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

2 Corinthians 4.1-6

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

Matthew 9.9-13

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hugh Bryant

Captain Slow

By hughdbryant

October 3, 2023 //

Sermon for Mattins (Morning Prayer) on 3rd October 2023 at All Saints Church, Penarth

Readings: https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=563256396

https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=563256396

It occurred to me that you might be a bit fed up if I spent the next 10 minutes talking about the Last Supper, Jesus shocking the disciples and forecasting that one of them was going to betray him, but then going on to celebrate very first Holy Communion. I think it will be a bit of an anticlimax to hear a sermon all about that and then not to receive communion, but as you know, we are not doing a holy communion service this morning.

If we look at our other lesson, the reading is from the prophet Ezekiel who was writing from exile in Babylon, making a prophecy about the circumstances under which God’s chosen people the Israelites would return to Jerusalem. Our reading comes after a few lines in which Ezekiel mentions that the existing people, who are currently in Jerusalem, have suggested that the Israelites should go away and find somewhere else. It resonates; it’s sad, even today.

It does have the well-known lines about the Lord promising to the Israelites that when they come to Jerusalem he will give them ‘one heart and put a new spirit within them’; he will remove the ‘heart of stone’ from them and give them a ‘heart of flesh’ so that they may ‘follow God’s statutes and keep his ordinances, and obey them’, so that ‘they shall be his people and he will be their God.’

In one sense the whole of the Old Testament is all about the history of Israel’s being obedient and then disobedient to the Lord their God and all the various consequences thereof. Again, I think it doesn’t really fit for me to go into that in more detail this morning. We would need a learned seminar at least.

So if I’m not going to spend a lot of time on our lessons – I hope that you will forgive me for so doing – what do I want to dwell on? Perhaps it’s not strictly true, that I am completely ignoring our readings, because I saw something in the passage from Ezekiel, which sparked a thought within me, which I hope will be worth our pursuing together. That is that after Ezekiel has finished his prophecy, we are told that the cherubim lifted up their wings ‘with the wheels beside them.’

If you go to the beginning of the book of Ezekiel, in the first chapter, he says that he was among the exiles by the River Chebar, and the heavens were opened, and he saw visions of God. He saw extraordinary visions of four living creatures, the cherubim, with four wings, and four different faces each; and there were wheels.

It was sometimes described as the vision of the chariot. ‘When they moved, [the wheels] moved in any of the four directions without veering’. Perhaps the mechanical engineers in our congregation will be able to confirm that this is, perhaps, one of the earliest references to Ackermann steering that we’ve come across in literature.

But anyway, there is something on wheels; and that’s what piqued me, because in among all the other things we have to deal with at the moment in our lives, there are a lot of people exercised about something on wheels, namely, the 20 mile an hour speed limit.

Now, I want you to be immediately reassured; I am not about to turn into Jeremy Clarkson, or side vehemently with one or other of the parties in the Senedd, on this issue: but it did seem to me that it was a good opportunity for us to discuss how we put our faith into practical effect in today’s world.

Is there a Christian way to look at the 20 mile an hour speed limit? I suppose the key to all this, if we are Christians, is to ask, what would Jesus do? If Jesus was around today, how would he approach the 20 mile an hour speed limit? What is the Christian approach to it?

This is a bit like when I was studying Latin and Greek at school and university and we had to do prose composition; you might be given the Times editorial from a couple of days earlier and asked to put it into the Latin of Tacitus or the Greek of Demosthenes. Our teachers delighted in finding modern passages with things that didn’t exist in classical antiquity, such as trains and aeroplanes. What is the Ancient Greek equivalent of Concorde?

It’s just the same problem that we have in this case, wondering what Jesus would have done about the 20 mile an hour limit. What sort of car would Jesus be driving? So far as I know, the only form of locomotion which Jesus used was a variety of ponies, starting with Shanks’ and extending to the famous ass on Palm Sunday.

Presumably there were horses and carts, but the only ones that we hear about in the Bible are chariots, predominantly in a warlike context. In Psalm 20, for instance, ‘…some trust in chariots, some in horses, but we will make mention of the name of the Lord our God.’

But I don’t think that a chariot is really a parallel with a motor car today, or even with an SUV, come to think of it. If that was the case, Jesus would have been rumbling about in a tank or an armoured fighting vehicle. I certainly don’t think that I see Jesus riding on a Challenger II on his way into Jerusalem. No, it looks as though Jesus was much more often travelling at 4 mph, walking pace, or alternatively, at maybe 5 knots in a fishing boat on the sea of Galilee.

So what is the underlying message, which we could draw a parallel with, over the gap of 2000 years? I would like to suggest that it is a message about slowing down, that whatever form of locomotion we are using, whether it is on foot or in a car, or in a chariot or on a train, or in a boat, the message of the 20 mph zone is to slow down, and moreover, to slow down for reasons given which have to do with care for our environment and so as to avoid harm to our neighbours, by not running them over.

I think that when we consider God’s creatures and caring for them, slowing down will be good for all creatures, not only cutting down the number of people knocked down on the road, but it will also be good for animals; cats and squirrels, for example.

Do you think that Jesus would go along with this sort of reasoning? I wonder if, by contrast, there were actually any experiences that Jesus would have had, which would have given him a taste for speed. On the water, the only thing I can think of again points to slowing down, when he stilled the storm, so force 10, 70 mph, winds dropped to a pleasant breeze.

As you can see, I am beginning to think that Jesus is coming out as Captain Slow, but maybe there are other factors that I haven’t taken into account. Maybe there is such a thing as Captain Too Slow. What do you think Jesus would have done? Let us dwell on that with a little prayer, every time we set our speed limiter to 20 in the car.

Amen.

Hugh Bryant

Tags 20mph speed limit, Ackermann steering, Demosthenes, Ezekiel, Jeremy Clarkson, Jerusalem, Jesus, prose composition, Senedd, Shanks’ pony, Tacitus, Top Gear

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Hodge and the Nasty Bishop

Captain Slow