Catholic Contextual urban Theology, Mimetic Theory, Contemplative Prayer. And other random ramblings.

Thursday 11 August 2011

Votive Mass for the Peace of the City, Tuesday 9th August


Matthew 18:1-5, 10, 12-14

“Who is the greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven?” So the disciples ask Jesus. There is some evidence that people were quite exercised by this question at the time that Matthew’s Gospel was written. The Essene Community, a kind of monastic Jewish community which left us the Dead Sea Scrolls, held ceremonies and meals where the seating order was very important; they had a complex hierarchy in which where you sat prefigured the place you would have in the Kingdom of God, and no-one was to sit above or below their allotted place.

Now that’s all rather competitive. If someone is the greatest, then someone else is less great, and you have a pecking order defined by people constantly comparing themselves with others.  And that of course is a recipe for envy, rivalry, and even violence if social controls break down.

But Jesus showed them a child and said, this is the greatest. The point is not the innocence or simplicity of children, but their littleness. Children at the time were social nobodies, non-entities. They were not present at great functions or ceremonies, and no-one thought what their position might be in the Kingdom of Heaven. So Jesus’ answer subverts the question. Children in that world were not part of the rivalrous hierarchy that asked, “who is the greatest”. So the Kingdom of Heaven is not structured according to that question, either.

So what is the Kingdom like? Jesus tells us it is like a man owning a hundred sheep who leaves ninety-nine undefended on the hillside to search for one that has strayed.  That is an extravagant, reckless thing to do. The sheep owner doesn’t count what he’s got, doesn’t compare himself to others, doesn’t ask who is the greatest. For him, finding the one sheep that has strayed is more important than owning a hundred sheep.

That is not the logic of this world, which would have written off the loss of one sheep, because after all ninety-nine is nearly a hundred, you would still own nearly as much, you would still be in a good position to ask “who is the greatest”.  It is the logic of a kingdom which is ruled not by rivalry but by love.  Generous love that doesn’t count the cost but spends itself and risks all for the sake of one straying sheep.

As the Church we are always called to bear witness to that self-giving, generous love.  We are to live according to the values of God’s kingdom in the midst of a world of rivalry, envy and violence. We perhaps are rather aware of that contrast today.

I’m not going to try any amateur analysis of the violence that has erupted in our city and in other places in the last few days. But it is possible to say that the question, “who is the greatest?”, lurks behind many conflicts, wars and acts of violence. Envy and rivalry can create a sense of exclusion, of marginalisation, and violence often follows.

Now there can be no justification for the criminal violence we have seen on our streets. But part of the way that the Church bears witness to God’s Kingdom is by having a prophetic role. The Church is to be attentive to the scriptures and to what is going on in the world – both the movements of God’s spirit and the movements of human rivalry and sin. By so doing, the Church continues the ministry of Christ in discerning the signs of the times and pointing to their solution, to God’s Kingdom of justice, love and peace.

The prophets of old didn’t often have anything very comforting to say to their earthly cities.  The prophet Amos, in a scorching denunciation of the luxurious society of his times, said “Woe to those who are at ease in Zion!”. Woe, because the problem with those who are at ease in Zion is that often they’ve stopped noticing those who are not, and fail to see the simmering tensions beneath the surface. Jesus, in his day, wept over Jerusalem, and foretold its destruction, because it refused know the ways that made for peace.

But the hope we stand for is not founded on human strength or rivalry, on asking who is the greatest. Our hope is in God’s extravagantly generous love, the love that seeks us out when we are straying, the love that draws us beyond our rivalrous desires and gives us a place in his Kingdom of justice, love and peace. To that Kingdom, in this world, in this city, we bear witness, today and every day.

