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Sure and Certain Hope

By publicsquare
May 18, 2014 //
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Sermon for Mattins on the Fourth Sunday after Easter, 18th May 2014
Ezekiel 37:1-12, John 5:19-29

‘Dem bones, dem bones; dem dry bones’. I’m sure you can hear in your head that very jolly spiritual. ‘Dem bones, dem bones; dem dry bones: now hear the word of the Lord.’ Ezekiel in the valley of the dry bones.

We have just said, in the Creed,

I believe in the Holy Ghost … the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.’

A cornerstone of our faith is our belief in the Resurrection. We believe that Jesus was raised from the dead. But also there is a strong thread of personal resurrection, not only in the Old Testament – and certainly in this passage in Ezekiel, where Ezekiel the prophet has this vision of being in a valley full of bones. The Lord tells Ezekiel to prophesy over the bones: ‘O ye dry bones, hear the word of the Lord.’ The Lord God says He will cause spirit, ruach in Hebrew, which also means breath, to enter the bones.

And the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood up upon their feet, an exceeding great army.

The explanation given by the Lord to Ezekiel was that the ‘exceeding great army’ who had come alive from the dry bones were the Israelites, who were in exile, and generally at a low ebb, until the Lord showed that He still cared for them, by ordering Ezekiel to prophesy, and breathe life into them.

Breathing. Ruach, Hebrew for wind, spirit; Holy Spirit. The divine spirit: ‘.. the breath came into them, and they lived.

At funeral services, and in Handel’s Messiah, we often have that beautiful passage from Paul’s first Letter to the Corinthians, chapter 15,

Behold, I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised, incorruptible …

In today’s lesson from St John’s Gospel, we read about Jesus’ teaching about the Resurrection: not just His own Resurrection, but the end of time, the coming of the Kingdom of God.

Verily, verily, I say unto you, the hour is coming, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God; and they that hear, shall live. … For the hour is coming, in which all that are in the graves shall hear his voice, and shall come forth; they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done ill, unto the resurrection of damnation.

This is the other side, if you like, of the resurrection of Jesus. This is the resurrection of us. It is part of the Creed which we faithfully rehearse as part of the divine service. The earliest Christian writings certainly mention it. It’s generally accepted that St Paul’s Letters to the Thessalonians were the earliest books in the New Testament, written maybe no more than ten years after the time of Jesus. In 1 Thessalonians chapter 4, verse 13 and following, St Paul says,

But I would not have you to be ignorant, .. concerning them which are asleep; that ye sorrow not, even as the rest, which have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with him.

For The Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first: then we that are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord.

‘Lo He comes, with clouds descending’, as Charles Wesley’s hymn puts it. What is this? Is it like Ezekiel, the product of ecstatic prophecy – and perhaps not to be taken literally? Because, actually, none of us have ever seen anyone raised from the dead, at least since the time of Jesus Himself. Jesus, of course, did raise people from the dead: Jairus’ daughter, and Lazarus for example.

But these days, the idea of dead people being brought back to life – particularly people who have been buried and perhaps decayed, coming back out of their graves – is something which we keep for horror films perhaps, but nowhere else. It doesn’t really make sense to us.

And yet, when we come to a funeral, we cling to that ‘sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life’. Is it just, really, wish-fulfilment, wishful thinking? St Paul, in 1 Corinthians 15, suggests that the resurrection of the body is to be understood in the context of our having a physical body and a spiritual body, and that the idea that there could be two bodies for one person, one soul, is something which we see in nature, where plants die, and the seeds fall on the ground and grow again. Life comes out of death.

It seems to me that indeed this is something which we can reconcile with a modern scientific approach. They talk about geneticists ‘playing at God’ when they clone embryos – but it seems to me that there is still a real mystery over the whole question how things actually come to life.

You can, as I understand it, mechanically make all the bits of a living thing. But it does not just automatically spring to life. Of course, negatively, we can cause death. But I’m very doubtful whether we can completely explain the business of coming to life. A baby is born, and it starts to breathe, and greets us with its first cries. But unless I am completely mistaken, that coming to life can’t be totally explained by the biological processes by which the physical body of the baby has formed in the mother’s womb.

Tragically, not all babies, which grow in the mother’s womb, do come to life. Sometimes we can know why this is. We can say that particular illnesses or failures in the growth process have caused life to fail. But some just simply fail to start, fail to come to life. So, what about all the babies that are born: what is that makes them start going?

We call non-human living creatures ‘animals’. This word comes from the Latin ‘anima’, spirit – the Latin equivalent of the Hebrew ruach. Animals have life, they depend on an animating, life-giving spirit.

Surely this life force, in humans as well as in animals, is indeed something like the ruach of the Old Testament, the wind, the spirit, the breath of God. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t continue to believe in it. There’s also a very good argument for saying that this spirit, this Holy Spirit, is at work now: it doesn’t need to wait till the end of time. In St John’s Gospel, Jesus is saying that He has all the power from God, and that He is judging – present tense; it’s not a question of judgment at the end of time. He is the good judge already.

And if that’s the case, then we need to think about this rather stern point which Jesus makes, that the dead will all be raised to an eternal life, some to eternal good life and some, to bad, depending on whether they have been good in their earthly life. This is difficult teaching for us to understand or to follow. Traditionally the church has always said that the question, whether you are eternally to be saved, or eternally damned, is not something which you can earn. Salvation is a gift from God and not a prize.

But nevertheless, if we do have the sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life, both because we believe and trust in Jesus and in Jesus’ resurrection, and also, because we believe and trust in what He and the apostles have taught us, then we ought to behave as though we are chosen by God to be saved. That means, as St Paul put it in his Letter to the Galatians [Gal. 5:22f], that we have to lead a good life and not carry on with the old bad ways.

So in this Easter season, this season of resurrection hope, remember the meaning of the story in Ezekiel of his prophecy in the valley of the dry bones: ‘Dem bones, dem bones. Hear the word of the Lord!’ Hallelujah!

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Be Reconciled

By publicsquare
May 12, 2014 //
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Sermon for Evensong for Churches Together on the Third Sunday after Easter, 11th May 2014
Ezra 3:1-13, Ephesians 2:11-22: Be Reconciled

So then you are no longer strangers …, but you are fellow-citizens with the saints and … of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. [Eph. 2:19-20]

Building a temple. Building a church. Being reconciled.

But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near, by the blood of Christ.

I want to welcome everyone to the church here at St Mary’s. We were excited when you, Godfrey, put your hand up in the Churches Together meeting and volunteered that we here would host the service to remember and celebrate the fellowship and spiritual growth which we enjoyed together in our Lent groups.

Our Lent groups, which were devoted to studying St Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, with a strap line which Jeremy Cresswell, in his erudite study notes, identified as ‘Be Reconciled’. Obviously St Paul was talking about Jews and non-Jews, at the time of Jesus Christ, whereas in applying this message today – and certainly in the context of our service tonight – we are talking about the different Christian denominations, and how we can be reconciled, brought together in fellowship, so as to become, in unity and diversity at the same time, the body of Christ.

Ezra, the author of our Old Testament lesson, was writing in the sixth century BC following the conquest of the Babylonians, who had destroyed the Temple, by the Persians – King Cyrus followed by King Darius and the three Kings Artaxerxes.

The Persians allowed the Jews to rebuild the Temple, and to have some self-government. But they were very much a minority, surrounded by people who did not necessarily sympathise with them, and who were much more powerful than they were.

