Archives for posts with tag: St Matthew

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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Happy Marriages

By hughdbryant
October 6, 2024 //
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Genesis 2:18-24, Mark 10:2-12

Sermon preached at All Saints Church, Penarth, on 6th October 2024

https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=595219558

I want to share with you that sometimes when I am thinking about what I am going to say in one of these sermons I have a distinct sensation of cognitive dissonance. I’m sure you all know what that is. You see something, you feel something, and somebody tells you what it is – but their description doesn’t square with what you are feeling, or seeing, or hearing. That’s cognitive dissonance. And I get that feeling quite often when we say our prayers together in church. 

We pray for our ‘broken world’. I don’t really get it. I open the curtains in the morning and the sun is shining – well, sometimes it is – and the birds are singing, and the cats are lying in wait for the birds; the milkman has just come and the paperboy is just delivering my copy of the Guardian. I would be tempted to say that all is well with the world: well, at least it is with my world. It’s not broken – and I thank the Lord for it. Of course if I was waking up in the middle of Gaza or Beirut or Kyiv, or any of those other places where there is terrible death and destruction as a result of war, then I wouldn’t say that. But somehow or other I don’t think it’s the world that is broken; it’s more us. It’s more what we do that’s going wrong.

I felt that same sort of ‘pull’ in two different directions when I was reading our lessons for today. The story of Adam and Eve, where Eve is created from Adam’s rib, in order for her to be a companion for Adam, and then Jesus laying down the law about divorce – ‘Don’t do it’, he said – well, in both of those cases I had that sense of unreality. I don’t believe that all women are descended from an offshoot of the original man, and equally, it doesn’t ring true to me that Jesus, who was so compassionate and understanding in so many other ways, should be so uncompromising about marriage breakdown. 

And then again, when I took another look at these topics, I realised that there is so much that people disagree about here that I could be here for hours and still not really scratch the surface. What is the theology of men and women? What is the Christian way to approach that huge area that we call ‘sex’? 

Let me just try to tackle a couple of things: if you think that this is something that we should come back to, then maybe we should think about putting together a discussion group, or even a sermon series. But I would just caution everybody that this does seem to be an area where there are no very easy answers which everyone agrees about, and there is really quite some potential for putting people off. I’ll try to be careful.

The Ministry Area Council – what we are used to refer to as the PCC – the Parochial Church Council, has decided that the churches in this Ministry Area should join an organisation called Inclusive Church, where the name tells you all about what it does. We want to be able to say, hand on heart, that our churches welcome everyone, whatever they look like, whatever they say their pronouns are, and whatever their gender and sexual orientation may be, because we believe that the biggest thing in our Christian witness, following Jesus, is to carry out his commandment of love, to love our neighbours as ourselves. 

So having said all that, here are a couple of thoughts. First, the apparently simple idea that God made them male and female. I have a feeling that my doctor daughters would want to add some footnotes to that. The first half – God made them – is reasonable shorthand for the process of creation, and it surely covers evolution as well. 

But the second bit – male and female – is now understood in a very nuanced way, because the scientists now understand that people may be physically endowed with organs which normally go with one sex or the other, but also, whatever their physical characteristics; that people may, again as a matter of the way they are made, be inclined to be more or less male or female in their sexual orientation. Gender and sexuality are seen as distinct, as two different things.

So scientists talk about a spectrum of sexuality between being absolutely male and being absolutely female, in the way that people feel themselves to be, quite separately from the gender with which they were born. 

And that also includes sexual attraction. There is again a spectrum. I was going to go on to say, ‘and scientists consider that xyz is the case’, but I think to be fair one has to say straightway that there may be differences of scientific understanding, for instance between scientists in most countries in Africa, and those in most countries in northern Europe and the USA, on the question of sexual orientation. 

The majority of western scientists say that sexual orientation is something that you are born with, and it is not something you can learn – or unlearn. 

But if you were in Uganda or Nigeria, for example, homosexuality is regarded as a crime, something which is voluntary, learned. They believe that people choose to be hetero- or homosexual, not that they are made one way or the other.

Provided that you are a straightforward male-oriented person in a male body or female-oriented in a female body, you’re fine. But if you are at all different from any of those parameters, on the various spectrums which run from those basic positions to the logical extremes of being bisexual or transsexual, things are much more difficult. Are you allowed to use bathrooms which are appropriate for the way you feel yourself to be, irrespective of your physical gender? What if you feel yourself to be female, but still have the body of a man, say?