Sermon at Parish Mass Trinity 7 2011


1 Kings 19:9, 11-13
Romans 9:1-5
Matthew 14:22-33


At the British Museum at the moment there’s an exhibition called “Treasures of Heaven”, saints, relics and devotion in mediaeval Europe. It’s an exhibition mainly of reliquaries, containers for relics, and many of them are superb examples. Gilded and jewelled shrines made to contain saint’s bones or objects associated with Jesus and Mary and so on.
A few weeks ago I gave a talk to another parish in our area about the cult of relics, as a preparation for their visit to the exhibition. What struck me was their response. Quite a lot of people wanted to know how you could be sure that a relic really was what it was said to be. How do you know that a particular bone really does come from St Hubert, or a particular splinter of wood from the Cross on which Jesus was crucified?
To ask that is to ask a very modern question of a pre-modern object. Living in the 21st Century we are, whether we like it or not, children of the enlightenment, heirs of the scientific revolution, thoroughly modern in our outlook and the questions we ask. Our approach to knowledge is based on evidence and proof, because it seems that that’s how most kinds of knowledge are handled in our world.
When mediaeval people approached a relic it was not proof, but belief, that invested the object with meaning. It was belief that made it a bridge between their own world and the heavenly world of Christ and the saints. This wasn’t pretence, but a different way of approaching reality than the one we are used to. Some of those mediaeval relics would indeed have met modern standards of proof, but some of them would not. But to judge them by modern standards as “fakes” is really to misread them, to misunderstand what the object was for.
A similar consideration applies when we read Bible stories. We need to remember that we are, unavoidably, modern people reading pre-modern texts. Stories of the miraculous can seem particularly problematic, such as the story we read today, of Jesus walking on the water, or the story we read last week of the feeding of the five thousand. How are we to interpret these stories?
For some, the first approach is to ask, what are the facts? Some Bible scholars in the 20th Century took a rather sceptical approach to stories like this. Commentaries were published suggesting that, when Jesus had fed the five thousand, what really happened was that the moral force of his teaching persuaded the people to take out and share the hidden stashes of food they’d brought along with them. Likewise when Jesus walked on water he was really walking on a hidden sandbank.
The problem with explanations like that is that they tend to rob the story of any significance. We’re no longer inhabiting the story and listening to what it’s got to say to us. We’ve become focussed on what the story is not focussed on: skepticism, evidence, proof.
Now, for what it’s worth, much contemporary Biblical scholarship is rather more robust and recognises the weakness of trying to explain away the miraculous. The stories of the feeding of the five thousand and Jesus walking on water are told in all four Gospels. These represent four different early Christian communities – and one of them, Mark, is very early. It is almost inconceivable that there were not some extraordinary events behind these stories, events which were remembered and told in those communities, the first generation of disciples.
But equally we need to recognise that it is the telling of the stories in the community which gives them meaning. These stories are not meant to be simply a reporting of facts from the past. As with last week’s story of the feeding of the five thousand, the story of Jesus walking on the lake is told in a symbolic way. There are references to the Old Testament and to the situation of the early Christian community which wrote this story in its gospel. All of them are references full of meaning, uncovering hidden depths.
First, Jesus descends from on high and walks on the water in the dark. It is night. And this recalls the first creation story in Genesis, where we are told that in the darkness of primordial chaos the Spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters, bringing creation and life into being.
The crossing of the sea of Galilee also recall the story of the Exodus and the crossing of the red sea, and some of the psalms and the prophets in fact speak of God walking on the sea ahead of the Children of Israel, parting the waves for them.
Both of these Old Testament allusions say that it is God who walks on the sea, and the meaning is clear: Jesus is doing what God does. This meaning is brought out more clearly in the greeting Jesus gives to his disciples. Our translation this morning says, “Courage! It is I!”, but in the Greek he actually says “Do not be afraid! I am!”. Jesus uses the Divine name, the name of Yahweh, I Am Who I Am, to greet his disciples.
As with the feeding of the five thousand last week, the meaning is that God is in Jesus, feeding his people in the wilderness, walking on the sea, bringing about a new exodus, a new liberation for God’s people.
But the people in this week’s story are not the vast multitude fed with the loaves and fishes. They are the small, harried group of disciples, desperately trying to row to shore in their little insecure boat, battling through the night against wind and waves and seeming to make no progress.
Sometimes being a Christian can feel wonderfully comforting and reassuring. Like the multitude fed by Jesus in the wilderness, we are conscious of the great family of the Church throughout the world, that great communion and fellowship, celebrating the one Eucharist, knowing that we are fed by Jesus and have more than enough. At other times we may feel more like that little group in the boat. Alone, battling in the dark, making no headway against the storms.
The community in which Matthew’s Gospel was written may well have felt like that much of the time. There are a lot of references to persecution in Matthew, which suggests that this may have been something that community was familiar with. And perhaps it wasn’t a very big community. If so, this story of the little embattled group in the boat would have had a particular resonance for them. As it may, indeed, for us.
In the West we are unlikely to face real persecution for our faith. The worst we can expect is probably just to be ignored and marginalised as irrelevant, unlike our brothers and sisters in some parts of the world.
But we all from time to time know what it is like to feel that we’re struggling on in the dark and making no progress. We all know, like Peter, what it is like to feel that the waves are rising up around us.
The storms and waves that surround us might be those of anxiety or illness, grief or weariness. It matters not. However dark the night, however far out from shore we may seem to be, Jesus is with us. As with his people of old, he is God, our liberator, mighty to save. In whatever situation we are in, he says to us, “Do not be afraid! I am!”. His hand reaches out to save us. If, in faith, we keep our eyes on him, we will not sink beneath the waves.
The meaning of this story spans the years. Jesus is not past and gone, but living now; he is not trapped in expressions and understandings of the past; he is at work today and speaks to us today, in our modern world. We meet him, risen from the dead, in word and sacrament. This story is as meaningful and relevant to us as it was to our brothers and sisters who first heard it nearly two thousand years ago. As it must be, for it is a story of Jesus Christ, who is our God and our saviour, the same, yesterday, today, and for ever.
The Church teaches that the Bible is inspired by God. That doesn’t mean that it’s an infallible text dictated from on high, but it does mean that the Holy Spirit lives and breathes – inspires – through these texts. It does mean that there is something in the Bible that has the power to open us up to a living relationship with the risen Christ. So we can read a story like today’s, from a very different time and outlook, and find it still fresh, still new, speaking to us in our own context and turning our gaze to Jesus, who hand is stretched out to save whatever the storms of life may be for us.

