St Stephen | hughdbryant

Sermon for Evensong at All Saints, Penarth, on the 6th Sunday after Trinity, 16th July 2023

2 Samuel 7:18-29

Luke 19:41 – 20:8

See https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=556283310

When I was little, my folks, especially my Dad, were very fond of a TV show which I think went out on Sunday nights, called the Dave Allen Show. It featured an Irish comedian called Dave Allen. I remember the way the shows always ended. Dave Allen would be sitting on top of a high stool, nursing a glass of Irish whiskey and, somewhat improbably, smoking a cigarette. He would say some warm words of farewell to his audience, and as the applause died down, he would sign off with the same greeting every week: – “May your God go with you”.

I’ve always found that rather intriguing. It seemed to me that Dave Allen had this picture of everyone having their own private God in their pocket, almost like some kind of super talisman or a piece of ‘Kryptonite’, if you prefer a Superman analogy. Maybe he just wanted to acknowledge the fact that, in his audience of millions, there would be people who had many different beliefs, followed different religions – which is perhaps another way of saying that they followed different gods.

And certainly, when we look at the story of King David making his prayer to God, after he had asked the prophet Nathan to consult God about whether he should make a house for God, now that he himself as a king had a nice house made of cedar wood, in that context, in those days, it looks as though when David was thanking him, for all that he had done for him and the people of Israel, that he was their God, and not a god for anyone else. Indeed it did look as though your religious belief then was all about finding a god who was stronger than your enemy’s god or even your neighbour’s god.

The people of Israel had come in to the promised land out of Egypt; and they had quite a lot of fighting to do against the indigenous people whom they displaced. I don’t want to get involved in discussing Zionism on this occasion, but I did want to point out that people have seemed to have understood what it is to be a God, or to be God, in a fairly local, parochial, sort of way. So they worshipped the one true God partly, we could say, in a Dave Allen sort of way. He was their God, and it was the foundation of their success, or at least of the survival of Israel.

The prophet Nathan told King David that he had consulted God and God did not want David to make a house for him, but David did bring the Ark, the Ark of the Covenant, to Jerusalem, to his capital city, so there was a sense in which God was local; the Israelites’ God, supporting them against the other people and their gods. But God told Nathan that up to that time he had never lived in a house, but rather had lived in a tent or a tabernacle.

There was a sense in which God and the king were tied up with each other. God wasn’t based anywhere, but He was with the king. It’s a very persistent idea, the idea of the divine right of kings, even in our history. So by having the Ark of the Covenant in his capital, David, in one sense, had God behind him, or possibly, in the Dave Allen sense, somewhere even closer.

But we might feel that’s not quite right, I think. Because surely God is much bigger than that. If he is all powerful, all knowing, the creator – and he may not be ‘he’ or just ‘he’ alone; for instance he could be he, she, they – or all of them. And indeed when David makes his prayer – which was our Old Testament lesson – you can see that he understands how much bigger God is than anything else.

‘Therefore you are great, O Lord God; for there is no one like you, and there is no God besides you, according to all that we have heard with our ears’.

But at the same time David also thinks that God is in his pocket too:

‘Who is like your people, like Israel? Is there another nation on earth whose God went to redeem it as a people, and to make a name for himself, doing great and awesome things for them, by driving out before his people nations and their gods?’

My God is mightier than you other people’s gods.

Then along came Solomon and built the first temple. So although God had told Nathan that he didn’t need a house, nevertheless eventually he got one. That temple lasted 400-odd years from 957BC till 587 when the Israelites were captured by the Babylonians and taken into exile. ‘By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept.’ And the temple was destroyed. Fortunately, 70-odd years later, Cyrus, the Persian king, liberated them from the Babylonians and let them go back and rebuild the temple. It was finished in 515BC. It was God’s house, the place where the Ark of the Covenant was kept; where worship took place and sacrifices were made.

We come back to it 500 years later, when we read in our New Testament lesson from Saint Luke’s gospel, which is a passage taken just after the Palm Sunday story, and Jesus prophesies the overthrow and destruction of Jerusalem. He went on to throw out the moneychangers and people doing business of one kind or another within the bounds of the temple. “My house shall be a house of prayer; but you have made it a den of robbers”. It was an accurate prophecy because the Romans destroyed the temple in 70AD.

The beginning and end of the story of the Temple, the House of God, and the two different ways of thinking of God, living in a house or being over all houses, not confined, were mentioned in one of the first great Christian sermons, when St Stephen went through the history of the people of Israel and their God in the Book of Acts chapter 7. He said,

‘Yet the Most High does not dwell in houses made by human hands; as the prophet says,
“Heaven is my throne,
and the earth is my footstool.
What kind of house will you build for me, says the Lord,
or what is the place of my rest?

Did not my hand make all these things?”’

He’s quoting Nathan, from our Old Testament lesson.

So where does God live? Is he defined by time and place? Today I don’t think we worry much about asking that question. It seems pretty obvious to us, I think, that the divine can’t be limited in time and space. By definition, someone who is all powerful, all knowing, eternal. But still, I don’t know whether we spend enough time – or any time really – thinking about who it is that we are praying to. Is it God who lives in a house, or is it that God who is characterised by those ‘omni’ words; omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent?

I don’t think people will necessarily fight you, these days, about whether God is a partisan God – whether our God is stronger than your God – as opposed to tackling you about whether he exists at all. If that happens, if you encounter Richard Dawkins, or one of his acolytes in the new atheists, then it might be tempting to say that your belief is divinely sanctioned; you, as a Christian, sense His real presence.

But how do you know? How do you know it’s God? It’s the question Jesus was asked. ‘Tell us by what authority you are doing these things. Who is it who gave you this authority?’ Jesus gave quite a tricky answer.

