (Luke 1:15-17) It was the beginning of the Kingdom of God, the time when all the happy things described by Isaiah in our first lesson would happen, the lame man leaping as an hart, like a deer: ‘then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped. Then shall the lame man leap as an hart, and the tongue of the dumb sing.’ [Isa.35:5f]

John the Baptist, preparing the way of the Lord. But what did he actually do?
He baptised people. What did that really involve? Obviously, dunking them in the river Jordan was what he was doing physically, but why did people turn out in vast numbers, as they apparently did, in order for him to submerge them in the Jordan?

Baptism by total immersion still happens today. The last Deanery confirmation and baptism service was at St George’s, Ashtead, where they have a built-in baptism pool. One of the faithful at St Andrew’s, a grown-up, was duly baptised there this Autumn. According to him, the pool was not heated, but he didn’t seem to mind.

The symbolism of baptism is fairly straightforward. It is a symbolic washing way of all our sins, all the bad things about us. If we are making a stand against evil, and trying to be closer to God, this washing will symbolically wash away the obstacles to our closeness to God. You can see what the washing is intended to signify.

Well that in Ashtead was a couple of months ago, but going back to Biblical times, the story of Zacharias and Elisabeth and their son John needs to be related to the context of the Old Testament. The significance of John’s arrival in this miraculous way has to be understood as it would have been understood at that time, in the context of Old Testament theology.

What John was doing in baptising was not just giving people a wash, but it had ritual significance as well. In the Jewish cult, that is, the way in which the Jews worshipped God, there are all sorts of procedures laid down, particularly in the book of Leviticus, among them for what was called ‘purification’. The Jewish religion was a religion of sacrifice, holiness, purification and atonement.

At every stage in life, Jews had to come before their God and propitiate him, turning away his anger and regaining his love by giving him things, by making sacrifices in his favour. This mostly involved killing innocent animals, unfortunately, and then burning them on the altar. I won’t take you through the whole ghastly procedure. If you really want to look it up, it is in Leviticus chapters 11 to 15.

The Jewish religious rules also laid down foods which were permitted to be eaten and which were not. Jewish people still abide by this – although some of my Jewish friends seem to have given themselves some latitude where bacon sandwiches are concerned!

I always smile when we read Romans chapter 14 about the Christian attitude to foods which were ritually proscribed. ‘One believes that he may eat all things, another, who is weak, eateth herbs’ – or, as for once in my life I prefer a modern translation, ‘the weak eat only vegetables.’ [NRSV, Romans 14:2]

Be nice to your vegetarian friends!

But there is an urgency about this, a dynamic to it, which perhaps we don’t quite ‘get’, if all we understand about John the Baptist and about baptism is a kind of symbolic washing, or even a kind of initiation ceremony. As we say, anyone who has been baptised is welcome to eat at the Lord’s table. That’s not really the full flavour of how it was in the Old Testament. The Jews were God’s chosen people, and their worship was designed to acknowledge that they had been singled out by God.

The whole dynamic of the Old Testament concerns the interaction between the Jews and God. They disobeyed God, and were enslaved by the Egyptians and Babylonians. They obeyed God; God loved them again, he freed them and took them to the Promised Land. It’s an idea of God, a picture of God, which I don’t think we would find convincing today.

Take the stories, that we were brought up on, of the soldiers in the trenches in the First World War, perhaps 100 or 150 yards apart, the Germans and the Brits so close that they could hear each other talking. So close that they could hear each other saying their prayers. They were both praying to the same God. What were they praying for? To survive, not to be hurt, and, dare one say, to win.

How could there be a God who favoured one side over the other? Or both sides against each other? Just as a matter of simple logic, it doesn’t work. It surely can’t be how God works.

Of course some people don’t take it any further than that and simply say that it means that God does not exist. I think in a way that is just as big a mistake as imagining God as some kind of divine helper who can fix things when they are seemingly hopeless, and more importantly, who can favour one lot of people over against another.

Of course the Emperor Constantine, in 312AD, had a vision, before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, that if he and his soldiers painted the sign of the cross on their shields, God would give them victory. They did paint the sign of the cross on their shields and they were victorious.

After that, Constantine adopted Christianity and made it the official religion of the Roman Empire. That was probably one of the biggest factors in making Christianity a world religion instead of just being a local middle eastern cult.

But it is rather doubtful whether Constantine actually believed in anything which modern Christians would recognise as Christianity. We certainly would not imagine that God would work some kind of magic so that someone would win a battle.

But certainly in the Old Testament time, the time of Moses and Elijah, Jews believed that they had to perform these various sacrificial rituals as part of their proper worship of God. There was a vital significance to this, that unless they worshipped properly, God would be angry with them. If so, God would ultimately enslave or destroy them. Ritual cleansing was all part of this worship.

These days, I don’t really ‘get’ the idea of ritual washing. I’m as fond of a nice spa as the next person, but that has to do with simply enjoying a pleasant experience. If somebody said to me that, in order to get closer to God, to put myself right with God, perhaps to atone for past wrong, for things which I have done, I needed to be baptised, I needed to have a ritual bath, I’m not sure whether I would believe in it.

Perhaps we should look again at what the work of John the Baptist could mean today.

For instance, the idea of purification. In the Jewish religion, purification has a connotation of stripping away things which are not true, bringing people to the true God, to the vital reality of creation.

Such a purification, a weeding out of things that are not true, that are wrong, could still make sense. There are plenty of things that are wrong today. If they were purified, refined back to their true essentials, would it indeed help to bring people to the true God, to the vital reality of creation?

Vital reality. I wonder why it is, therefore, that today there doesn’t seem to be the same kind of urgency. Quite a lot of people, after their Sunday lunch, and perhaps a little walk, may indeed have watched Songs of Praise, but now instead of coming to Evensong, they will be settling down for a pleasant evening catching up with the doings of some Norwegian detective.

I wonder whether we ought to be quite so blasé. Some of the things, which we take as being facts of life, perhaps aren’t. They might perhaps be better for some purification.

Take money for example. We all understand the idea of money: that money is something which stands for things which you can exchange for it. A certain amount of money gets you a certain amount of goods or services. Until 1933, a £1 note could be exchanged for a gold sovereign. There was a gold standard. The idea was that money had a fixed worth.

Clearly that is not true any more (if it ever was). Why is it, for example, that if a poor person goes into debt, maxes out their credit cards at Christmas and then is made redundant, they are immediately in trouble, and there is no one to help them; but if the banks go bankrupt, as they did in 2008, governments will step in to bail them out? It’s all the same stuff: all money.

Indeed the banks were bailed out largely by the government creating money. Clearly that money did not necessarily represent, or have any equivalence with, goods or services in a way we would understand. Is that the reality that suits us human beings best? Is it a true reflection of how things are? Perhaps we need some kind of washing. Perhaps this whole system needs to be washed through, cleaned.

Maybe John the Baptist still has something to say to us. It is something to think about when you are next in the Jacuzzi.

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What it is to be a King

By hughdbryant
November 24, 2013 //
1

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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