Ezra tells the story of the rebuilding of the Temple. But before then, in the passage that we heard tonight, came the restoration of worship, of the One True God. It’s a theme throughout the Old Testament – certainly it comes out in Ezra, if you read Ezra and its sister book, Nehemiah – that there was one true God: that also, that one true God had made a covenant with a chosen people, and so the world was divided, divided into God’s chosen people and the rest.

It was difficult for the Israelites to maintain their faith, their belief in the one true God, when they had such terrible bad fortune. By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept. .. How shall we sing the Lord’s song: in a strange land? (Ps. 137).

The Assyrians conquered the Israelites in 722, and when in 587 BC the southern kingdom of Judah was conquered by the Babylonians, the Temple, which had stood for so long, was razed to the ground. All the precious things in it were taken by the victorious Babylonians. You can read all about these disasters in the Books of Kings and the Books of Chronicles.

It didn’t really look as though God’s covenant with the Israelites, His covenant with Abraham, was really working. Then the Israelites started to understand that it was God, God Himself, who had caused all the misfortune, and it was because they had not followed God’s commandments. But God forgave them, and during the time of the Persians, they were treated much more kindly. Eventually they went about rebuilding the Temple.

Flash forward 600 years to the time of Jesus, and the time of St Paul immediately afterwards, and imagine what a huge step – a huge mental step – St Paul was making when he realised that God was not exclusive in the way that he had been brought up to think He was.

It wasn’t the case that there was one God, and that that one God favoured only the Israelites, the Jews. The lesson of Jesus was that God was – God is – a god for all of us. God created the whole world after all. The message of Jesus’ appearance is that there is still a covenant between God and His people: but his people are all people, not just one small nation.

That is, of course, a momentous step. Once St Paul had recognised that, it made it possible for the good news of Christ to spread throughout the world, and not just to stay as a minority cult among the Israelites.

So look at this timeline: Ezra, about 500 BC: St Paul, no more than a dozen or so years after the death of Christ, so, let’s say, just over 500 years later. And we are just over 2,000 years after that.

But back to the fact that we are tonight in St Mary’s. St Mary’s is the oldest church in Surrey – it was built originally in 680AD. Indeed, it’s a Saxon church: if you look, after the service, at the three little models that are on the shelf over there in the transept, you will see that it was originally a sort of Saxon shed – and then it grew progressively in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries to be the shape of church which it is now.

So if we go back to the timeline – Ezra, 500 BC: St Paul, maybe 40 or 50 AD: St Mary’s, just over 500 years later, 680. And our service, written in the 1540s by Archbishop Cranmer – so, about another 5- or 600 years later.

You should know that the Book of Common Prayer, which we’re using tonight (it’s the little blue book in your pew), actually took 100 years to settle into its final form, but the key bits of it were written by Archbishop Cranmer in the middle 1500s – so, the time of Henry VIII – and we are about 700 years after that. We are joined – reconciled, sort of – with all those Christians before us.

Remember that in the 1540s Archbishop Thomas Cranmer was writing the Book of Common Prayer in the crucible of the Reformation. Martin Luther had nailed his 95 theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg: John Calvin had preached in Geneva; Zwingli in Zürich, and of course, Henry VIII; all contributed to a time of theological ferment and disagreement.

We are using words which haven’t changed for 700 years. We really are walking in the footsteps of the saints. Because Cranmer didn’t just dream up all the words in the services which went into the Book of Common Prayer. He based all the services on his translations, and on his understanding, of even older services which the church had been using before he compiled the Prayer Book in the 1540s.

The BCP was meant to be a prayer book, a service book, for use in common, meaning shared by everyone. Against the background of all the different strands of the Reformation, the BCP was a powerful tool for reconciliation.

So the fact that tonight we are using the BCP, a prayer book written 700 years ago which goes back even earlier in its origins, is, I think, very apt in the context of Churches Together: in the context of our variety, all our different ways of worshipping, in our seven churches.

Just like the time of St Paul. Faithful Christians in Ephesus, in Rome, in Corinth, in Colossae, in Galatia, were all confronting something which was far bigger than they were, and they didn’t know what the right answers were.

St Paul talked about it in 1 Corinthians 1:12.

‘ …. each of you says, ‘I belong to Paul’, or ‘I belong to Apollos’, or ‘I belong to Cephas’, or ‘I belong to Christ.’

Which one of these great preachers had it right? Terribly important; once you are confronted by the Revelation, the Good News, that God cares for us, that He sent His only Son: nothing is more important than to respond appropriately.

But, as the Roman poet Terence said, ‘Quot homines, tot sententiae’ – (for as many as there are people, there are just as many opinions). That’s why the message of Ephesians is so very important. Its message of reconciliation, coming together, of agreeing together – even in circumstances where we disagree – is vitally important.

So he came and proclaimed peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near; for through him both of us have access in one Spirit to the Father. So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God.

I pray that that has been your experience in our Lent course – and that it will continue to be: that you will come and share with us here, and we will come and share with you. In our different ways, we will spread the good news of Christ and will receive the good news of Christ; and we will live like people who have seen the Kingdom.

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The View from the Mountain Top

By publicsquare
March 2, 2014 //
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Sermon for Evensong on the Sunday before Lent, 2nd March 2014
2 Kings 2:1-12; Matt. 17:9-23 – Elijah and Jesus

I’m not quite sure whether you still find some of the stuff in the Bible surprising or not: just in case it did just flow over you, I will just highlight a couple of surprising things which we have heard in this evening’s lessons.

In the second Book of Kings, we heard about the prophet Elijah being taken up into heaven – but first of all, parting the waters of the River Jordan, so that he and his successor Elisha could pass through to the other side: ‘They went over on dry ground’ (2 Kings 2:8). And then ‘a chariot of fire appeared, and horses of fire, and took Elijah up in a whirlwind to heaven’ (2:11).

Then if we turn to St Matthew’s gospel, we have picked up the story, as Jesus, Peter, James and John the brother of James were coming down the high mountain on which they had seen Jesus ‘transfigured’ with Moses and Elijah. A bright cloud had suddenly overshadowed them and a voice came out of the cloud, ‘This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased; hear ye him’ (Matt. 17:5).

And then as they came down the mountain, Jesus cured a man’s son who had epilepsy, by ‘casting out a devil’ which had made the boy have fits. Jesus challenged his disciples by saying that they did not have enough faith: ‘If you have faith no bigger than a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, move from here to there: and it will move. Nothing will prove impossible for you.’

What do you think? Is there any way these days that we could understand Elijah suddenly appearing with Moses and Jesus, in some way ‘transfigured’? I’m not sure what ‘transfigured’ really means. There is that wonderful piece of music by Arnold Schoenberg, ‘Verklärte Nacht’, Transfigured Night, a night of strange light, a supernatural aspect. What do we feel? Are we in the camp which feels, along with C. S. Lewis, that anything is possible for God, and therefore there is no reason why God could not make miracles like the Transfiguration, or Elijah being taken up into heaven?

Elijah being taken up into heaven, of course, is somewhat like the Ascension of our Lord Himself. So are we comfortable saying, ‘Because of the omnipotence of God, there is no reason why, given that Jesus was God, he shouldn’t be able to have transfigurations and ascensions: and no reason that Elijah, as the prophet of God – as the other great prophet with Moses – couldn’t be taken up into heaven in the way described?’

On the other hand, we could be sensitive to the charge of humanists and rationalists, who object that everything that we believe in ought to be subject to the same rules of logic and science, and that you could not make sense of stories such as Elijah being taken up to heaven in a whirlwind or the Transfiguration in the normal way: just contrast the way in which you would describe the arrival of a number 38 bus with the way in which these stories about Elijah and Jesus are told. Quite different.

