Archives for posts with tag: St Luke

The Pleasant Plant, the Stinker and Dietrich Bonhoeffer

By hughdbryant
April 13, 2025 //
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Sermon for Evensong on Palm Sunday 2025

https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=611300034

Two vineyards. Two stories about vineyards at the start of Holy Week. You might think that we are being exposed to, talking about, another temptation involving wine, but that’s not it. The two vineyard stories in Isaiah and St Luke’s gospel.

Isaiah the prophet singing for his beloved concerning his vineyard – I’m not quite sure how the genders work – the beloved having done all that is necessary to create a fruitful vineyard on a very fertile hill; he expected it to yield grapes, but it yielded, according to our translation here, ‘wild grapes’: although apparently, according to one of the commentaries which I read, the word in Hebrew literally means ‘stinkers’. Heaven knows what a grape has to be like to be described as a stinker; anyway it was not a successful planting of a vineyard. Somehow the vineyard didn’t turn out as it was intended to be.

‘What I will do to my vineyard’ – it’s quite difficult to follow who’s who in this story – it’s somebody and his beloved who builds the vineyard and then it’s me, it’s my vineyard. And because the vineyard produces stinkers I’ll dismantle it and make it a wasteland so that it’s overgrown with briars and thorns. There isn’t really some boyfriend’s Château Musar somewhere which has suddenly stopped producing decent grapes.

Similarly Jesus talks about a man turning his vineyard over to tenants – literally, farmers – in the King James Bible, husbandmen. Where have all these good words gone? I like a world with husbandmen in it. And where are the handmaidens? I ask myself. The word here is γεωργος (Georgos, which is Greek for ‘farmer’). Like a lot of names, George is derived from the Greek, so if you are called George, in Greek you are a farmer. In Jesus’ story, they were tenant farmers of some kind. And he sent members of his staff – literally, his slaves – one at a time to try to collect the rent, or a share of the produce instead, which certainly seems still to be the way that it works in the south of France even today. A friend of mine had a house there including a vineyard. He let the local cooperative manage the vineyard, in return for which they harvested the grapes and gave my friend a share in the wine produced. He took his rent in bottles.

Here, however, the parable is about wicked tenants who didn’t pay their rent and instead, eventually, when the owner sent his own son, the tenants, having kicked out his servants one by one when they called on the farmers to hand over the rent, actually killed the son. So what did the owner of the vineyard do? Obviously he evicted the wicked tenants and passed the vineyard over to other managers to manage.

Again, this is not an actual story about something that actually happened. It’s a parable and it’s very relevant to Easter. Jesus is forecasting what is going to happen, and the scribes and the chief priests, hearing him, get angry because they realise that what he is saying is directed against them, Jesus suggests that if they do behave like the wicked tenants then ‘the stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone’, and that stone will trip people up fatally, and it may fall on other people, with similar devastating consequences.

If they, the Pharisees and scribes, are builders, and if they reject a stone while they are building something, if they reject Jesus, then He will become a stumbling block for them, or even fall on them and obliterate them.

Ploughing up a vineyard. Fatal trips and falls. Being crushed by a massive boulder. I’m not sure whether, when we read these lessons in the Bible, even in the context of Lent and even as we look forward to the commemoration of the amazing events of the first Easter, even so, I’m not sure that these lessons really grab us in the way that some of the language used indicates that they are meant to.

Everyone who falls on that stone will be broken to pieces and it will crush anyone on whom it falls. And Isaiah’s friend’s vineyard producing ‘stinkers’ instead of the sweet juicy grapes that he might reasonably have expected and so getting dug up and bulldozed. These are two parables, two stories that are not meant to be taken literally, but which colourfully illustrate, dramatise, an idea or principle; and they have been chosen to be readings for Evensong today because they put you in mind of what we are going to commemorate at Easter.

Jesus is the son who is sent to the vineyard, the vineyard being the human race, the only son, who gets rejected and killed by the people who are looking after his father’s property, the vineyard, the world that his father has created. The Israelites, the Jews, were the bad tenants who threw out the only son and killed him; or rather, they would be, because Jesus is telling the story before he gets crucified.

But so what? Look, there are only 43 of us here – although that’s a really good turn-out: there are only a few thousand, perhaps, in Evensong services all over the UK. Most people couldn’t care less. Most people are snoozing after Sunday lunch or maybe having a nice walk in the park.

Even if they are vaguely aware of Easter having more to it than just a lot of Easter eggs, nevertheless there is nothing vital or urgent about it so far as they are concerned. Even if they’re going to turn up on Easter Sunday, if they are in the habit of coming at Christmas and Easter, say, (which, incidentally, if they were in the Roman Catholic Church would count as regular attendance), but even if they are really rather sparing attenders at church, or if they never come, they presumably don’t feel any compulsion, any need or anything really vital for their life today about this teaching of Jesus or this prophecy of Isaiah.

Nobody much today really thinks that because they might be descendants of the people who cast out the son and killed him, (in these terms), they should worry that a stone might be a stumbling block or that it might fall on them and crush them. It’s probably a metaphor too far, even if they do know a bit about Jesus, because the idea that Jesus would take some dreadful vengeance on people, crush them and grind them into dust, is not consistent with our picture of ‘gentle Jesus, meek and mild’, the suffering servant, who washed the disciples’ feet – as we will wash at least one of your feet, on Thursday at Holy Nativity.

What is our Lent reflection about this? I want to read you something which was written by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the great German theologian who was executed by the Nazis in the dying days of the Second World War because he was a member of the Stauffenberg Plot to kill Adolf Hitler in 1944. The church remembered the 80th anniversary of his death last Wednesday. He wrote, from prison, what he called an ‘outline for a book’, in which he tackled the idea of a world in which people do not feel they need God any more. He speaks of a God in “religion” as a deus ex machina. Literally it means ‘god from the machinery’. That’s defined in the Oxford Illustrated Dictionary as a ‘power [or] event that comes in the nick of time to solve difficulty.’ The ‘machinery’ was what they had in ancient Greek theatres, to make the actors playing the part of gods fly through the air.