Weekday Mass, Tuesday 2nd August


Matthew 15:1-2, 10-14

We’re getting used to appearances of the Pharisees in Matthew’s Gospel. They’re a bit like the bad guys in pantomimes, you know you have to get ready to boo when they come on stage.

These appearances of the Pharisees in Matthew have a dramatic function – they are brought on to the scene to present the counter-argument to what Jesus is saying and doing.

The Pharisees in today’s reading are “shocked”, we are told, at what Jesus says. Actually they are more than shocked, they are scandalized. A scandal is literally a stumbling block, an obstacle in your path that you can’t draw back from and can’t get round. A scandal, in the Gospels, is a serious offence that you become obsessed by and can’t let go of.

What offends the Pharisees in this passage is Jesus saying that external observances don’t matter – things like washing hands, dietary laws, Sabbath observance and so on. Instead what matters is what comes out of you, what’s in your heart.

The ritual observances of the Jewish law were of course a sign of belonging. You did these things because you belonged with the community, with the people, who did these things. But it was important to get them the right way round. According to Jesus, and later St Paul, the ritual observances were what you did as a sign that you accepted God’s generous and loving inclusion of you in his people. God’s action towards you was free and unmerited, and came first. The observance of the ritual law was your response to God’s action.

Instead, for some people, the ritual law had become a means of earning God’s favour, of buying their way in. God’s action followed their observance of the law, it was, they thought, God’s response to their action.