We can generally agree that if I tell you about seeing a number 38 bus, you will know what I am talking about, even though perhaps what you and I actually see when we look at a number 38 bus might in fact be different. We can’t get into each other’s heads to prove what it is exactly that we are looking at: whether it is the same thing. Nevertheless it’s sufficiently similar for us to be able to communicate about it successfully. What it is for something to be a number 38 bus is sufficiently similar in my understanding to what it is in yours for us to be able to talk about it.

But on the other hand, if we talk about something like Elijah going up to heaven in a whirlwind, or Jesus being transfigured with Moses and Elijah, we can’t necessarily be confident that we will be understood by everyone in the same way.

Jesus adds a twist, by asking whether or not the disciples have enough faith; if they do have enough faith, even the tiniest quantity, it will be sufficient to move mountains.

But – are you going to beat yourself up over the fact that you aren’t able to go out there and transpose K2 for Everest using pure will-power and faith? Nobody else has done it. So what did Jesus mean? Clearly we are in a different area, different from simple mundane questions like whether the 38 bus has arrived or not.

Of course some of the Oxford philosophers of the 50s and 60s, like the late, great, A. J. Ayer, would have said that, unless a statement is verifiable, in the same way that something about the number 38 bus would be verifiable, then it is meaningless. So everything about Moses and Elijah, transfiguration, being caught up to heaven in a whirlwind and so on, is, according to Prof. Ayer and others, meaningless.

So on the one hand you have C.S. Lewis accepting miracles and saying, ‘This is just the sort of thing that an omnipotent god would do’, and on the other, you’ve got a sort of common sense view, either that they’re not true, or that there’s no way in which we could make sense of these stories in any literal way.

Does it matter? We are just about to start Lent. Ash Wednesday is this Wednesday, and in fact our Lent courses are going to start on Monday morning, so that we can get six sessions in before Holy Week. We’re going to be studying St Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians, under the heading, ‘Be Reconciled’.

St Paul wrote, ‘He has made known to us His hidden purpose – such was His will and pleasure, determined beforehand in Christ – to be put into effect when the time was ripe: namely that the universe, all in heaven and on earth, might be brought into a unity in Christ.’ We will be studying all the various aspects of this ‘unity in Christ’, this reconciliation, over the next six weeks.

But for the purpose of this sermon, I simply want to draw attention to the process, to the way that our faith can work. There must be a very strong suspicion that unless something very remarkable did in fact happen, it’s tempting to feel that no-one would have said that Elijah was a prophet, someone through whom God spoke.

Without the miracles, the revelations, perhaps no-one would have said that Jesus was not only a prophet – as the Moslems and Jews acknowledge – but was in fact God on earth, the Son of God. But it’s not so much a question how God manifested Himself through Elijah, or became incarnate in Jesus Christ, not a question of how, but that He did. The exact mechanism is beyond our powers of understanding.

One can say that these big miracles, like the Transfiguration, or Elijah being taken up into heaven in a whirlwind, are indeed beyond our power fully to describe or explain. But that doesn’t mean to say that they did not happen in some sense. Because if they did happen, we can recognise through them that God cares for us, that God is involved with us.

And in the light of that wonderful fact, we ought to be reconciled, to be reconciled with God and with each other. Sin is being separated from God: salvation is being brought back together, reconciled.

So much for this rather philosophical excursion. You might be rather scornful that I could stay in this rather rarified vein in the face of all the momentous events which have been happening this week. As Christians preparing to rehearse, to act out, the drama of Jesus’ Passion, prepared to accept the reality of God on earth, how do we look at the conflicts in the world, in Syria or in the Ukraine?

Nearer to home, what do we think about the two criminals who murdered the soldier, Lee Rigby? ‘ROT IN JAIL,’ in bold capitals, read the headline on the front page of the Daily Mirror. What is the Christian perspective? How would we see it if we ourselves had just come down from the mountain with Jesus?

Who are the good people and the bad people in these stories? What happens when the dust has settled? When the Syrians have finally stopped killing each other, and the Ukrainians have decided whether they want to go with the Russians or with the Europeans, where are we going to stand as Christians?

Are the killers of Lee Rigby really condemned to rot? Is there no redemption for them? Clearly now the killers don’t appreciate that what they did was wrong. They have a crooked justification for it. But let’s suppose after years in gaol, they appreciate the wrongness of what they have done, and they repent. What shall we say then? Jesus’ message was a message of forgiveness, not ‘rot in jail’. How would it feel to us if we had just come down from that high mountain?

The same with the civil war in Syria and the terrible divisions in the Ukraine. Will people be reconciled? In these situations the church can speak. The church can remind the world of Jesus’ message of forgiveness and reconciliation: we Christians should be fired up by the thought of that mountain-top experience.

We can be prophets; we can let the Holy Spirit speak through us. Let us pray that, at the end of the conflicts in Syria and the Ukraine – and in all other places where there is a breakdown of law and order, where there is civil war or civil unrest – that there will be a resolution, not based on victors’ justice, but rather on true reconciliation. Truth and reconciliation, in Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu’s words: truth and reconciliation. Come down from the mountain. Be reconciled.

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Spiritual Rusks

By publicsquare
February 17, 2014 //
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Sermon for Mattins on the Third Sunday before Lent, Septuagesima Sunday, also Education Sunday, 16th February 2014
1 Corinthians 3:1-9; Matt. 5:21-37

The Corinthians said, ‘I am of Paul; … I of Apollos ..’ I went to St Paul’s school; I went to Apollos’. Are you a grammar-school boy, like me? Or are you a Cranleighan, a Rugbeian, or a Carthusian, or a Wykehamist? Or did you go to Crouch End Primary, like Tony Hancock? And what difference does it make?

This Sunday is Education Sunday, in churches of all denominations. Today we offer prayer and thanksgiving for everyone in the world of education. In our lessons today, there are two examples of teaching: and teaching is surely a vital part of education, if not the vital part.

In St Matthew’s Gospel, we heard part of the Sermon on the Mount, the greatest sermon there has ever been. In the context of Education Sunday, we should focus on what Jesus said, what his message, his teaching, was. It was to show that, in the kingdom of heaven, simple utilitarianism, do-as-you-would-be-done-by, isn’t enough. If you are a Christian, you must go the extra mile, turn the other cheek. People often say that you don’t need to be a Christian in order to be a moral person, and Jesus wouldn’t disagree. He said he wasn’t there to destroy the law. The point is that he went further. Go the extra mile.

In his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul was concerned to stop the early Christians in Corinth squabbling and turning into factions among themselves. One of the dividing lines seems to have been about teaching, not about the content, the syllabus, but about who had been the better teacher, who had taught them Christianity better. Was it St Paul or was it his colleague Apollos?

The argument was a more or less tribal one, and you can see echoes of it today where people identify themselves partly by where they went to school. The idea is that you can recognise particular character traits, strengths and weaknesses, partly at least by knowing which school somebody went to. It clearly does make a difference which school you went to. More prime ministers have been to Eton than to any other school.

Church schools are perceived to be, on the whole, good schools, and there’s often competition for places at the local church school. There’s a very funny episode of the TV comedy ‘Rev’, about the trials and tribulations of a young vicar in an inner-city parish, where the majority of the congregation seems to be there only because they want the vicar to sign a letter to the school, a church school, saying that they are regular attenders. Indeed I gather that our Rector still writes letters to the head teachers of the various church schools locally, to confirm that certain parents are regular church-goers.