Bonhoeffer felt that religious people had been seeing God in a way as a magic fixer, that “[God] must be ‘there’ to provide answers and explanations beyond the point at which our understanding or our capabilities fail.” But as scientific knowledge has increased, so people have needed God less and less. They may well feel they can get along without needing God at all.

Bonhoeffer felt we ought to accept this, that this was a sign of the world ‘coming of age’. He wrote, ‘The only way to be honest is to recognise that we have to live in the world etsi deus non daretur – even if God is not ‘there’. Like children outgrowing the secure religious, moral and intellectual framework of the home, in which ‘Daddy’ is always there in the background, God is teaching us that we must live as men who can get along very well without him’.

He went on to set out a paradox at the heart of this, which I think leads very well into our reflections for Lent. Bonhoeffer wrote, ‘God allows himself to be edged out of the world, and that is the way, the only way, in which he can be with us and help us. … This is the decisive difference between Christianity and all [other] religions. Man’s religiosity makes him look in his distress to the power of God in the world; he uses God as a deus ex machina. The Bible however [has] directed him to the powerlessness and suffering of God; only a suffering God can help.’

“[Bonhoeffer wrote that he would explain in his book] the experience that a transformation of all human life is given in the fact that Jesus is ‘there only for others.’ His ‘being there for others’ is the experience of transcendence. It is only this ‘being there for others’, maintained till death, that is the ground of his omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence.” Those are the essential characteristics of the divine, of God, of what he calls ‘transcendence’. He goes on: “Faith is participation in this being of Jesus (incarnation, cross, and resurrection).” Those are the key things about Jesus: incarnation becoming human, the cross, and resurrection. According to Bonhoeffer,“Our relation to God is not a ‘religious’ relationship to the highest, most powerful, and best Being imaginable – that is not authentic transcendence – but our relation to God is a new life in existence for others, through participation in the being of Jesus. The transcendental is not infinite and unattainable tasks, but the neighbour who is within reach in any given situation.”

We need to think very carefully about this really big mystery. On the one hand we believe in God as a kind of omnipotent father figure, but on the other we read that the first shall be last and the last shall be first. God, Jesus, is in the needy people, the ill people, the homeless people, the naked people who have no clothes.

The sky has turned darker since the joyful procession this morning on a donkey. Donkeys are great, and Jesus was on that donkey. But what else was going on? That’s for us to ponder in this week to come.

Quotations are from ‘Outline for a Book’ in Bonhoeffer, D, (enlarged edition) 1971, ‘Letters and Papers from Prison’, London, SCM Press p.380f., and from Bonhoeffer as quoted in Robinson, J. A. T., 1963, ‘Honest to God’, p36f, ‘Must Christianity be Religious?’

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Sabbath Day Observances

By hughdbryant
October 21, 2024 //
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Sermon for Evensong on the 21st Sunday after Trinity, 20th October 2024, at All Saints Church, Penarth

Lessons: see https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=596249536

Matthew 12:1-21

As you can see, Evensong today is a team effort. The vicar, our ordinand and I all wanted to join in to praise the Lord this afternoon. You may not realise this, but the vicar has not only been leading the service but also, without knowing it, he’s written most of this sermon. 

We meet to say morning prayers at 9 o’clock most mornings during the week, and anyone can come, but most usually, it’s just the vicar, our ordinand and me. We often take the opportunity, as we say our prayers, to reflect on what we have read in the Bible and our church life; and if that sounds a bit serious, I can immediately reassure you that there’s always a lot of laughter and joy in what we discover together.

This week I shared with the vicar the thought that today we were going to be talking about sabbath day observance – when all the shops used to be shut and you used not to be able to get a drink in a pub on Sundays, and all that good stuff. I was muttering slightly that I thought that things have gone a bit too far in a secular direction and that Sunday wasn’t special any more, whereupon he brought me up short, because he said, first of all we have to be clear that Sunday is not the sabbath.

The sabbath is a Jewish idea and it was Saturday, the day when God rested, the seventh day, during the story of creation in the book of Genesis, whereas Sunday is the day on which we as Christians commemorate Jesus’s resurrection, the first Easter. And so we started to talk about that, and I made a mental note of what the vicar was saying, for this sermon; and I invite you to join in this discussion, or at least to think a little bit about it. I don’t think it matters, by the way, that most of us, when we talk about Sabbath day observance, are not talking about Saturday but are talking about Sunday.

Another thing: do we as Christians have any right to inflict on society as a whole a way of spending Sunday that perhaps only makes sense if you are a Christian? The story of Jesus clashing with the Pharisees and scribes about working on the sabbath, either through the disciples picking up heads of grain in the fields and eating them, sort-of harvesting them, or more clearly as a question of work when Jesus did some healing of the man with the withered hand, those things put him at odds with the Pharisees and the scribes, who said that on the sabbath no work of any kind should be undertaken, because it was a time of rest, picking up from what God did in the creation. He rested on the seventh day, and we should follow God, they argued, and so rest as well. But is that just a religious thing, and not really appropriate these days, when perhaps only a minority are believers?

This story comes up in three of the gospels, Matthew (the version we had as our lesson today), Mark and Luke, but crucially it only has the really memorable, famous, words in Saint Mark’s account: ‘The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath’. (Of course if you want to say it in a gender-neutral way, you say that the sabbath was made for ‘humankind’ and not ‘humankind’ for the Sabbath, but somehow it doesn’t have the same ring to it.) The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath.

I think this is a really encouraging story, and that Jesus is giving us the freedom to do what our conscience tells us to do, whatever the rules may seem to say. If you imagine the story of the healing of the man with the withered hand and put it in the context of an operation in a modern hospital, it would seem nuts to us if the surgeons had to stop operating at midnight on Saturday. The work of healing goes on every day, 24/7, and Jesus confirms, in effect, that that is what God intends.

But – perhaps it’s not quite as clear cut as that. The Jewish law, the first five books of the old Testament, contains some very enlightened ideas, two of the best of which, I think, are jubilee and the sabbath. Jubilee is not just a royal beano, but the idea that every seven years debts should be forgiven, written off. This is an idea which is still highly regarded in international affairs as there are many benefits to the world as a whole if the rich nations periodically excuse the poorer nations their debts. 

