Archives for posts with tag: Thought for the Day

Hodge and the Nasty Bishop

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

2 Corinthians 4.1-6

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

Matthew 9.9-13

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hugh Bryant

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The Theology of Baked Beans and Sausages

By hughdbryant
March 7, 2020 //
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Sermon for Evening Prayer on Saturday 7th March 2020 for the Prayer Book Society Guildford Branch, at the Founder’s Chapel, Charterhouse

Jeremiah 7:1-20; John 6:27-40 (see http://bible.oremus.org/?ql=450504242)

And Jesus said unto them, I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on me shall never thirst.

I want to speak to you not just about the bread of life, but also about baked beans and sausages. At the same time we can’t ignore that it is the end of the first week in Lent.

The baked beans and sausage, you might be a bit surprised to hear, bring into consideration two theologians, one ancient and one modern, and the bread and the Lent give us a topical Christian context for that food, which is, fasting.

And I suppose that the other ingredient which I need to work in is some reference to our beloved Book of Common Prayer, and the theological developments which Cranmer was influenced by in writing it.

The first thing to reassure you about is that there is no command to fast in the Gospels – except that Jesus said that he did not come to abolish the Law of Moses, but to fulfil it. So the days laid down for fasting in Leviticus, for example on the Day of Atonement, mean that it’s not strictly true that there’s no Biblical justification for fasting.

As you will know, the Reformation, which greatly influenced Cranmer, was led certainly by Martin Luther in Germany but also by Zwingli and Calvin in Switzerland.

Diarmaid MacCulloch has written, ‘It was a sausage that proved to be the rallying-cry for the Swiss Reformation.’ A Zurich printer, Christoph Froschauer, with Zwingli and 12 of his followers in Zurich sat down on the first Sunday in Lent in 1522 and ate two large sausages. Zwingli followed up by preaching a sermon in which he argued that it was unnecessary to follow the church’s traditional teaching about not eating meat during Lent. It was a human command introduced by the Church, which might or might not be observed, but which ‘obscured the real laws of God in the Gospel if it was made compulsory’. [MacCulloch, D., 2003, Reformation, London, Allen Lane, p139]. Cranmer and Zwingli are supposed to have met, and the Swiss reformer is thought to have influenced the English archbishop.

So that’s the sausage. In the Reformation context, according to Zwingli, fasting is not divinely ordained. It’s up to you.

Not but what by the time of the Second Book of Homilies, published in the Church of England in Queen Elizabeth’s time, in 1563, whose author was Bishop Jewel, there was a published sermon – a Homily – called ‘Of Fasting’, Homily number 16. The Homilies were intended for the use of vicars who were not good at preaching, so they didn’t make any theological mistakes. We tend to think of a ‘homily’ as a short sermon – the sort that the vicar doesn’t get into the pulpit to deliver, but perhaps hovers invisibly on the chancel steps for; something like Thought for the Day in size and weight. Not so in 1563! ‘An Homily of Good Works and of Fasting’ is in two parts, the first being about fasting, and in the modern edition which I have, it occupies 8 ½ pages of very dense small type!

Some of the early Christian Fathers such as Irenaeus or Chrysostom or Tertullian or Gregory the Great all debated how long a fast should go on for. The possibilities included one day, as on the Jewish Day of Atonement, or 40 hours, mirroring Jesus’ 40 days in the wilderness, or indeed 40 days of fasting.

The ‘Annotated Book of Common Prayer’, edited by the Revd John Henry Blunt, published in 1872, which I’m very fortunate to have a copy of, says this.

‘The general mode of fasting seems to have been to abstain from food until after 6 o’clock in the afternoon and even then not to partake of animal food or wine. Yet it may be doubted whether such a mode of life could have been continued day after day for six weeks by those whose duties called upon them for much physical exertion… and although it may seem at first that men ought to be able to fast in the 19th century as strictly as they did in the 16th, the 12th, or the third, yet it should be remembered that the continuous labour of life was unknown to the great majority of persons in ancient days, as it is at the present time in the eastern church and in southern Europe; and that the quantity and quality of the food which now forms a full meal is only equivalent to what would have been an extremely spare one until comparatively modern days.’