To some extent, church schools are controversial. The suggestion is that children are being indoctrinated by going to a Christian school, a school which has an avowedly Christian ethos. What if, the argument goes, the child comes from parents who are not Christians, but are, say, Moslems or Hindus? The answer is that there are provisions for parents belonging to another religion to opt out of Christian assembly or RE.

More recently we have seen the creation of academies and free schools: both are types of state school, which are not answerable to the local education authority. In Cobham, a free school has started, and there is competition between that free school and the existing church-based primary schools.

Now the Free School is bidding to expand into becoming a secondary school as well, and there is a big debate about the proposed site of the school off Portsmouth Road, where alongside the school itself a developer wants to build 500 houses – in return for which it will fund the land purchase and the cost of building the new school.

‘I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase.’ What St Paul is saying is that it doesn’t really matter who the teachers were, however excellent they were: the question is, did the lesson take root in the pupils? Did God make that seed grow? Did God make that seed grow? You can have the best teachers, and no doubt the best premises, but you need something more. God must give ‘the increase’.

Of course if we look from a different angle at the support for church schools, you can’t deny that many of the parents, who seek out a church school for their children, are not actually churchgoers themselves. It may be these sort of parents who have been attracted to the new ‘free schools’, which claim to offer good teaching and effective education just like the church schools, but often without any religious affiliation.

I offered the other day to address an assembly at the Cobham Free School, to tell them something about the Foodbank. The teacher whom I spoke to said that, in fact, they don’t have a religious assembly at all. Once a month they do have a gathering which they call ‘worship’, but apparently God is not mentioned there.

I hope they know what they’re doing; because on the face of things it looks as though they are breaking the law, if nothing else. But quite apart from whether or not it’s illegal, is it right, right that children should be brought up in schools which no longer teach them anything about God? The law is very clear that schools must reflect the fact that ‘religious traditions in the country are in the main Christian, while taking account of the teaching and practices of other principal religions’. That’s a quote from a circular from the Dept for Education, number 1/94, which makes it clear that all state schools must have a religious act of worship every day.

Perhaps I misunderstood the teacher from the Free School – in a way I hope it did – but it looks to me on the face of things as though, if they’re not actually breaking the law, they’re certainly not keeping to the spirit of it.

I suppose one could have an argument concerning whether or not schools should offer teaching about religion, along the same lines as the debate about the merits or otherwise of infant baptism.

The dividing line between indoctrination and education may be at times rather fine, but I do think that it is at least arguable that English schoolchildren should get to know a bit about what goes on in their parish church, and in the Church as a whole.

Of course, as they mature, children can then decide to what extent they accept the Gospel message and come to belief in their own right. They would then be making the transition which St Paul refers to between eating spiritual baby food and being weaned off it. My worry is that there are too many children in our community who are not even getting spiritual rusks.

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Satisfaction and Status

By publicsquare
February 17, 2014 //
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Sermon for Evensong on the Third Sunday before Lent, Septuagesima
Ephesians 5:1-17

Today is actually Education Sunday, which is an ecumenical fixture promoted across all the churches in the UK. It is sponsored locally by Churches Together in Cobham, Oxshott and Stoke. This morning I preached a sermon at Mattins about Christian education, and I raised a few queries about what’s going on in our schools today, contrasting the church schools with the newer Free School in Cobham, which appears not to have any religious assemblies.

But this evening I want to come nearer to home and, if you like, to run a bit of a trailer for the study course which I hope as many of you as possible will try out during Lent. This year is one of the years when we will be organising the Lent course ecumenically under Churches Together again, and the groups will be organised on the basis that you will meet people from the other churches in Cobham as well as from St Mary’s.

I know that there is a sign-up sheet at the back of the church, and that Sue Woolley is the point-person whom you need to see if you haven’t signed up yet. There will be sessions during the evening and during the day most days.

What we will be studying is St Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, from which our second lesson this evening came. Ephesians is not a long letter. It has just six chapters and in my Bible it runs over three and a half pages. It is nevertheless what the great Bible scholar C.H. Dodd regarded as ‘the crown of Paulinism’, Paul’s finest letter.

In its six short chapters Ephesians covers just about everything you need to know about Christianity. First, of course, about Jesus’ death and resurrection. Then about grace, about God’s generosity to us and the effect of it on us Christians.

The title of the course is, ‘Be Reconciled’. Reconciliation is a major topic in Ephesians. In the context of the early church, the people who needed to be reconciled were the Jews and the Gentiles – and St Paul was known as the Apostle to the Gentiles. Christianity would never have become the worldwide religion that it is, if it had remained as a Jewish sect.

The letter goes on to look at the wider context of reconciliation, reconciliation with God. Sin is understood as separation from, exclusion from, God’s love.

Other themes include St Paul’s perspective on the church, the body of Christ – not the churches as they are today, in lots of denominations, but as the way, the channel, through which the Holy Spirit works on earth.

I find it really fascinating to read and study anything which tells us about the life of the early church. Sometimes I think one forgets what cataclysmic events Jesus’ life, death and resurrection must have been for the people who were close in history to them. It wasn’t just something that you read about, but you could see the vital consequences, the living controversy.

Religion was very important to the Ephesians. They were people who revered the Greek gods: ‘Great is Diana of the Ephesians’ you will remember they chanted in the story in Acts (Acts 19:28). It was a powerful city with sophisticated people. It’s interesting to see how St Paul and the other early Christians coped with this strong, confident civilisation which believed in different gods.

I think there can be messages for us to learn today. People may not say, ‘Great is Diana of the Ephesians’, but there are other things which seem to be worshipped like pagan gods. There was a staggering letter in yesterday’s FT: the latest instalment in a correspondence which started with somebody saying that, for someone on £200,000 a year, a rise in tax back to 50% would cost about £7 a day, and the letter said, ‘What’s the odd £7 a day more or less, between friends?’ Someone who was that well paid wouldn’t miss it.

Then there were some other letters saying that no one had mentioned the point of paying taxes, that is, to support the community at large; but yesterday there was a letter from a lady in Evercreech, Somerset, whose judgement may of course have been slightly skewed because perhaps she had been flooded, but what she wrote was this.

‘The pursuit of success provides a satisfying goal in itself, resulting in financial rewards if it succeeds making the attendant sacrifices worthwhile. It is therefore galling to have this endeavour viewed by the public as a source of envy and by politicians as an asset to be plundered. Only when success is assured and large amounts of wealth have been amassed do the incentives change. Only a few will follow … [the] noble values of gaining satisfaction from a willingness to contribute to community. In the main, it becomes a game, with the driving motivation to outwit the Inland Revenue … The only way to reverse this trend is to shoot their fox by lowering taxes significantly and moving the goalposts again, in order for recognised philanthropy to become the new order of priority as a source of satisfaction and status.’ (Letter from Miss Sierra Hutton-Wilson in the Financial Times, February 15-16 2014)

I wonder what Jesus would have said about that. There is really nothing about anyone other than the self in what this lady writes. The main objective which she supports is ‘the pursuit of success’. First, become successful (meaning, become rich). Lower taxes will help you to achieve your objective. There is no room for philanthropy until and unless you have achieved your objective. Then, and only then, philanthropy can become ‘a source of satisfaction and status’.

Think about the parable of the Good Samaritan. The Samaritan’s motives were not a desire to feel better (satisfaction) or the be more highly regarded (status). Instead, as we read in St Luke’s gospel (10:33), when he saw the man who had fallen among thieves, ‘he had compassion on him’ – the Greek word literally means, ‘his innards were churned up’ by what he saw. It wasn’t, as somebody once said, only possible for the Samaritan to be generous because he himself was well-off; it was because he cared about the other man, the injured man.