And similarly with the idea of sabbath, the day of rest. It has very clear benefits for society as a whole. If people are worked into the ground it is clearly harmful for them, and it’s ultimately harmful for the people they are working for as well, because tired people do a progressively worse and worse job, the more tired they are.

The Jews interpreted the idea of the sabbath as meaning that people were not allowed to do any work; and indeed, orthodox Jews to this day don’t drive to the synagogue on the sabbath, they don’t work and they keep exercise to the minimum. But that is quite legalistic. 

As Jesus pointed out, if people start to regard the rules as being more important than the situations which the rules are intended to cover, then things won’t turn out well. It wouldn’t be good to tell the man having open-heart surgery that the surgeon was out of time and had to stop for his statutory rest period, even though he was in the middle of the operation! 

But Jesus didn’t want to make a song and dance about it. The writer of the gospel quotes bits of the book of Isaiah, in Isaiah 42 and Isaiah 61, “Here is my servant, whom I have chosen, my beloved, with whom my soul is well pleased.” This is a reminder of the words which were heard when Jesus was baptised by John the Baptist, the voice from heaven, “This is my son, the beloved”. What Jesus said, and what he did, had divine authority.

It’s quite difficult to believe that Jesus really expected to keep all this quiet; his miracles were truly sensational. All that we can say about them is that it looks as though he did do them, but there’s absolutely no information about how he did them. They are just as startling now as they ever were before. 

So what should we say about sabbath day observance? I can’t help feeling that, just as the idea of Jubilee still has some real validity today, particularly in the context of international development and fairness between the richer and poorer nations, so the idea of a sabbath, in the sense of a day of rest, is still important; but I think it has to be interpreted consistently with what is practical, so that it may well be that some people do have their day of rest, but not actually on the seventh day (and never mind whether that is Saturday or Sunday). 

The important thing is that they should have the right to have some rest. God rested, according to the story, and so should we. Everybody should have a protected right to a day of rest. And that would be valid in a trades union meeting just as much as in Evensong – it’s not just Christians inflicting religious ideas on the heathen masses. 

It always used to amuse me that after I had taken a service, maybe Mattins, at my old church, I would see the congregation again, half an hour later, as we all did our shopping in the supermarket. But the only people that I would worry about, in that context, would be the people who worked in the supermarket. I do hope that they were not being pressed into working on Sundays, when they would rather have been taking a day of rest, or even, perhaps, coming to Evensong. It was Waitrose, after all…

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The Morning After

By hughdbryant
April 21, 2024 //
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Sermon for Morning Prayer on 21st April 2024, Fourth Sunday of Easter

Acts 4:5-12, 1 John 3:16-24

https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=580609123

I want you to think about the morning after the morning after the morning after the night before. Or possibly, the morning after that.

Think of something that has happened, something that you’ve been involved in, that was really a big deal. Something that really made a difference.

Maybe it was the day you got married, if you did. Or the day when you won an Olympic gold medal. Or the day when something really momentous happened in the world outside. Perhaps you can even remember Armistice Day, or perhaps more likely, the day after the Brexit referendum. In all those cases, things changed; things changed really radically for ever. Nothing would be the same again. In our Bible lessons today the context is another of those enormous events as we enter into the world of the very first Christians, in the first, the earliest, churches.

The momentous event was of course Easter, Jesus’ resurrection. They had either experienced meeting the risen Christ themselves or they had met people who had. That’s one reason why I always find it very exciting to read the Acts of the Apostles, written by St Luke, as book 2 of his gospel, in effect; and St Luke was certainly around at the earliest time even if he didn’t actually meet Jesus. St Paul describes him as the ‘beloved physician’ and there are certainly moments in the Acts of the Apostles, describing St Paul’s journeys, where the third-party narrative, ‘they’ did this, ‘they’ did that, turns to ‘we’ did it, so we can infer that Luke was there.

So it is a very immediate, personal account of what it was like to be an early Christian. And so we are seeing the Easter people, the first Easter people, picking up their lives and carrying on after the amazing events of Easter. And we hear that they ‘met constantly to hear the apostles teach, and to share the common life, to break bread and to pray. A sense of awe was everywhere and many marvels and signs were brought about through the apostles’. They held everything in common, as we heard in one of the lessons a couple of weeks ago.

And then the part which we heard read today: Peter and John had healed a man who had been crippled from birth, who was begging at the gate of the temple. Peter said, ‘I have no silver or gold; but what I have I give you; in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, walk!’ And the man who had been crippled from birth sprang up, stood on his feet and started to walk.

Needless to say it attracted a lot of attention, and Peter said this to the crowd: ‘Why stare at us as though we had made this man walk by some power or godliness of our own? The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of our fathers, has given the highest honour to his servant Jesus… And the name of Jesus, by awakening faith, has strengthened this man, whom you see and know, and his faith has made him completely well.’

The chief priests and the Sadducees, just as they had done with Jesus himself, took exception to this and considered it to be blasphemy. They arrested Peter and John and put them in prison. And the passage describes what happened when they were asked to explain themselves.

It’s very reminiscent of a similar episode when Jesus himself was tackled about healing somebody on the sabbath day. Again, to use a contemporary expression, the disciples pushed back against the criticism. What was wrong with healing somebody who was sick? You might be tempted to say, what does it matter who the doctor was? Just be grateful that the cure worked. But the high priests were concerned that Peter and John were giving credit to Jesus in a blasphemous way. But they insisted that it was Jesus who was the divine agent and it was the sick man’s faith in Jesus which had brought on his healing.

Let’s go back a minute to the question of the morning after the morning after the morning after the night before. Nothing was the same after Easter. Whom could you trust? There were so many people claiming that they were the true believers, that they had an inside track to understanding the story of Jesus.

So let’s look at the first letter of John, the first ‘Epistle General of John’ as the King James Bible puts the heading. It’s possible that the John who wrote the letter was the apostle, or certainly was the same person who wrote Saint John’s Gospel. Although he would have had to be pretty old, it’s not impossible. Some scholars do think that all three of them are the same individual.