And of course there are the vexed questions of whether the church should marry people of the same sex, or whether there should be homosexual priests and whether they themselves can be married. 

People find references in the book of Leviticus which they bring forward to say that anything other than basic boy-meets-girl is an ‘abomination’. They conveniently forget that in the same passages all sorts of other bits of behaviour, which no-one would take exception to these days, are identified as being impure in a religious context. Try this, from Leviticus chapter 19:

You shall not plant your field with two kinds of seed. You shall not put on a garment woven with two kinds of yarn.’

It’s clearly ‘of its time’, and not something which we would abide by today – or that we would even vaguely consider to be sinful. And after all, if we are trying to love our neighbours, think what someone else might feel like, if he or she was in one of those different categories. What does it feel like? In the end, everyone is human. Everyone is a neighbour. Everyone deserves to be loved. That’s the important thing about being ‘male and female’.

On the question of divorce, if you compare what Jesus is reported to have said about divorce here in St Mark’s Gospel, with what he said in St Matthew’s Gospel and what St Paul says about marriage in his first letter to the Corinthians, things are not so simple: the three accounts aren’t all the same, they don’t just say that marriage is for a man and a woman and that there should not be any divorces. 

Matthew said that Jesus added a caveat that there shouldn’t be any divorce unless the wife commits adultery (but he doesn’t say anything about straying husbands), and St Paul brings up another situation where one of the parties isn’t a Christian and there are tensions as a result. Paul feels that it’s okay to let a marriage between a Christian and a non-Christian break up if that becomes a bone of contention. 

Bear in mind that the story in Saint Mark’s Gospel of what Jesus said was written down much later than what Saint Paul wrote to the Corinthians. Saint Paul’s letter to the Corinthians probably came 40 years before any of the gospels were written down, so the idea that there isn’t an absolute prohibition on divorce probably reflects the time of Jesus more clearly than the rather fierce quote that appears in Mark’s gospel. 

We have to say that that fierce quote, suggesting that Jesus said that anyone who gets divorced, male or female, is eternally condemned, just doesn’t chime with everything else we know about Jesus. 

I would suggest that Jesus would say that there is room for forgiveness. I hope that I am right in saying that, because, I’m ashamed to say, I am sinful in that way too, as I have been divorced. So I pray that, in all this area, we can follow Jesus more nearly, and love each other more dearly, day by day. 

Amen.

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No, not him

By hughdbryant
October 29, 2018 //
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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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Prince Charles, an Eagle and the King Eternal

By hughdbryant
November 23, 2014 //
1

Sermon for Evensong on the 25th Sunday after Trinity, the Feast of
Christ the King
2 Samuel 23:1-7, Matt. 28:16-end

The other day in the Guardian there was an extended article, in a section which they now call ‘the long read’, about Prince Charles, and what sort of a king he would be when eventually he accedes to the throne. Apparently it’s not something he likes to talk about, because to do so would necessarily mean that he would have to be thinking about the death of his beloved mother, the Queen.

I think that’s rather endearing. I read the article with extra interest, knowing that I was going to be preaching tonight, on the Sunday when we celebrate Christ the King. It’s a relatively new festival in Christianity – it began in the Roman Catholic Church in 1925. Pope Pius XI instituted the Feast of Christ the King as a reaction against what he perceived as a rising tide of secularism. People had forgotten the importance of God.

Actually I preached only last week about the text from the Gospel according to St Matthew which was our New Testament lesson tonight, Jesus’ Great Commission, to go and make disciples of all the world.

It isn’t the Gospel reading which one most readily associates with the idea of Jesus as King. This morning the lesson was Matthew 25, ‘Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you for the foundation of the world: For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat, …’ You remember, when they asked when they had done this, Jesus replied, ‘inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me’ – one of the most powerful social justice and charitable love messages that Jesus ever gave.

Jesus the King was King in heaven, and He was dividing the sheep and the goats in the Last Judgment. The Gospel writer expected Jesus to be an absolute monarch, splendid in majesty and power.

We are not used to absolute monarchs now, today in England. After Magna Carta our kings are ‘constitutional monarchs’ with powers constrained and restricted. The will of the people, expressed in Parliament, is sovereign.