After all, Jesus told the parable to illustrate what it was to be someone’s neighbour. There’s nothing in Jesus’ teaching about ‘satisfaction and status’. But yesterday, the Financial Times could print this letter under the heading ‘Philanthropy – the new status symbol’ without batting an eyelid.

As Christians, we have to be on our guard against these seductive ideas which encourage us to be selfish and not to love our neighbours. The idea that you get wealthy first, and then do some philanthropy not because it helps other people, but because it makes you look good, is superficially pretty attractive, and it has been endorsed by famous people. The person who said that the Good Samaritan had to be rich, before he could have done anything to help the injured man, was – who do you think? It was Margaret Thatcher.

So you wouldn’t be blamed for adopting that selfish theory – only be generous if you are rich enough, and if it makes you look good or feel better. The best people agree with you. That was exactly the challenge that St Paul and the early Christians faced. His letters, including his letter to the Ephesians, set out how he countered these seductive arguments. His arguments are still good value today. To follow self is to cut yourself off from God. Separation from God is what ‘sin’ means. So when Paul says, ‘Be reconciled’, he means, be reconciled with God, be saved. (See Ephesians 2:16.)

This is still so relevant today. Come and study Ephesians this Lent. I guarantee it will be very worthwhile.

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That would be an Ecumenical Matter

By publicsquare
January 19, 2014 //
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Sermon for Mattins on the Third Sunday after Epiphany, 19th January 2014, at St Mary’s
1 Corinthians 1:1-9 – The Week of Prayer for Christian Unity

In Father Ted, whenever anyone asked Father Jack a question he couldn’t answer, he would say, ‘That would be an ecumenical matter’. What is an ecumenical matter, really? It means a question of the organisation, the οικουμένη, meaning the world, the set-up, of the church. We use the term ‘ecumenism’ to cover the whole question of Christian unity.

At four o’clock this afternoon I will be going – as I hope some of you will too – to the Methodist Church in Cedar Road, for the annual service, arranged by Churches Together in Cobham and Oxshott, to mark the beginning of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity.

In our first lesson today St Paul begins his first letter to the church at Corinth, addressing them all as ‘saints’, ‘saints, with all that in every place call upon the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, both theirs and ours.’

‘Both theirs and ours’ – their and our what? The modern translations, for example the New English Bible, say, ‘their Lord as well as ours.’ But the Greek says literally that Paul is writing to those who are called together in Corinth, called to be saints, with all those who call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ in every place, of theirs and of ours.

It perhaps doesn’t make a vast difference, but what it means is that there were different bodies of Christians in different places, even in the earliest days. There was a church at Corinth, and it had some distinctive features.

Well, today I shall go, I shall go back, to the Methodist chapel. I was brought up a Methodist. Both my grandpas and one great-grandpa were Methodist ministers; and indeed I worshipped in the Methodist Church, was a member of the Methodist Church, until 1996. So in some senses, going to the service this afternoon will be like coming home.

But it won’t really be, because the service this afternoon is actually going to be run by another of the churches in Cobham, which uses the Methodist chapel as their base for worship too, and that is Cobham Community Church, which describes itself as a ‘congregation of Bookham Baptist Church’. Although they don’t say so very obviously, they are Baptists.

In Cobham, Oxshott and Stoke D’Abernon there are Anglicans, Catholics, Methodists, Baptists, United Reformeds, Scottish Presbyterians: six different denominations, just in our little group of villages. This Churches Together area includes about 17,000 people, of whom about 4,000 claim to belong to one or other of the churches here.

I expect that, this afternoon, the worship may be strange – well, strange to me: and, dare I say, not something that I will necessarily find very congenial. But I’m certainly ready to be pleasantly surprised. I should say straightway that going to church is not a matter of entertainment; so to some extent it’s not relevant whether I like the worship or not.

A better question might be whether the worship is worthy; whether it is a proper sacrifice of praise: if it is a sacrament, whether it is ‘an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace given unto us’, [The Book of Common Prayer, A Catechism, p.294].

For some reason the first lesson, from 1 Corinthians, set for today in the Lectionary, stops at verse 9, and is just the opening greeting from St Paul’s letter, where he praises the Corinthians, acknowledges them to be saints, and says that they are ‘enriched by the grace of God, so that they come behind in no gift.’ They are not mere runners-up in the the race for gifts.

But if you read on, you immediately get to the passage which is much more commonly used in the context of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity: ‘Now I beseech you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that ye all speak the same thing and that there be no divisions among you, but that ye be perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgement.’ He goes on to say, ‘Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were ye baptised in the name of Paul?’

In other words, Paul started to criticise the fact that even then, the church had factions in it. I’m not sure when a faction becomes a denomination, or indeed, when a faction becomes a schism, but it does seem that, even in the very earliest church, there were differences of opinion about how best to express the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Today, as we have seen, even locally, we have a whole variety of denominations. The denominations stand for different interpretations of the gospel of Christ. Even within the Anglican church, there are a wide variety of shades of opinion about our faith. There are threats of schism, splits in the church, over the question what we should believe about human sexuality, for example.

The African Anglicans, in general, and the North Americans, are diametrically opposed, and we Englishmen try to sit on the fence. And so, each year, we embark on the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. Dare I say that I don’t think that we are approaching this question of Christian unity in quite the straightforward way that St Paul recommends?

He says, ‘I beseech you that ye all speak the same thing, and that ye be perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgement.’ But I have to confess that I don’t have the same mind and the same judgement as my friends in the Catholic Church, or my friends in the Cobham Community Church, or in the United Reformed Church. I probably do have the same ‘mind’ as my friends in the Methodist Church, because by and large they believe the same things that we Anglicans do. John and Charles Wesley were Anglican vicars till they died.

Although even saying that, an amber light goes on in my brain, because we Anglicans have such a wide variety of belief: so it might be better to say that the Methodists and some Anglicans share common ground.

Of course, historically, the two biggest splits in the church were those between the Western and Eastern Orthodox churches first of all, between Constantinople and Rome, and then between the Protestants and the Catholics. Article XIX of the 39 Articles says,

‘The visible church of Christ is a congregation of faithful men, in the which the pure Word of God is preached, and the Sacraments be duly administered according to Christ’s ordinance in all those things that of necessity are requisite to the same.

As the Church of Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Antioch, have erred; so also the Church of Rome hath erred, not only in their living and manner of Ceremonies, but also in matters of Faith.’

So said Archbishop Cranmer in 1542. It’s still officially the belief of the Church of England.

It doesn’t sound like we have followed St Paul’s instructions to the church in Corinth. But I’m bound to say, the question which occurs to me is whether it matters. Never mind, for a minute, the divisions between Christians: think about the divisions between the various religions – or certainly, the so-called religions of the book, that is, Judaism, Islam and Christianity. All of them make claims to be the exclusive way to the true God. ‘No man cometh unto the Father but by me’ [John 14:6].

The problem is that this whole area is of the highest importance. Nothing could be more important than that we correctly understand, and have the right attitude towards, God, the creator and sustainer of everything. That then leads on to the question, ‘What is true, what is truth?’ Clearly there’s room for a lot of disagreement and different understandings.