Again we are in the world of the very early church, and it’s clear that in that world it was commonly expected that the end of the world was round the corner, and all the references to salvation and eternal life referred to a last judgement at the bar of heaven which was just about to happen. All the more reason, the early Christians felt, to be sure that you were a true believer, that you were one of the people who were truly saved, the elect.

And this is what the letter, John’s first letter, is all about. In one of my Bibles there’s a sub-heading describing the letter as a ‘recall to fundamentals’. It begins with these words: ‘It was there from the beginning; we have heard it; we have seen it with our own eyes; we looked upon it, and felt it with our own hands; and it is of this we tell. Our theme is the word of life. This life was made visible; we have heard it and bear our testimony; we here declare to you the eternal life which dwelt with the Father and was made visible to us.’ Do you remember the beginning of St John’s Gospel? ‘In the beginning was the word’. And it is all about love. The ‘word’ is Jesus, and Jesus is love; and the key to being saved is whether you are ‘in Christ’, which is a rather mysterious expression which is generally reckoned to mean whether Christ is in you.

In John’s First Letter there are a series of illustrations of what it means to be in Christ and to be in the light of Christ. ‘A man may say I am in the light; but if he hates his brother, he is still in the dark.’ Only the man who loves his brother dwells in the light. And then this great passage that we had read to us as the second lesson, contrasting two examples, one, the greatest example, that greater love hath no man…, And we ought to lay down our lives for one another, the supreme sacrifice; and the other, because we can’t be in a position to offer a supreme sacrifice every day, the everyday salvation, the everyday expression of love, which you will remember from the sentences before the traditional Holy Communion service, ‘Whoso hath this world’s good, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him?’ If a man has enough to live on, and yet, when he sees his brother in need, shuts up his heart against him, how can it be said that the divine love dwells in him? That’s how it works. God is love.

God is love; God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. If we are in Jesus, in the Son, we are in love, love is in us; and the test of that is how we show that love. Let us love our brothers and sisters, let us love our neighbours. If we are Easter people, if we are like those early Christians on the day after the day after the day of the great event, what difference does it make to us? Is it still buzzing in our minds? Does it still draw us irresistibly to do things that we didn’t do before? Let us pray that it does.

Amen.

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And Mary said …

By hughdbryant
August 16, 2020 //
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Luke 1:46-55 – The Magnificat – see http://bible.oremus.org/?ql=464171095

‘And Mary said, ‘My soul doth magnify the Lord’. Really? Is that really what Mary, the mother of Jesus, said? Now what Mary is reported by Luke as saying, saying to the other rather unlikely mother, Elisabeth, the wife of Zechariah, was, of course, not transcribed from a dictaphone recording. Dr Luke was writing it up, 40 or 50 years later. These are the words that Luke felt that Mary would most likely have said, after the angel Gabriel had visited her and told her that she would have a baby who would be the Son of God. Picture the scene. ‘Hello Mary! I’m an angel. Call me Gabriel. You’re going to have a baby. He is going to be the Son of God.’ Y’know. As you do.

As you do? No – you don’t. It’s not a normal thing. What would you have said, if you were in Mary’s place? Some of Mary’s words are, indeed, what you’d expect her to have said: but other bits are more hypothetical, more speculative; they come more from St Luke, from Luke reflecting on the true meaning of the earth-shattering event which Mary was about to undergo. On the one hand, there is nothing too far-fetched about having Mary say, ‘My spirit rejoices’ because ‘.. he has looked with favour on the lowliness of his servant’. She’s saying, God has chosen me, an ordinary girl, to do the second most important thing for the world after its original creation. That is the sort of thing you’d have expected Mary to have said.

But what about this other bit: ‘… he has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts’, or ‘He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly;

he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty’? Is that really something that Mary would have said? Because those are really quite revolutionary ideas. Let’s think a bit about them.

When Mary was visited by the angel Gabriel, so far as we know, the rich were still comfortably situated; the Emperor, the Roman emperor, still had his clothes – and his mighty armies. The lowly were still poor and lowly. The hungry were still hungry. God hadn’t actually done any of the things which Mary was supposed to be celebrating.

St Luke was putting words into Mary’s mouth, thinking what Gabriel’s visit to Mary really meant. It meant that God wanted to upset the established order. Luke knew what Jesus was going to do, what the true values would be, in the Kingdom of God. No more inequality; no more rich people getting more in one day than whole countries’ worth of what ordinary people could earn in their lifetimes.

You know that Jeff Bezos, the boss of Amazon, is said to have ‘earned’ – well, earned; perhaps a better word would be ‘come by’, or ‘trousered’, or ‘blagged’ – $14billion in one day, recently. And, incidentally, he tried to reduce the salaries of his employees on the same day. What a hero. Now God, according to Mary in the Magnificat, would definitely ‘send the rich away empty’. That means Mr Bezos. Amazon Prime to Amazon Zero. God will send the rich away empty.

Mary’s words, Mary’s rant, even, is a vision of the Kingdom of God. What do we think about that? Do we just hope, and pray, that things will eventually, miraculously, become fairer, and no-one will want for anything? Because if so, after 2,000 years, we’re still waiting. Or do we believe that God needs people, people to be His hands and feet, to be his eyes and ears?

If that’s how it’s supposed to work, then what the the Kingdom needs is activists. It needs people who are prepared to work really hard to change things for the better. Maybe their activism will even verge on being revolutionary. Activists. So who are these activists? Are there any activists about today?

I found some the other day, in what might seem to be a rather unlikely place. They were in ‘Vogue’ magazine. Yes really, ‘Vogue’. I’m hoping we can show the cover of the latest edition on our screen. There it is.

There on the front cover with the supermodel Adwoa Aboah, is Marcus Rashford, the Manchester United footballer, who made a fuss and persuaded the government to provide school meals for poor children during the holidays; and inside there are many more people who are called the ‘faces of hope’, working in many ways as activists to bring hope where previously there was none.

I assure you that I’m not a secret employee of the publishers Condé Nast. I’m not on commission based on how many copies of Vogue you buy. But it is worth a look. There are many inspiring stories – and, reflecting the rise of Black Lives Matter, for once the stars in this glossiest magazine are all black. Beautiful black people.