King David, the greatest king of the Jews, in his last words, in the first lesson, from 2 Samuel, affirmed that God had told him that ‘One who rules over people justly, ruling in the fear of God, is like the light of the morning, like the sun rising on a cloudless morning, gleaming from the rain on the grassy land.’ That’s the poetry of the man who wrote the Psalms, describing kingship in a similar vein to Magna Carta. The king is subject to higher authority, and, respecting that higher authority, he must rule justly: not capriciously or cruelly.

Reading the article about Prince Charles,[http://gu.com/p/43dtt, ] I found that the author was concerned that perhaps Charles, who has a habit of writing to people in public life and expressing very forthright views, would be much more assertive in public than the Queen has been, and is. The thrust of the article was to ask whether Charles would throw his weight around in an anti-democratic way.

I confess that I was somewhat uneasy about the Monarchy when I was a young man. What was it that made the Queen and her family better than you or me, so that we owed her respect – reverence, almost. What was her strength? Why would we go through elaborate rigmaroles when she was about?

That feeling in me changed completely, when my Father got the OBE. My mother, my brother and I went with him to the investiture in Buckingham Palace. We sat no more than a few feet away from where Her Majesty was standing. She had someone standing next to her to pass her the medals, but no notes or prompts.

She bestowed medals on about 75 people. What was amazing was that she seemed to know about every single one that she was giving a medal to. She spoke to my Father for a couple of minutes – which felt much longer, of course – and clearly she had carefully researched all that Dad had been doing.

She had done this thorough preparation for every single person that she decorated that day. It must have been a big task of preparation – and just think, she must have to do a similar job several times a year. It speaks volumes that, after so many years, the Queen still takes it upon herself to prepare and get to know exactly what her loyal subjects have been doing, the reason why they have been awarded the medals.

The Queen is reported to say that this hard work is just part of the job. She has a very strong ethic of service. The Queen is modest enough to do masses of homework, so that she can serve her people in a professional way. My Dad was really impressed. Although he was dying, the whole thing really bucked him up. He really did walk taller after getting his OBE from the Queen.

And I ceased to have republican leanings. In a minute we will pray for our Queen; I will lead the prayers; and I’ll really mean it.

I do hope that Prince Charles will be similarly imbued with an ethic of service. He has had to lead a rather odd life so far. In the article which I read, for example. It describes Prince Charles visiting Chester Cathedral.

‘Inside the cathedral, the strangeness of Prince Charles’s life came into focus. … Some modernist choir stalls, installed 15 years ago, caught his disapproving eye. “Doesn’t quite go,” the prince announced, locking eyes with the senior churchman. “It may be time for a review.” …. Finally, in the cloister, Charles was invited to hold Grace the golden eagle, a magnificent bird who, moments earlier, had evacuated her bowels explosively on to this reporter’s notebook.’ A close shave for the Prince.

Apart from the eagle, Charles seemed to act as though he was in charge. Telling the Dean of a cathedral that his seating ‘didn’t quite go’ and that it was ‘time for a review’ doesn’t sound like someone whose prime object is to serve.

But that is it. The Servant King. That is a modern hymn which we can like. Think of the passage in St Mark chapter 10: ‘You know that among the Gentiles [in the context, it must mean, among the Romans], those whom they recognise as their rulers [their kings] lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. But …. whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, …’

Jesus’ kingship was not like a Roman emperor’s. Not even like Herod, the puppet king, king of the Jews, who would soon condemn Him. These men had considerable power in the secular sphere, we say, ‘on earth’. They had the power of life and death. Jesus, Jesus the man, didn’t have that kind of power.

‘Pilate said to Jesus, “Are you the King of the Jews?”… Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.” So Pilate said to him, “Then you are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say I am a king. For this I was born and for this I came into the world,to testify to the truth.”‘ (John 18:33b, 36-37).

So we come back to this question, what makes a real king. King David said that he must fear God and deal justly; our Queen is giving her service, committed and faithful to her people. Prince Charles already does a great deal of charitable work – but he must not stray into autocracy. He needs to be a Servant King, just as his mother is a Servant Queen.

And the Servant King, the original Servant King, will be with us till the end of the age. As Bob Dylan sang, ‘You’re gonna have to serve somebody.’ Christ the King. Let us indeed serve Him.