More than that, it was also a used as a sign of being different from other people. If you ticked all the boxes in the ritual law, then you knew that you were alright, and all those other people who didn’t, weren’t. You were an insider, they were outsiders. The law was a means of defining yourself over against other people. You’ll recall the Pharisee in the temple who prayed “I thank you that I am not like other men, and in particular not like this tax collector here”.

Jesus undermines that completely by teaching that what matters is what is in your heart, what comes from within. Because if you look into your heart and are honest, you know that you’re just the same as everyone else. All kinds of unclean thoughts lurk within and emerge in our lives: pride, violence, covetousness, lust. Suddenly there is no tick box which tells us that we’re different from other people. It’s no longer possible to define ourselves as insiders to God’s people, because we can no longer identify outsiders who are not like us.

This is what offends the Pharisees in this reading – their whole means of defining themselves and knowing that they are good and righteous, that they “belong” and other people don’t, has been undermined.

What is left then, if we can’t rely on our own construction of ourselves? Grace and mercy, and the love of God. It is within ourselves that we need to be converted, to be freed from our uncleanness. And God sends his Spirit into our hearts to reveal to us our need of grace, and to make us clean.

God, by his Spirit, will free us from the self-righteous identity which we construct by defining ourselves as different from other people. God, by his Spirit, makes us one in Christ. God welcomes us and all the other unworthy and unclean sinners into his holy people. Our belonging depends solely on his generous love and mercy, freely given to all.