In 1834, Thomas Arnold, who became the famous headmaster of Rugby School and was at some time the Regius Professor of Modern History in Oxford and a fellow of Oriel College, wrote to the Professor of Moral Philosophy, R.D. Hampden, saying, ‘Your view of the difference between Christian Truth’ – capital C, capital T – ‘and Theological opinion is one which I have long cherished.’ Hampden had said that he made a distinction between religion, or divine revelation on the one hand, and theological opinions on the other, suggesting that Christians were in broad agreement over the first: everyone broadly recognised the basic revelation of God in Jesus Christ, but only human interpretations of divine word caused Christians to differ over the second, over theological opinion of what the gospel meant. [Catto, J., ed., 2013, Oriel College, a History: Oxford, OUP, p.336]

But of course, if you say that every word in the Bible is literally true, then there are all sorts of difficulties. You may have to believe that the world was created in 4004 BC, and that Methuselah was over 900 years old, for example. Blood-curdling consequences arise if you follow literally the prescriptions in Leviticus and Deuteronomy. A rebellious child can be stoned to death (Deuteronomy 21:18): men can be polygamous. Abraham, Jacob, David and Solomon all had several wives: slavery is acceptable (Lev. 25:44-45).

So there is in the Church of England a helpful compromise, according to which our understanding of Christian truth in the Bible can be informed by reason and tradition. But, however reasonable that sounds, not all Christians would agree.

So these days, we tend not to be so exercised about the divisions of the church. The ecumenical movement, things like the World Council of Churches, which had a general assembly recently in South Korea, doesn’t worry so much about trying to merge the various denominations together, but rather there is an understanding that all of us ‘live in more than one place at once’ as Canon John Nurser, of the ecumenical group Christianity and the Future of Europe, put it recently. [John Nurser, book review, ‘Christian unity reconsidered’, in Church Times, 17th January 2014, p. 23].

Ecumenism now works in trying to reconcile the churches, not only one with another, but also with the challenges outside. So the World Council of Churches was united in its resistance to apartheid in South Africa and the oppression of poor people in Latin America. More recently, the World Council has become concerned with reconciling lifestyles in the West with the sustainability of creation. We can all agree that we must respect God’s creation: but we may not agree on the details of how we go around it, because we are ‘differently situated’. [Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women]

It’s easy to talk about drawing a distinction between divine revelation and theological opinion; but ultimately everything comes to us the lens of our human experience. We are all different; we all have different experience. Therefore even our understanding of religious truth is likely to be different.

Actually, St Paul’s advice to the church in Corinth may be capable of a rather more mundane explanation, namely, that he thought that they had forgotten that the Gospel came from Jesus Christ, from God, and not from Paul and Apollos, or the various other preachers. Remember, said St Paul: the preachers were preaching the Gospel of Jesus; they weren’t themselves divine.

Thomas Arnold’s distinction between Christian Truth and theological opinion may not be a final answer, but I think that it is still quite a useful way for us to look at our friends in the other churches. There is a core of belief which Christians all share. But the theological interpretation of that belief, of course, goes in all sorts of different ways. We should, I suggest, not try to change each other, but simply respect each other’s differences. After all, those of us, who have experienced mergers at work, know that mergers and takeovers are very rarely an unmixed blessing.

I do hope that you will join me this afternoon at 4 o’clock. We will join with our fellow Christians from Cobham, Stoke and Oxshott, to worship God together. It will be different from what we are used to. But that’s all right.

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Famines and Pestilence

By publicsquare
November 17, 2013 //
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Sermon for Mattins at St Mary’s on the Second Sunday before Advent, 17th November 2013
2 Thessalonians 3:6-13; Luke 21:5-19 – Famines and Pestilences

‘Then he said unto them, Nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and great earthquakes shall be in divers places, and famines, and pestilences; and fearful sights and great signs shall there be from heaven.’ [Luke 21]

It might make sense for me to preach about this picture of the end of the world which Jesus paints for the disciples. You might think that I would go on to talk about the damage which Hurricane Haiyan has done in the Philippines, and all the other various natural disasters which suddenly seem to be happening. Is it a sign that the world is coming to an end, perhaps as a result of man’s careless use of the earth’s resources, so producing global warming?

I don’t think that I can be that definite. I think there’s a very high probability that, whatever I might try to say in relation to whether or not Jesus’ words here in St Luke’s Gospel actually do refer to disasters such as the one which has struck the Philippines, I think there’s a very high likelihood that I will turn out to be wrong. We are indeed horrified by what has happened in the Philippines, but it seems to me that Jesus’ message in relation to it is not that this is in some way evidence of the end of the world coming about, but rather that we must treat the people affected with as much compassion as we can muster, both through our governments and as individuals.

Both here in St Mary’s and at St Andrew’s today, there are collections for the Disasters Emergency Committee, and I do hope that you will give generously. There is a basket at the back as you go out.

But honestly, I don’t think there’s very much which I can usefully say about the end of the world, at least based on this passage in St Luke’s Gospel. From the earliest times, Christians thought that the end of the world was just round the corner. St Paul himself even counselled against getting married, in his First Letter to the Corinthians (7:8), if people could possibly avoid it, because everything was about to come to an end. But it didn’t, and it hasn’t. We still have a working planet, which sustains more and more people all the time, and which provides enough riches to feed everyone, even today, if only food were fairly distributed.

No, what I’m interested in this morning are indeed some of St Paul’s words, in his Second Letter to the Thessalonians, which was our first lesson. ‘For even when we were with you, this we commanded you, that if any would not work, neither should he eat.’ If you don’t work, you don’t eat. Is St Paul saying something here which is relevant today in the context of the Welfare State? I hope you won’t groan inwardly, but I am going to say a few words about our new Cobham Area Foodbank.

The Foodbank will indeed, in some instances, feed people who are not working. As a matter of trite reality, people who are out of work may well not have enough money with which to buy food, as well as paying for rent, heat and all the other incidentals of life, on the £150-odd a week, or £600 a month, that unemployment benefit provides.

I am one of the team who have come together under the auspices of Churches Together to create a food bank in this area. Although it is now an independent charity in its own right, Cobham Area Foodbank was created by the local churches. It is affiliated to the network created by an organisation callee the Trussell Trust, which is a Christian foundation in Salisbury, which has been setting up food banks for the last 15 years.

In the last three years, there has been a vast increase in the number of food banks which are operating. There are over 400 food banks in the UK today. In the year from April 2012, 370,000 people in the UK came to food banks for food, which was 170% increase on the previous year.

Since then, since April this year so far, 355,000 people have come to food banks, including 40-odd thousand who have been fed in the prosperous south-east. In other words, the numbers needing to turn to a food bank have doubled again. We don’t expect that Cobham is going to be any different. The Oasis Childcare Trust is already, among its other good works, providing a hot meal once a week for fifteen families, and they tell us that in fact they could do this for double that number if they had the resources.

In the area behind the fire station in Cobham there is very high unemployment among the 18-30 year olds. I recall that the Envisage project found levels of unemployment around 25%. In our area there is a huge gap between those who are well-off, who are on the whole very well-off, and those who are not, who are in some cases destitute. We are in the Borough of Elmbridge, which, on some criteria, is supposed to be the second richest borough in the country, after Kensington and Chelsea.

Cobham Area Foodbank will be the third food bank in the Borough of Elmbridge, when it opens on 13th December. Instead of relying on St Paul’s rather fierce statement to the Thessalonians – which I think was really aimed at those in the church community, perhaps in particular the ministry team – I would prefer that we looked for our Bible text in relation to people who have to use the Foodbank in the sentences which precede the offertory in the 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?’ (From the first letter of John, chapter 3.)