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The Thief in the Night

By hughdbryant
December 1, 2013 //
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Sermon for Holy Communion at St Mary’s on 1st December 2013, the First Sunday in Advent
Romans 13:11-14, Matt. 24:36-44 – The Thief in the Night

Some of you may know that I have just come back from a visit to the USA, where I enjoyed Thanksgiving with some friends. It’s like a combination of Harvest Festival with Christmas – you eat a massive meal of turkey with all the usual trimmings – and with some things we don’t have, like fresh cranberries instead of cranberry sauce, squash as one of the vegetables, and pecan pie for pudding.

The timing of the meal depends on whether the family you are visiting favours a brisk walk in the park afterwards, playing touch football or watching it – American football, that is. The TV schedule is often influential in the decision concerning the timing of Thanksgiving lunch. Another thing is that you may find that you need to rest your eyes. Somehow there is no need to eat or drink anything more that day!

Thanksgiving is just that, thanksgiving, a season where the Americans give thanks to God for the abundance of good things that they enjoy. It looks back to the hard work of the harvest. It doesn’t look forward to Christmas. It’s not like Mardi Gras, Shrove Tuesday, a blow-out before a time of restraint and fasting.

So in America, on Thursday it was Thanksgiving. I flew back yesterday – and now the season of Advent begins. One is tempted to think that, if one were an American, it ought to be a seamless transition from one season of joy to another. From one turkey dinner to another, at Christmas. Only so many shopping days to Christmas: Christmas parties: starting to think about good resolutions for the New Year. Sit down at the fireside. Happy times.

Even if you can put presents and shopping out of your mind, still at Advent it is wonderful to reflect, to reflect on God with us, how God became incarnate, took on human form, in the birth of a baby in Bethlehem. The deep meaning of Christmas is that it is a sign of the revelation of God to us. We would not know much about God if He had not revealed Himself to us. He was born, he was a human baby – but He was also God, and He showed his divine nature to us – showed it to us in person.

That’s the background to our lessons today. You might think that the Advent time, when the church prepares to commemorate the birth of Jesus, would just be a time of mounting jollifications as a result. Christmas is a happy time, because we are celebrating the tangible evidence that God cares for us. By coming in human form, God shows that He isn’t just the blind watchmaker, setting the world in motion and then not bothering with it again.

But also we have to acknowledge that precisely because of this, it ought to be a time of awe, of reverence, for the majesty of God. Although a baby doesn’t on the face of things, look particularly fearsome, once you fully appreciate what that baby represented, then, indeed as the Wise Men did, you are called, perhaps even feel yourself to be compelled, to show respect, to offer worship.

The lessons set in the Lectionary for today start with Isaiah 2:1-5, which we haven’t read in our service, but which might be a passage for you to read at home after lunch. It is that very familiar passage, ‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, … that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths’. He shall judge between the nations …; they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks…’ Isaiah 2.

This time of the Kingdom will be a time of judgment. And St Paul picks up on that in his letter to the Romans. ‘For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers; the night is far gone, the day is near.’

And last comes St Matthew’s gospel, recording the words of Jesus himself, rather eerily warning people to be ready for the coming of the Kingdom, as though it would not be unmixed good news. It will come like a thief in the night, unexpectedly. ‘… two will be in the field. One will be taken and the other left’ in Matthew: and the process is compared with Noah’s flood in Romans. This is the end time, the Day of Judgment, the Dies Irae.

At first blush it doesn’t fit such a happy, jolly time as the run-up to Christmas. But traditionally, the church has used this time to reflect on the meaning of God with us, Immanuel, in terms of the Last Things: death, judgment, heaven and hell.

To some extent I think that raises a question what exactly we are doing as we follow the liturgical year. We aren’t literally looking forward to the birth of Jesus – after all, He has already been born. It is a commemoration. We are doing something similar to a serious play. We are acting out a sacred story. By telling the story, we get into it, as indeed actors sometimes say, they get into character.

So we aim, as Christians, to be in character for the Advent drama. That drama is far too awe-inspiring to be just a jolly time. In the time of the Kingdom, the Last Judgement cannot be far away. But St Paul has it right when he says that the impending time, the thing which you must prepare yourself for, is not Doomsday, but ‘salvation’. ‘Salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed.’ So Advent is sometimes called a ‘penitential time’ in the same way as Lent: but that is rather uneasy. We are looking forward to a happy event, the happy event in the stable in Bethlehem.

So I think that it’s all right to enjoy Advent, all right to look forward happily – as we will do tonight, to sing carols and be merry, during Advent time. But we have to remember that we are at the same time preparing for the end time, whenever it will be. That needs repentance, so that we can be saved. ‘Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armour of light’.

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