But we wouldn’t hesitate, surely, knowing what we do. We would say he got his authority from heaven. Then the question is the question Jesus asked. If you think that I get all this stuff from heaven, why don’t you take any notice?

Fortunately that’s not where we came in. Instead we are back with Dave Allen. Where is our God? Does our God go with us? I pray – I believe – that He does. The Lord is here. His Spirit is with us. Everywhere.

Sermon for All Saints, Sunday 1st November 2015
Rev. 21:1-6, John 11:32-44

Why do you come to church? I’m sorry; I’ll put it a bit less abruptly. Why does one come? I used to know a lovely old lady, Mrs Ryder, who said, ‘I go to church to think about dead people.’ To some extent, I think that’s how I came in, too. What does happen when we die? What is heaven like? ‘Behold, I make all things new. … A new heaven – and a new earth’. Is that where Mrs Ryder’s people have gone?

And then there’s Lazarus. Too much detail: his corpse was beginning to go off, to get smelly. He hadn’t gone anywhere, apparently. Then out he came, blinking, into the light. Not smelly.

In a way, those two pieces encapsulate where I came in; where I started to think about things outside the realm of what I could see and feel and touch. How I started the the process in which I eventually came into being a Christian.

‘Am I going to die?’ I asked my mother one day when I was a boy. ‘No’, she said. Well, not imminently, anyway, she might have added. But even so, I had started to think about it.

Actually, it’s tomorrow that we really think about dead people – All Souls, the Commemoration of the Faithful Departed, will be our service at 10.30 tomorrow morning. Today we are doing what Christians have done at least from the third century, and that is to celebrate the special people who have been, from the earliest time, witnesses to Jesus’ mission, the saints. I Sancti, the holy ones, set apart from ordinary people. St Paul mentions ‘saints’ thirty times in his letters. We may think of them as being somehow almost superhuman, but St Paul simply used that name for the ordinary members of the church.

But clearly in many instances the term ‘saint’ does describe someone very special. In the Roman Catholic Church saints are priests, in the sense that they pray for us, they intercede for us with God. ‘Sancta Maria – ora pro nobis’: holy Mary, saintly Mary – pray for us. So in Catholicism the idea grew up that you pray to God through a saint, you ‘invoked’ that saint.

This was all part of the system of purgatory and indulgences which Martin Luther opposed. Thomas Cranmer, following Luther, wrote in our 39 Articles of Religion, Article XXII, ‘The Romish Doctrine concerning Purgatory, Pardons, Worshipping, and Adoration, as well of Images as of Reliques, and also invocation of Saints, is it fond thing vainly invented, and grounded upon no warranty of Scripture, but rather repugnant to the Word of God.’According to the Reformers, invocation of saints, praying through the saints, has no scriptural basis – you can come to God direct: you don’t need a priest to intercede for you. There is a ‘priesthood of all believers.’

Just like a lot of the controversies from the Reformation, the antithesis between the Catholic idea of the saints as being people whom we can call upon to intercede for us with God, and the Reformation idea of the Priesthood of all Believers, is a question which we don’t now look at in such a black-and-white way. We do say prayers by ourselves; we do dare to speak directly to God, wherever we might be: but we also come to church and have the minister say prayers for us.

In the Apostles’ Creed in the Prayer Book (the one we say at Mattins or Evensong), we say,
‘I believe in the Holy Ghost, the holy Catholic Church, the Communion of Saints, the Forgiveness of sins, the Resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.’ The Communion of Saints is right up there with all the other really important parts of our faith.

Today we pray in the Collect, “O Almighty God, who hast knit together thine elect in one communion and fellowship, in the mystical body of thy son Christ our Lord…” Being in ‘Communion with the Saints’ means being in the same body with them, in the church down the ages. There is something very powerful about that. All those wonderful men and women, beginning with the apostles and the earliest Christians – Peter and James and John, the Twelve, then Paul, then Dorcas and Phoebe; then the early martyrs, St Stephen and all those who were eaten by lions in the arena: and then all the great figures in the church down the ages.

Martin Luther, certainly: Thomas Cranmer: but also St Francis Xavier, and Pope John XXIII. John Wesley and John Henry Newman. Dietrich Bonhöffer. This is the ‘great cloud of witnesses’ that we read about in the Letter to the Hebrews.

These saints were willing to sacrifice everything for their faith. Read the list of faith heroes in Hebrews 11. It might be rather daunting. How could we match up to some of the things they did? But at least we don’t have to face being thrown to the lions.

Whom would you think of as a saint today? This is where we can recognise the force of St Paul’s idea that everyone in the churches was, is, a saint. I’m sure it’s still true. Just look around you, and think how nice we are – think how we have cared for each other and for those in need. In a real sense everyone in the congregation is a saint.

It doesn’t mean that we have to be perfect in order to qualify to be saints. St Paul, when he wrote to the ‘saints’ at Corinth, or in Ephesus, or in Colossae, or even in Rome, wasn’t writing to eulogise their virtues: instead the purpose of his letters was often to correct their errors and put them back on the track of the true faith. Saints are normal people with normal faults and weaknesses. People like us can be saints.

So what is it that calls us, still calls us, to be people apart, holy people – (because that is what Άγιος , Sanctus, sacred, saintly, means)? This is where poor old Lazarus comes in. We are ‘members of one another in Christ, members of a company of saints, whose mutual belonging transcends death’. Jesus conquered death. He raised Lazarus from the dead, and He himself rose resurrected in glory. This is our faith.

This faith is the mark of a saint. A saint – a saint like us – has the sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life.

‘Behold, I make all things new’. That includes us. Us saints.

God in your Pocket

Saints