Sermon at Parish Mass Trinity 6 2011


Isaiah 55:1-5
Romans 9:1-5
Matthew 14:13-21



One version of the story goes like this:
Wilfred the Hairy, who was Count of Barcelona, Urgell and BesalĂș at the end of the 9th Century, had fought for the independence of his territories, which were later to be known as Catalunya. As he lay mortally wounded on a battlefield in Southern Spain, he asked his ally, the King of France, to give him a flag, a badge of honour he could leave to his descendants. The King dipped four fingers in Wilfred’s blood and drew them across his golden shield, thus creating the Catalan flag: yellow with four red stripes.
I’ve been spending part of my summer holiday visiting Barcelona, which is the regional capital of Catalunya. After years of repression under Franco, the Catalan identity has bounced back stronger than ever. Catalan is the first language spoken, the Catalan flag is everywhere, and the story of Wilfred the Hairy is still told.
History and legend are not simply facts recalled from the past with no power in the present. The story of Count Wilfred is part of the identity of the Catalan people; in telling the story they remember who they are now, it evokes a sense of belonging and shared destiny. Re-membering, in this sense, means rediscovering membership, entering anew into an identity with a community which is not just something in the past but a present reality.
It’s useful to remember, when we read the Bible, that the stories we read there have much the same kind of function. When we read the Old Testament we are reading the story of the Jewish People, the story of God’s providence and care which formed the destiny of that particular people, the people who were rescued from slavery in Egypt and received God’s revelation through the law and the prophets.
The telling of those stories in the Jewish community was and is a part of what establishes that sense of identity. The scriptures were not written to be books for private study, but to be read aloud in the assembly of the people. That wasn’t simply for instruction about righteous living and good behaviour, although that was part of it of course. Gathering together and telling the stories anew were an act of collective re-membering, re-establishing their identity as the people God chose for his own.
The early Christians continued telling those stories in their own gatherings, discovering new meanings in the light of Jesus. They also added their own stories, memories of the life of Jesus and his teachings, and the teaching of those who were closest to him in his earthly life. After a few decades these were codified and written down, forming the material we now call the Gospels. And the Gospels, like the earlier Jewish scriptures, were meant to be read aloud in the assembly of the people.
The Christian assembly, from the very beginning, was the Eucharist, the gathering for the breaking of bread. On the first day of every week, the day that Jesus rose from the dead, his followers gathered to do what he had commanded, telling the story of the last supper, sharing bread and drinking wine, his Body and his Blood, the memorial of his death until he comes again.
The Gospels were written to be read aloud at the Eucharist, to be part of our re-membering, our belonging in the people of God whom Jesus has called and established. It’s therefore very significant that all four Gospels contain the story of the feeding of the five thousand. It is an identity story of the people of God.
Firstly, it recalls the exodus from Egypt, God’s deliverance of the Jewish people from slavery. They left Egypt, you’ll recall, and were led by Moses into the desert, the wilderness of Sinai. Today’s Gospel reading says literally in Greek that Jesus went out into a desert, followed by the crowd. Now in fact the area round the Sea of Galilee is not a desert, it is a fertile area with lots of small towns dotted around. But Matthew wants us to get the meaning that Jesus is like Moses, leading God’s people out into the desert.
Then, Jesus feeds the people miraculously in the desert, just as Moses had called on God in the desert and God had sent the manna from heaven to feed the children of Israel.
But this story of the feeding of the five thousand also refers to the Eucharist – and remember that this is a story meant to be told at the Eucharist. In the desert, Jesus took bread, blessed it, broke it, and gave it to the disciples – exactly the same words as are used at the last supper.
The earliest Eucharistic liturgies we know about, from the early second century, use a peculiar Greek word to describe the portion of the bread given in Holy Communion and reserved for the sick – klasmaton. And this is exactly the same word that the Gospels use for the fragments of bread gathered up at the end of the feeding of the five thousand. This story of miraculous feeding, and the Eucharistic liturgy, use the same language. So, in the feeding of the five thousand, we have both the Exodus, and the Eucharist.
The ancient Israelites were freed by the Exodus from slavery in Egypt. What are Jesus’ disciples freed from?
Immediately before this passage, Matthew tells the story of the death of John the Baptist. On Herod’s birthday, he gave a banquet for his friends. A banquet of debauched entertainment, poisoned with envy, hatred, and malice, desire spiralling out of control and culminating in murder.
By placing Herod’s banquet immediately before the banquet which Jesus provides, Matthew makes the contrast clear. Herod’s banquet represents the old order of sin and death. Jesus gives the banquet of compassion, love and life, a banquet in which there is no rivalry or envy because there is always more than enough for everyone.
And this is precisely what is told, and enacted, and becomes real, when we gather to celebrate the Eucharist. The Last Supper, when Jesus instituted the Eucharist, was of course a Passover, a meal enacting and re-telling the Exodus, making real in the present God’s saving acts for his people of old.
So, too, the Eucharist enacts, re-tells, makes real, God’s saving acts in Jesus. His death and resurrection are our liberation from sin and death, and our entry into new life. The Eucharist is our re-membering as the people of God, in which we become what we receive, the Body of Christ.
Now, how many people were fed by Jesus with the loaves and fishes? Five thousand men, not counting the women and children, because, of course, in those days they didn’t count women and children. So, very many more than five thousand, then. It was a huge multitude.
Well, here we are, celebrating the Eucharist, entering once more into the identity that Jesus gives us as the people of God. But there aren’t five thousand of us here.
In the parish of Old Saint Pancras, there are about 26,000 people, more or less. And most of them aren’t with us here in Church. But we will be with them, as our neighbours, friends, work colleagues, the people we meet as we go about our daily lives this week.
Today we re-hear the story of our identity, the story of God’s saving work in Jesus, and we re-member our place in the people he has claimed for his own.
But that crowd in the desert wasn’t a select few. It was an enormous multitude, everyone and anyone, all sorts and conditions. Everyone has a place in the story of salvation which we tell. Everyone can find, if they will, that they too are called out of the old order of sin and death to new life in Christ.
Our challenge is to live the story we tell in a way that makes a difference not just to us but to those around us. It is to live the story in a way which rekindles the imagination of a society which, perhaps, has forgotten that there might be any other way of living than that old order of sin and death. Our challenge is to live the story that makes love real in a world where love has grown cold.
Does that seem too much of a task for our meagre resources? Fear not. For the story is the story of Jesus, who brings abundance out of our poverty. Five loaves and two fishes were enough to feed the multitude; our own poor love, if we will offer it to him, he will transform. And it will be enough, and more besides.