Hmm. In the Song of Songs the bride sings – as you can hear in Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610 – ‘Nigra sum, sed formosa’, ‘I am black, but beautiful’. ‘But’ beautiful. That’s the only false note in that beautiful song. Not ‘but’ beautiful, but ‘and’ beautiful is what it should be. And the editor of ‘Vogue’ has celebrated that. He is Edward Enninful, and he is an activist.

What else about these activists? A common feature of all their stories is that they all say their activism builds a sense of community, or having values and friendship in common with each other. So would the Blessed Virgin Mary count as an activist today?

I’m sure she would – maybe in a similar way to some of the beautiful people portrayed in ‘Vogue’, as icons to be followed, to be copied. Faces of hope.

Because what else does this make you think about? Surely we can loop back from our world today to the first century AD. The stories of the activists in Vogue are very reminiscent of the stories of the early Christians. They were activists; they were a community; they had everything in common. They would lift up the lowly and fill the hungry with good things. Build up your community – support your local food bank, say – isn’t that just another way of saying, ‘Love your neighbour’?

That might prompt you to think again about Mary’s song, Mary’s rant, the Magnificat, as it’s called. Because ‘magnificat’ is Latin for ‘bigged up’, ‘magnified’, ‘made more of’; as the hymn puts it: ‘Tell out, my soul, the greatness of the Lord’. And the Magnificat, sung by a cathedral choir, is one of the highlights in Evensong, that lovely service, that you can hear on Radio 3 twice a week – this afternoon at 3 and then on Wednesday at the same time – or on any day in the Cathedral at 5.30 (in normal times). It’s something you might just let flow over you in its beauty. Well, you mustn’t stop enjoying the Magnificat – but do remember that it is a call to action, to be an activist, for God.

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Dead and Alive

By hughdbryant
January 14, 2019 //
0

Sermon for Evensong on the First Sunday after the Epiphany, 13th January 2019

Isaiah 55:1-11; Romans 6:1-11

What difference does it make? You know, being a Christian. We are past the lovely Christmas baby-fest. Now what difference does God-with-us, Emmanuel, make?

Isaiah is saying to the Israelites, come back to the true God. Don’t follow pagan idols. 

‘Why spend money and get what is not bread,

why give the price of your labour and go unsatisfied?

Only listen to me and you will have good food to eat,

and you will enjoy the fat of the land.

Come to me and listen to my words,

hear me, and you shall have life:

I will make a covenant with you, this time for ever,

to love you faithfully as I loved David’ [Is. 55:2-3, NEB]

Salvation is coming. The Messiah will come. He will not be what you expect – he will be like a suffering servant, even – ‘ despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief’ [Is. 53:3f]. But ‘all we like sheep have gone astray’. You can hear Handel’s ‘Messiah’ in it – but you mustn’t be seduced by the beautiful music into not hearing the Bible underneath.

It’s the major theme of much of the Old Testament. The chosen people, the Israelites, ‘like sheep have gone astray’. They have worshipped false gods. Isaiah asks, ‘Wherefore do ye spend money for that which is not bread? and your labour for that which satisfieth not?’ 

We can recognise ourselves a bit in this, even though it was written nearly 3,000 years ago. Your eyes will probably glaze over if I say this. Yeah, yeah. Of course we shouldn’t get hung up on new cars and posh extensions to our houses. But – we do. What harm does it do? Worse things happen at sea.

Well, Isaiah said to the Israelites, according to some scholars about 700BC, that they needed to ‘Seek ye the Lord while he may be found, call ye upon him while he is near:
Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts: and let him return unto the Lord.’ It could still be valid for us today.

Because what the Israelites were doing was sin; they were sinning against the one true God. But he offers them a second chance. ‘Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts: and let him return unto the Lord, and he will have mercy upon him; and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.’

Sin is, in a sense, doing bad things. But underpinning that is the reason that something is sinful. It is, that it shows that the sinner is turning away from, is separated from, God. So if you steal, or envy someone their things, or elope with their wife, those are bad things, but they are also sins, because you are going against God’s commandments. ‘If ye love me, keep my commandments’ [John 14:15f].

But in our other reading, from St Paul’s Letter to the Romans, we have flashed forward 700 years from Isaiah, to the time of Jesus, and St Paul. Isaiah’s prophecies have come true. The Messiah has come. This morning in our services we were marking the Baptism of Christ. Christ meeting the last of the prophets, John the Baptist. You might perhaps think that because of the story of Jesus, there isn’t any need to bother with the Old Testament, with 60+ chapters of Isaiah and things, any more. But remember that Jesus himself said, ‘Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am come not to destroy, but to fulfil.’ (Matt. 5:17). So when the dove came down on Jesus after his baptism in the River Jordan, and the voice from heaven said, ‘Thou art my beloved Son; in thee I am well pleased’, it was a pivotal moment, joining the prophetic time with the incarnation of God on earth.

Paul made powerful use of baptism in his preaching to non-Jews. Baptism was a ritual common in Greek cults as well as in Christianity. ‘To his pagan converts it appealed as a sacrament parallel to those of the Greek mysteries’ (C.H. Dodd, 1950 (1920), The Meaning of Paul for Today, Glasgow, Wm Collins Sons and Co, p.130). In the Greek mysteries, by performing sacramental acts ‘spiritual effects could be obtained’ (Dodd).

Running through St Paul’s letters is the idea of the Christians being ‘in Christ’, intimately bound up with Christ. So, in a sense, Christ’s baptism was a symbol of being dead and then resurrected; going down into the water and then rising up out of it.  By being baptised ‘along with’ or ‘into’ Christ, Christians were symbolically sharing in his death and resurrection. 

At the same time, there was a problem: even after being baptised, Christians were still human, they still did sinful things. Paul said that we need to be ‘dead to sin’ in the way that Jesus was. That is, as Jesus died, he couldn’t be prey to sinful influences. He was ‘dead to sin’.  So as a Christian, if I am ‘alive to Christ’, baptised, sacramentally dead and resurrected with him, I too should be ‘dead to sin’. 