The Victorians were too busy safely to fast, and their meals were cuisine minceur by comparison with the groaning boards enjoyed in olden times. Think of what we know of Henry VIII’s diet, or Sir John Falstaff’s. Having a rest from eating was probably very good for them, and there was no risk of starving. Come the industrial revolution, however, and meat and two veg in the works canteen was all you might have. If you gave that up, ‘night starvation’, as the Horlicks advert used to warn, was a real possibility unless you had some nourishment at least.

But it’s at least arguable that Jesus, in our lesson from St John’s Gospel, wasn’t talking about the ins and outs of fasting. [6:27] ‘Labour not for the meat which perisheth, but for that meat which endureth unto everlasting life, which the Son of man shall give unto you..’ This leads up to one of the great ‘I am’ sayings in St John’s Gospel, ‘I am the bread of life’. Just as the name of God as He spoke to Moses in the Old Testament was ‘I am’, so in these sayings, Jesus is using the same form of words, giving a sign of his divine nature. And we are no longer thinking about whether or not to eat a sausage. This is spiritual, divine food, ‘meat which endureth unto everlasting life’.

And that, you’ll be amazed to know, brings us to baked beans, and to our second theologian. He is Jürgen Moltmann, the great German theologian, some time Professor of Systematic Theology at the University of Tübingen. (That is the same university at which Pope Benedict taught, once upon a time.) Moltmann is in his 90s now, and so it was a great honour for me to attend his lecture this week at Westminster Abbey, called ‘Theology of Hope’. This was the title of one of his famous books.

Prof. Moltmann comes originally from Hamburg. His excellent English still has the same accent that I know so well from my friends there in the shipping world. He was a boy when Hamburg was bombed, bombed by us, when there was the terrible ‘fire storm’ about which Kurt Vonnegut and others have written so eloquently. Moltmann was conscripted into the German army, and on Monday night he told us he had carefully learned two words of English, which he used when his platoon encountered the British Army for the first time. They were, ‘I surrender’. He told his audience that the abiding memory of his time as a prisoner of war was baked beans – which like all boys, he liked, and I think he still likes, very much.

So if the sausage in our baked beans and sausage is redolent of the Reformation, and the creation of the Book of Common Prayer, so the baked beans lead us to Jürgen Moltmann, and his Theology of Hope. What is this hope?

Moltmann saw, and still sees in the world today, great challenges in our life. They represent death, or even separation from God, which is another way of describing sin. Climate change, the destruction of God’s creation; nuclear war, where the use of nuclear weapons would end the world as we know it, because no-one could survive the nuclear winter. Division and separation among peoples instead of unity and co-operation; the erection or rebuilding of borders in contravention of God’s creation of all peoples as equals. The end time – what will happen when we die?

Maybe it’s not fanciful to say that this, this climate of despair, is somewhat reminiscent of Jesus being tempted in the wilderness. Lent is the right time for this kind of reflection.

Moltmann has argued that we should not despair or become nihilistic in the face of these challenges. Whereas we are often encouraged to have ‘faith’ when we have to confront these existential threats, Moltmann has suggested that what we really need, and what really reflects the presence of God in our lives, is hope. Hope, rather than faith.

For example, in the committal prayer at a funeral, the body is buried ‘in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life’. You might think that what you need at that end time, at the end of life, is faith, a strong faith. But Moltmann says no, not faith, but hope is what we need. The fact, the great revelation, of Jesus’ life on earth gives us the grounds for hope. It is more than a bare belief, more than blind faith. If I hope for something, I reasonably expect that it will be possible. It’s more than an intellectual construct.

So there we are. Baked Beans and Sausages. Should we abstain from bread, or meat, or drink? Certainly not from the Bread of Life. But if even our spiritual bread is disappearing, overwhelmed in the apocalypse, in what looks like the end time, then what? 500 years ago Zwingli said, don’t stop enjoying your sausage – give thanks to God for his bounty. In the smoking ruins of that great city of Hamburg at the end of WW2, Moltmann discovered Baked Beans, and with them, divine hope. I hope that that will give you some food for thought this Lent.

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