The fact is that there are needy people, even here in Cobham and Stoke D’Abernon, for whom there is now often a choice between paying the rent and having something to eat. The Foodbank network has established that, in Britain today, there are 13m people who are living below the official poverty line. The reasons why people have used a food bank – which are known, because everyone who gets food from a food bank has to provide some information – included the following:

Delay in paying benefits – 30% of the people;
Low income – by itself, just not earning enough to be able to afford to live – nearly 20%;
Changes in the benefit system – 11.5%;
Getting into debt – 9%;
Unemployment is actually only 5.5%.
Being homeless – just under 5%;
Being refused a crisis loan – 3.5%;
Domestic violence – 2.7%.
Sickness – 2.2%. How come somebody who is ill does not have enough to eat?
Delayed wages; wages paid late – just under 1%.

Note how low the figure is for unemployment. Even if we accepted what St Paul said, in fact there are very few people coming to the food banks and asking for food, because they are unemployed.

The system is tough. The food bank system set up by the Trussell Trust, which we will operate, is designed to provide emergency relief only, for three days at a time. The food provided will be non-perishables, effectively the sort of thing which we give at Harvest Festival time. In Cobham we are very fortunate in that Sainsbury’s Local on the High Street have agreed to provide bread, which will be freely available to the clients of the Foodbank.

But basically the system is designed to provide only three food parcels to last three days at a time in any period of six months. It is not designed to provide long-term sustenance, because the Welfare State is supposed to provide a safety net. We will know whether that is still true once we start operations in the middle of December.

However, I can tell you that, here at St Mary’s, you have been the most pro-active of all the congregations in Churches Together locally, because you have already started to collect food, and indeed Arnie Gabbott, who is your representative on the Foodbank organising team, has provided, at the back by the font, the prototype of a very smart green bin, which will be in all the churches soon, for people to put their food contributions in.

From this week, food will be collected each week by the Foodbank van and taken to a warehouse on the outskirts of Leatherhead: please do keep on putting food in the church bin here.

People must obtain a voucher in order to get food for the Foodbank. They can’t just turn up and demand food. Vouchers will be available from the Citizens’ Advice Bureau, from Oasis Childcare, from the Cobham Children’s Centre, from the schools in the area, from the doctors’ surgeries, from all the ministers in the churches and from the social services and housing benefit offices – and, we hope, from the Jobcentre.

The Foodbank will open initially once a week, on Fridays, at Friday lunchtime, and we aim to extend to a second day of opening, probably on a Monday, once everything is working. The recent meeting which we had for volunteers who want to work in the Foodbank brought in over 50 people, and there has been wonderful generosity shown in giving money for the launch and sustaining of the Foodbank operation. So I am confident that we will be able to provide an effective service.

But it will need continuing support. As well as giving out food, there will be members of the team at the distribution centre – which will be at the Methodist Church in Cedar Rd – who will be trained to listen to the clients carefully and sympathetically, and then to provide ‘signposts’ to possible ways to make their situation better. And last, in the Foodbank there will always be somebody who will be willing to pray with a client who felt that they needed to bring their situation to God in prayer.

I know when you read the newspaper today, you very often read that if people are poor, it is because they are in some way feckless. But I have to say that, the nearer we get to the sharp end, trying to alleviate poverty on our doorstep, the less I believe in that. The churches nationally have done research into the causes of poverty today, and found that less than 2% of people are out of work for more than a year. It is natural for people to want to work, and they do. The problem is that there are too many jobs which pay the minimum wage, or possibly even less – which is the situation with so-called zero-hours contracts, where somebody is contracted to work for a particular employer – can’t work for anybody else – but that employer does not commit to give him a set number of hours of work – and they are paid by the hour. So they could be unable to claim benefit (because they are employed), but not earning any money.

The people of the Philippines, and the poor people of Cobham, both need your prayers – and your gifts. Please be generous.

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We are here, because they are not here

By publicsquare
November 3, 2013 //
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Sermon for the Time to Remember Service at St Andrew’s, 3rd November 2013
Revelation 21:1-6

We are here, because they are not here. In a few minutes we will read out their names, the names of our loved ones, which we have written down, and whom we will remember together, here in God’s house. We will make an act of remembrance by lighting candles in their memory.

We will remember our mothers, our fathers, our wives, our husbands, our sons and daughters; our friends. They are not here. It makes us sad to think of all those people who have died, all those whose company we have lost.

Some of those who have died have left us after a full life, when perhaps they themselves would even have said that they were ready. You will remember Jesus’ saying, that in his Father’s house there are many rooms, many ‘mansions’. Some people, when they reach the end of their lives, are quite happy, quite happy to pass from one room to the next. My late father-in-law surprised many of his friends, days before he died, by ringing them up, and announcing that, as he wasn’t going to be around much longer, he wanted to say goodbye properly. He was quite relaxed about his future. He was truly blessed.

But some people are taken from us too soon, before they are ready and before we are ready. It is a great challenge to us to understand it, when people die suddenly or accidentally or unexpectedly. We are struck with the unfairness of it. We protest. We ‘rail against heaven’. Why them? Why should we lose the ones we love? There is no easy answer.

At the heart of the Christian gospel is Jesus’ promise of eternal life. We believe that Christ Jesus was raised from the dead. In the Bible, Jesus assures us that there will be a resurrection for everyone; there will be eternal life.

You will remember that wonderful aria in Handel’s Messiah: ‘The trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised, incorruptible’. How it works, is surely a mystery. But we have the assurance that it will happen, because of the good news that it happened to Jesus himself.

When Jesus said, ‘In my Father’s house are many rooms,’ [John 14:1-6], he said that those rooms are for everyone who follows Him. So whenever one of our loved ones is taken from us, Jesus says that there will be room for them in God’s house.

How it works, St Paul explains in his first letter to the Corinthians, where he reminds us that we all have a body and a soul. Two separate things. Although the body may die, may perish, the soul does not. This is what St Paul says. ‘There are heavenly bodies and earthly bodies; and the splendour of the heavenly bodies is one thing, the splendour of the earthly, another. The sun has a splendour of its own, the moon another splendour, and the stars another, for star differs from star in brightness. So it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown in the earth as a perishable thing is raised imperishable. Sown in humiliation, it is raised in glory; sown in weakness, it is raised in power; sown as an animal body, it is raised as a spiritual body.’ [1 Cor. 15:40f, NEB]

There is now scientific work which bears out the possibility of the life after death. There is a well-known book, ‘Proof of Heaven’, by Dr Eben Alexander, who is a neurosurgeon, and that book, together with the work of other scientists who have analysed near-death experiences, strongly supports the conclusion that there is a life after death.

Now other leading academics, such as Prof. Richard Swinburne in Oxford, have examined the latest neuroscience findings on the way in which our brains work, how they control our movements, and have concluded that the only way to explain how our bodies are actually controlled involves the existence of something separate from our bodies, something which corresponds which our idea of a mind or a soul. There is no reason, as Prof. Swinburne says, that that soul should not survive the death of the body. [Swinburne, R., 2013, Mind, Brain & Free Will, Oxford, OUP]

Or, you can be simply blessed with faith, as the saints were blessed according to the letter to the Hebrews; in chapter 11, there is a wonderful catalogue of faith shown by the leaders of the Israelites all through the Old Testament. Hebrews says, ‘Since we are ‘surrounded by … so great a cloud of witnesses, … let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us.’ A great cloud of witnesses.

If we have run that race, as we heard in our lesson from the Book of Revelation, the vision is that there will be a new heaven and as new earth, ‘where God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more.’