But it isn’t magic. It’s a sacrament. The essence of a sacrament is that it is ‘an outward visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace’, as the Catechism in the BCP puts it (p294 of the Cambridge edition). It’s worth reading this bit of the Catechism. Things aren’t as fierce today as they were in the 16th century, when the heading to the Catechism in the BCP was ‘an Instruction to be learned of every Person before he be brought to be confirmed by the Bishop’. That is, learned by heart, at about 10 years old… 

Anyway, if you’re up for it, this is what you have to learn about being baptised.

‘Question.

How many parts are there in a Sacrament?

Answer.

Two: the outward visible sign, and the inward spiritual grace.

Question.

What is the outward visible sign or form in Baptism?

Answer.

Water: wherein the person is baptized, In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.

Question.

What is the inward and spiritual grace?

Answer.

A death unto sin, and a new birth unto righteousness: for being by nature born in sin, and the children of wrath, we are hereby made the children of grace.

Question.

What is required of persons to be baptized?

Answer.

Repentance, whereby they forsake sin: and faith, whereby they stedfastly believe the promises of God, made to them in that Sacrament.’

‘A death unto sin, and a new birth unto righteousness’. That’s what you get in Christian baptism. But just as sin doesn’t just mean doing bad things, so conversely, being a child of grace doesn’t mean just going with the flow, being baptised and doing nothing in consequence of it. You need repentance, μετάνοια, change of mind, as a prerequisite.

Paul has posed the problem, the puzzle. Why is there still sin around, or rather, can we still get away with committing sins, after we have been baptised? Indeed, he starts with a rather nerdy argument that sounds as though it has come out of a philosophy essay, to the effect that we need to carry on sinning in order to demonstrate by contrast the weight of grace which we have got. It’s almost like saying you can’t understand what it is to be black unless you have white as well.

Paul answers his puzzle not philosophically, but by explaining how we are joined with Christ in the sacrament. Dead with him; dead to sin.  Alive, resurrected, with Christ. So, I come back round to my original question. ‘What difference does it make? You know, being a Christian. We are past the lovely Christmas baby-fest. Now what difference does God-with-us, Emmanuel, make?’

This is tough stuff. It really means that, if we put our heads above the parapet and let people know that we are Christians, it should be evident in what we do, evident in how we behave. 

It means that in business, if we say that our actions are dictated solely by the need to make value, or profit, for shareholders; or in public affairs, if we say that we would like to do something good, but that money, or the market, dictates otherwise; if we see poor people risking their lives to escape poverty and danger, and try to keep them out instead of giving them a place of refuge; in all those cases, we will show ourselves as still not being dead to sin and alive to Christ. 

Think of Jesus’ teaching. God and mammon: the good Samaritan; the prodigal son; giving and not counting the cost. As Jesus said just before he was baptised, in St Luke’s Gospel, ‘The man with two shirts must share with him who has none, and anyone who has food must do the same.’ It’s not enough – although it’s a good start – just to go to church. Think what you have to do, to really do, in order to be really dead to sin.


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No, not him

By hughdbryant
October 29, 2018 //
0

Sermon for Holy Communion for SS Simon and Jude, 28th October 2018

Ephesians 2:19-end; John 15:17-end

Today along with most of the churches in the western world we are commemorating two apostles whom we know very little about, St Simon and St Jude.

There were two Judes, two Judases. We’re not quite sure who this one was, because in the four Gospels he is described as being various things. In St Matthew and St Mark he is not called Judas but Thaddeus, which might be a surname; it is only in Saint Luke and the Acts of the Apostles that he is called Jude. St Jude was not the same as Judas Iscariot, although his name in Greek is the same, Ιουδας. People historically haven’t chosen him to invoke in prayer, because they think he might get mixed up with Judas Iscariot. So he is called the patron saint of lost causes – ‘If all else fails, offer a prayer through St Jude’. The little letter of Jude in the New Testament was not written by this Jude, according to many scholars. In St Luke’s Gospel Jude is described as the son of James the brother of Jesus. ‘Jude the Obscure’, which was the title of one of Thomas Hardy’s novels, is an apt name for him.

Simon – not Simon Peter – had been a terrorist – a real terrorist. He had been a member of the Zealots, who were a Jewish extremist sect that believed that the Jews were supposed to be a free and independent nation; that God alone would be their king, and that any payment of taxes to the Romans or accepting their rule was a blasphemy against God. They were violent. They attacked both Romans and any Jews who they thought were collaborating with the Romans. Simon had been one of them.

So the Apostles were a motley assortment. Humble fishermen; a tax collector; a terrorist (although of course, depending on your point of view, one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter); James and John, the ‘Sons of Thunder’, whatever that means. It certainly doesn’t sound meek and mild. And of course, Judas Iscariot; the other Jude. Jesus wasn’t choosing people whom we would think of as saintly.

But there isn’t an awful lot that we know about Simon the Zealot and Jude – Jude-not-that-Jude. So our Bible readings today, the message from St Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, ‘You are no longer aliens in a foreign land,’ and the message from St John’s Gospel, about Christians not belonging to the world, are not about them, but rather they are a reminder of some of the teaching that Jesus – and after him, St Paul – gave to the Apostles and to the early Christians.

Paul’s letter to the Ephesians has a great theme of ‘reconciliation’: St Paul’s great mission was to bring the Gospel to the non-Jews, the Gentiles, so that Christianity wasn’t just a subdivision of Jewishness. ‘You are no longer aliens in a foreign land.’ Perhaps it’s not so topical for us nowadays.

But in Jesus’ own teaching, from St John’s Gospel (chapter 15) that we heard this morning, packed into these few lines there are some really deep meanings which still help us to understand the nature of God.

Jesus said, ’Because you do not belong to the world … For that reason the world hates you.’ In Jesus’ day and in that Roman world, being a Christian was definitely dangerous, simply because Christians didn’t worship the Roman emperor as a god. In the reign of some emperors, for example Diocletian, it meant that large numbers of Christians were fed to the lions.

It’s still to some extent true today, in parts of the Middle East and in Northern Nigeria, that Christians are persecuted. But by and large in our part of Surrey, it’s not really controversial to say that you are a Christian. But I do think that perhaps we still should reflect on what it means ‘not to belong to the world’. You don’t ‘breathe the same air’, as people sometimes say. Are we sometimes tempted to keep our religious belief out of things, for fear of offending people? But Jesus said here, don’t be afraid of being different.

What about the next proposition in this teaching passage, ‘Servants are not greater than their master’? The translation is actually wrong. The word isn’t ‘servant’, but ‘slave’, δουλος in Greek. This word also means what was called a ‘bondsman’, somebody who was indentured, bought. In the Roman empire, bondsmen, indentured slaves, could buy their freedom. Their bonds could be remitted, they could be ransomed.

It seems to me that these words surely have echoes of the idea of redemption, that by Jesus’ sacrifice he has purchased our remission from the slavery of sin. Jesus has bought us out, redeemed us. We are no longer slaves. Earlier on in chapter 15, indeed Jesus does say, ‘I call you slaves no longer’.

‘The people who hate you’, Jesus said, ‘do not know the one who sent me’. Again: ‘… the one who sent me.’ This is a reminder of the way that Christians understand God ‘in three persons’, as the Holy Trinity, father, son and Holy Spirit. (Jesus comes to the Holy Spirit later on, when he talks about sending what he calls the ‘Advocate’, the spirit of truth, after he has gone. Here, it’s just him and the One who sent him).

Here we can see what caused some of the controversy in the early church, which ended up in the Council of Nicaea in the fourth century, and in our Nicene Creed. If God ‘sent’ Jesus, the Son, was Jesus also God, or just another creature? And depending on the answer to that question, where did the Holy Spirit come from? God, or God-and-Jesus? And again, was the Spirit, is the Spirit – remember, ‘His Spirit is with us’, we say – is the Spirit made by God, or is it God itself?

If you don’t think of God as a nice old chap with a beard sitting on top of the clouds – and since the sixties, at least, since Bishop John Robinson’s wonderful little book, ‘Honest to God’ [Robinson, J. (1963), Honest to God, London, SCM Press], we mostly don’t – how can we understand the Holy Trinity? Try the logical, a priori, back to logical first principles, way that Professor Richard Swinburne, the great Oxford philosopher of religion, has set out in his book ‘Was Jesus God?’ [Swinburne, R. (2008) Was Jesus God? Oxford, OUP, p.28f]. It goes like this.

There is a ‘divine person’ who is omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly free and eternal. Let us call that person ‘God’. Because He is omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly free and eternal, God is perfectly good.

God could exist alone, but being perfectly good means he won’t be selfish; He will have to have a object for His love. Perfect love is love of an equal: a perfectly good person will seek to bring about another such person, an equal, with whom to share all that he has. That other person is the Son.

But the Son didn’t, in fact, come after the Father. As a matter of logic, because they are perfect, ’At each moment of everlasting time the Father must always cause the Son to exist, and so always keep the Son in being.’

But then, Swinburne says, ’A twosome can be selfish’. ‘The love of the Father for the Son must include a wish to cooperate with the Son in further total sharing with an equal; and hence the need for a third member of the Trinity’ And that is the Holy Spirit.

For the same logical reasons, the Spirit isn’t something ‘made’ by God. As we say in the Creed, the Spirit ‘proceeds from’ the Father, or the Father and the Son. (Saying ‘proceeds from’ is perhaps a philosophical cop-out. We can’t say exactly how the Spirit gets here). The Three-in-One are, is, there. The Trinity is in a sense caused by the One, by God. But it is one with God. The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Three ways of being God.

One more nugget of theology. Jesus says, at verse 24, about the heathen, the worldly people, ’If I had not come and spoken to them, they would not be guilty of sin; but now they have both seen and hated both me and my Father’. It seems that Jesus has a different concept of guilt or criminal responsibility from the one we’re familiar with. We say that ignorance is no defence. Something is either lawful or it isn’t. You might think that sin worked the same way. Something is either sinful or it isn’t, surely, isn’t it sinful, irrespective whether you know it or not? But Jesus has this different idea – you’ll find it also in St Paul’s letter to the Romans [7:7] – that heathens, who know nothing about sin, are not sinful. What makes someone sinful, or capable of being sinful, is being ‘fixed with knowledge’, as a lawyer would put it. So it looks as though ignorance is a defence, where sin is concerned.

But that is perhaps an indication that to ‘sin’ is not the same thing as to do bad things, to do evil, even. The point about sin is that it is a separation, a turning of your back on, God. And you can’t do that, if you don’t know about God in the first place. Of course, if you are sinful, if you have turned your back on God, you may well do bad things. If you are saved by grace, you will show it by your good works. If you aren’t, if you are lost, you will show it by the bad things you do. St Paul sets it out in Galatians chapter 5.

What a concentrated lesson for his disciples it was from Jesus!

– What it means that the Father is ‘the One who sent me’;

– what it means that because of me, the Son, you are no longer servants, or really slaves; and,

– what it means that Jesus will get the Spirit to come to you. (That is the ‘Advocate’, what the Prayer Book and the Authorised Version of the Bible calls the Comforter, ό παρακλητος).

The common thread, the theme of Jesus’ teaching here, might perhaps be relationships, relationships between people, and with God. And the currency used in those relationships. Hate – ‘the world hates you’; service – Jesus has bought us out, redeemed us, so we are no longer slaves; comfort, the Holy Spirit, the Comforter; and love – love from ‘the one who sent me’. And ‘the greatest of these is love’, as you know. [1 Corinthians 13]

Sometimes it’s good to think about these lessons that Jesus taught, never mind who was listening to him. It could even be you, as well as Simon-not-Peter or Jude-not-Judas.

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Nigra Sum

By hughdbryant
August 22, 2017 //
1

Sermon for Evensong on the 10th Sunday after Trinity, 20th August 2017
2 Kings 4:1-37; Psalm 90; Acts 16:1-15

‘Thou turnest man to destruction: again thou sayest, Come again, ye children of men’. That’s what we’ve just sung, in Psalm 90. It means, return to the dust, out of which you were made. Psalm 90 is sometimes used at funerals, and describes the insignificance and fleeting existence of human life when compared with the creative – and destructive – power of God.

 

There’s a powerful novel by P. D. James called ‘Children of Men’. It’s a dystopian vision of the future – just as 1984 suddenly wasn’t in the distant future, in this case, the future is 2021 – not long now.