We are here because they are not here. But the Gospel message is that that separation, that loneliness, will not last for ever. So in our act of remembrance, we need not be without hope. We can have the Gospel hope, the ‘sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life.’ [The Book of Common Prayer: At the Burial of the Dead]

Of course we do feel sadness. We do feel the pain of loss, the pain of separation. But we can also feel joy. We can rejoice in hope, in the Christian hope of eternal life, that we will not be separated for ever.

Sometimes when I look at old family pictures I do feel rather sad. But then, I look again at those pictures, and remember the happy times, the achievements we celebrated, the love. It was real. It is real. It is still good.

So therefore, in our memories we can feel happiness as well as pain. We can celebrate as much as we regret. We can understand that it is not enough, simply to say that we are here because they are not. ‘Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?’ We are here because we remember them. Let us remember them with joy.

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Comfortable Words

By publicsquare
September 16, 2013 //
1

Sermon for Mattins on the 16th Sunday after Trinity, 15th September 2013
1 Timothy 1:12-17

‘Hear what comfortable words our Saviour Christ saith unto all who truly turn to him: …
This is a true saying, and worthy of all men to be received, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.’

I’m sure the passage in the Holy Communion service in the Prayer Book (p. 252), called the ‘Comfortable Words,’ is very familiar. In it come these words, which I want to look at this morning, and which were in our first lesson. For completeness, I ought to remind you of the words which come immediately after these Comfortable Words in the Bible, namely, ‘… sinners, of whom I am the foremost’, literally in the Greek, ‘of whom I am the first’ – number one. So all together, the quotation, in the NRSV translation, is, ‘The saying is sure and worthy of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost’.

Scholars have said that this letter to Timothy, St Paul’s constant companion, isn’t really by St Paul, but is a letter in the style of St Paul, ‘pseudonymous’, written by an early church leader. Anyway, most of it is consistent with things that St Paul clearly did write in his other letters. But what do these ‘comfortable words’ really mean?

They’re deceptively simple. They describe the work that Jesus came among mankind to do. Not what He was, but what He did. The objective, the purpose, for Jesus coming among us. To save sinners. Among whom, the writer of the letter in the guise of St Paul claimed to be No 1, the No 1 sinner. That means that, if St Paul, or someone who writes in the guise of St Paul, says he’s in it up to his neck, so are all of us.

We need to understand first what a ‘sinner’ is. Is it just a bad person? It is not just badness, but knowing that it is against God. The writer says that although he was ‘a blasphemer, a persecutor and a man of violence’, he ‘received mercy because [he] acted ignorantly in unbelief.’ He didn’t know. But if you know you are doing wrong, and still do it, that is sinful. Remember St Paul wrestling with this in Romans chapter 7: ‘For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing that I hate. … But in fact it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me.’ (Romans 7:15,17)

So St Paul suggests that someone who doesn’t know what they are doing, who has no conscience about it, may be doing wrong, but it isn’t sinful. Sin is a crime against God. Idolatry – ranking something other than God higher than God – is perhaps the quintessential sin. Just saying that makes us realise that this is still very relevant today. We can all think of instances where it has been more important, we thought, to do something, something where God didn’t come into it, rather than to take time for God or to follow His commandments. We are still prone to worshipping idols.

To put it another way, sin is something which pushes us away from God, which separates us from Him. What utter bleakness, if there is in fact nothing higher, nothing greater, no ultimate heart of Being; if life is nasty, brutish and short, and there is no purpose in it.

But we are told that Jesus came amongst us to ‘save sinners’. How did He do it? What is this ‘saving’ process? How does it work? (Unfortunately, we might be tempted to ask if it works at all, seeing that dreadful things, sins surely, are still all around us.) Is it true that ‘Love’s redeeming work is done’, as we sing in Charles Wesley’s great hymn?

In simpler times perhaps, people might have been content, might indeed have been ‘comforted’, by the thought that somehow Jesus had ‘paid a ransom for our souls’, that by his death on the cross He had paid a price of our sins – a ‘full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction, for the sins of the whole world’, as the Prayer Book puts it.

But I would hope that we couldn’t really believe in a God who, on the one hand, is a loving creator, but on the other, must countenance human sacrifice if His terrible vengeance is to be bought off. But Jesus’ work isn’t some kind of a ‘transaction’, some crude and brutal trade-off. Even back in the time of Abraham, God would not let Abraham sacrifice his son Isaac to him. (Genesis 22)

Nevertheless there is an element of costliness, of sacrifice, in what Jesus did. ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends’ (John 15:13, AV). This is still the greatest love.

There is a calendar of ‘holy days’ which the church celebrates. Various saints and holy people are commemorated throughout the year. A few weeks ago, on 14th August, our church remembered, commemorated, a modern saint, Father Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish Franciscan monk who was in Auschwitz. At morning prayers on 14th August every year we listen to his story.

It was believed, wrongly, as it turned out, that someone had escaped from the part of the prison, Auschwitz, where Father Maximilian was held. The SS seized ten men at random to be executed, horribly, by starvation, as a deterrent to others who might try to escape. Father Maximilian asked to take the place of one of them, so that that man might see his wife and children again. He gave his life in that man’s place. It is a very terrible and moving story.

That story, I think, gives us a better understanding of how Jesus ‘saves’ sinners. It wasn’t just a question of Father Maximilian making the ultimate sacrifice or being inspired by Jesus’ willingness to die on the cross, not just a question of his trying to follow Jesus’ faithfulness, wrestling with temptation in the garden of Gethsemane: ‘Father, … take this cup away from me’, but eventually accepting the Father’s will.

If that was how salvation works, by inspiring us to follow Jesus so closely that we never sin again, not many of us would make it, not many of us would qualify. Just as St Paul pointed out in Romans, we are sinful. We can’t help it. Jesus’s death on the cross hasn’t put an end to our still being challenged by sin. So salvation doesn’t just work by inspiring us not to be sinful any more – although again, there’s an element of truth. What Jesus did does inspire us – and it may well make us better people. But that in itself wouldn’t justify saying that He ‘saved’ us.

By his supreme expression of love, Father Maximilian triumphed over the evil of Auschwitz. He has never been forgotten. Even the guards were astonished at what he was willing to suffer. The reaction of the SS guards was very reminiscent of what the Roman centurion said at the foot of the cross. The Holy Spirit was definitely at work, in 1941, in Maximilian Kolbe. It wasn’t annihilation. It was a victory. Father Maximilian Kolbe won a victory.

Jesus won a victory. Not a blood sacrifice. Not just a wonderful example – but something extra, over and beyond sacrificial love and inspiration. It was a triumph – Christ the Victor. Christ had conquered death. In so doing, Christ revealed the power of God at work. That revelation is that God cares for us, even though we may be cut off from Him – or though we may cut ourselves off: even though we may be sinners.

The idea is that we are like the lost sheep, the lost coin or the prodigal son. The prodigal son acknowledged that he had messed up, he had missed the mark in life – and ‘missing the mark’ is the literal meaning of the word we translate as ‘sinning’. But his father welcomed him back, no questions asked. The fatted calf – if it had happened today, that would be roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, using Kobe beef – was his father’s free gift, his ‘grace’, in religious language. He sinned: he repented: he was welcomed home.

This still works. Maximilian Kolbe proved it in 1941, and I’m sure that, if we only knew about them, there are lots of saints at work today, also making colossal sacrifices, sustained to do it by their faith.

You might still think that all this talk of ‘sinners’ doesn’t mean you. But let me remind you of one of the ‘sentences of scripture’ which I read before the service: it’s from the first letter of St John, chapter 1:

If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us; but if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

So reflect on these comfortable words in the week ahead. They still mean something significant, they still offer real comfort, even for you.

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