 

Gradually, no more children are being born. The human race is dying out. Then, years after the last person was born, a woman becomes pregnant. Now read on! I won’t spoil it for you. There’s a film of it too, which is also good, but rather different.

 

One little switch. No more babies. And that’s it for the human race. It’s perhaps more frightening, as being rather more mundane, more feasible, in a way, than a nuclear holocaust.

 

There has been a school of thought – perhaps as a result of too much reading of the Old Testament – that if God does take steps against mankind, it must be to punish them for something they’ve done wrong.

 

So now, for people who think in that way, it will be likely to be rather a worrying time. We have the President of the USA completely failing to condemn white supremacists and Nazis – saying there are ‘some very good people’ among them; in this country, all of sudden, it’s not beyond the pale for people openly to want to shut out from this country anyone who isn’t a white, English-speaking person with useful skills and plenty of money.

 

Nearer to home, did anyone even think for a minute whether it was right to chase away the travellers, the gypsies, who came and camped out on the Leg O’Mutton field in Cobham? Remember, Hitler exterminated Gypsies as well as Jews. How should we treat them? What would Jesus have said?

 

Now again, instead of seeking closer union with our neighbours in Europe, we have set our faces against them with the vote for so-called ‘Brexit’. ‘Sovereignty’, whatever that means, is supposed to be more important than the brotherhood of man.

 

I think that Emily Thornberry was right, although she got into hot water for saying it, about the house with a white van parked in the drive, festooned with English flags. That flag is not benign: it is meant to say, ‘England alone!’ Go away, everyone else. Black, brown, foreign people: go away from our ‘crowded’ island. The crowds are, I would suggest, a myth. There is plenty of room in the UK. The hidden, evil message is that there are too many of the ‘wrong sort of person’ – people who are not like us.

 

I still remember the first time I went to Bombay – the first time I went to India – and walked down the street. I was the only white man. The only white man among thousands of brown and black faces. I began to imagine what it must feel like to be a black person in England sometimes. No wonder that black people may congregate in places where there are already significant numbers of black people. We have a certain innate small-c conservatism, all of us, I think, which makes us easier with people whom we know.

 

Obviously in a country of nearly 70 million people, we can’t know everyone, so I suspect that we fall back on what people look like. If they look like us, fine. If not, there might be a reservation, a hesitation, a query in our minds.

 

This isn’t good. Xenophobia, racism, white supremacy. No thought for the idea that we are all equally God’s creatures, God’s children. God, if He cares about us in the way the Old Testament describes, might well send some plagues down on us for being so awful.

 

Yet so far as I know, God hasn’t worked that way recently. Taken as a whole in the Bible, in contrast with the various chastisements in the Old Testament – and Psalm 90 is said to be a Psalm of Moses, inspired by the complaining of the Israelites in the desert – there are many stories of healing and salvation.

 

Elisha’s two miracles described in our first lesson are cases in point. The first one is a sort of self-help example with a miraculous element, a bit like feeding the 5,000, in that the oil never ran out, and the resurrection of the Shunammite woman’s daughter is like the raising of Lazarus or the resurrection of Jairus’ daughter – ‘damsel, arise’ – in the New Testament.

 

We don’t know how these miracles worked – or else they wouldn’t be miraculous. Maybe these stories are just mythical. It’s striking how similar the miracles done by Elisha are, in these two cases at least, to Jesus’ miracles.

 

The ‘rose of Sharon’, the beautiful girl, in the Song of Solomon, ‘nigra sum sed pulchra,’ in the Latin words of the beautiful canticle in Monteverdi’s Vespers, is said to be a ‘Shulamite’, or a Shunammite. Perhaps there’s a link with the ‘great woman’ in our lesson from 2 Kings. She was kind to the man of God, Elisha, and ‘constrained him’ to eat bread. It’s a bit reminiscent of Mrs Doyle, Father Ted’s housekeeper, pressing ever more cake and sandwiches on her hapless priestly charges: ‘Oh, go on, go on, go on …!’ Maybe she was Abishag, the most beautiful woman in Israel, who went to comfort King David in his old age – she too came from Shunem.

 

But even in the beauty of Monteverdi there’s a wrong note. ‘Nigra sum sed pulchra’ sings the girl – although often, for mysterious musical reasons, it’s actually a male counter-tenor singing – meaning, ‘I am black but beautiful’. To sing ‘but’ beautiful is awful – but in 1610, when the Vespers was written, that kind of casual racism was unfortunately there. I feel that if we can change the words of the Lord’s Prayer so that we ‘forgive those who’ trespass against us, instead of ‘them that’ do it, we could change ‘nigra sum, sed’ (black, but …) to ‘nigra sum et pulchra’. ‘And’ beautiful. Perhaps you, Robert [Prof. Robert Woolley, Director of Music at St Mary’s], could speak to Harry Christophers or Sir John Eliot Gardner about it.

 

The disciples with St Paul – (including St Luke, who most likely was the author of the Acts of the Apostles as well, and who was an eyewitness with the Apostles, at least for some of the time, which we think partly because of the passage which was our lesson tonight, in their journey, where it says, ‘We’: ‘We came with a straight course to Samothracia’, and so on) – well, he and the disciples went to pray, not just in the synagogues, but in Philippi they went to a part of the river bank, where people went to pray; actually, not just any ‘people’ went there, but a group of women. And there they met and got to know Lydia, who, like the Shunammite woman with the man of God, Elisha, invited them to stay with her. She ‘constrained them’ too; she was another Mrs Doyle!

 

Shunammite women, blacks, and the women worshipping with Lydia on the river bank: all a bit different, according to the lights of the time then; but all variously blessed. To be with Elisha, and with the apostles – and of course, with Jesus – we should be celebrating diversity and welcoming the people who are shut out – shut out by polite society, but also because they are black or strangers or refugees. Let us not shelter behind false distinctions between ‘genuine’ refugees and ‘economic migrants’. Whatever they are, they are here; they are human beings like us; they’re just as good as us; and if they are refugees, they need our welcome, our love, and our help. ‘Come again, ye children of men.’

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Handmaidens

By hughdbryant
December 20, 2015 //
0

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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