Writing on the Walls of Nineveh

Sermon Low Sunday 2013

noreply@blogger.com (Matthew Duckett) — Sun, 07 Apr 2013 15:59:00 +0000

Acts 5:12-16

Revelation 1:9-13,17-19

John 20:19-31

I’ve just finished re-reading, after many years, Mary Renault’s trilogy of historical novels about Alexander the Great: Fire from Heaven, The Persian Boy, and Funeral Games. The last is set after Alexander’s death, as the great empire that he built and the harmony of peoples he strived to achieve disintegrates in old feuds, greed, revenge and murder. And it seems as though the shade of Alexander and other dead characters is hovering behind the tragic events as they unfold.

One of the motifs in the series is the common belief of the ancient world was that the dead needed to be treated carefully. They hadn’t ceased to exist but were in a gloomy underworld, which was nowhere near as nice as being alive, and they tended to be regretful and rather cross about it. And if you had wronged them in life, or neglected to offer the due sacrifices after their death, then you had reason to be afraid of them.

And that of course is the basic idea underlying many ghost stories and supernatural thrillers in our own day. These seem to have a perennial appeal.

This idea of death perhaps reflects our human expectations. Revenge is a deeply buried instinct. If we could come back and haunt someone who had done us wrong, isn’t that just what we would do?

But today we have heard an account of the appearance of a dead man which completely undermines that expectation. The disciples in the upper room, like John on the Isle of Patmos, see Jesus. Jesus, who had been betrayed by one of his friends and handed over to the lynch mob. Jesus who had been killed, in public, in the full view of the crowd. He was dead and buried. Those were the definitive facts, decisively closing off, for ever, any further human possibility for this man Jesus. He was gone.

And they saw him. That group of disciples, friends who had run away or stood back, who had denied they knew him, failed to defend him. That group who were gathered in a locked room, in fear for their own lives, in case their association with the dead man should bring the same fate on themselves. They saw him.

He came and stood among them in the closed-in place of their fear, and said to them: “Peace be with you.” That first word of greeting undoes all their fear. The message of the risen Jesus is peace. And even as he shows them his hands and his side, the wounds of his death, there is no reproach, no blame, no hint of vengeance. His greeting is peace. And they are filled with joy.

Jesus has not come back from death into this life, this old way of living. Rather, he has as it were emerged from death on the other side. He has passed into the eternal deathless life of the Father. Jesus, who died, is now entirely alive with the loving, vivacious, uncontainable life of God.

And Jesus comes to his disciples from beyond death to share that life with them. To give them the good news that beyond death there is not gloom, or fear, or vengeance. Jesus the Risen One is now the gateway to the life that the Father lives, eternal life, overflowing with love and forgiveness and joy. And he longs to share that life with his disciples, with all of us, with his Church in every age.

So Jesus gives to those disciples in the upper room his promised gift of the Holy Spirit. This scene is the ‘Pentecost’ of John’s Gospel, the gift of Divine life to the disciples, their empowering for the mission on which he is going to send them. So Jesus breathes on the disciples and gives them the gift of the Holy Spirit.

He breathes on them. This is an act of creation. It echoes the second creation story in Genesis chapter 2, where we read that:

The Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.

That first gift of the breath of life made inanimate matter into living beings. But that gift does not last for ever. Biological life, good and wonderful as it is, returns sooner or later to the dust from which it was made.

But in the resurrection of Jesus the new creation is revealed, and the new creation is eternal, because it shares the life of God. Once again the Lord God breathes on his people, but this time gives them the gift of the Holy Spirit, not the breath of biological life but the breath of God, God’s own life, eternal and indestructible.

In John’s gospel it is Jesus’ dying and going to the Father that opens the way for the gift of the Holy Spirit. Jesus has burst through the great barrier of death that held humanity captive and so has opened the way to the Father.

From now on, then, we are to live the life of the Spirit. We are to be dead to sin and alive to God in Jesus Christ. Of course that is not to deny the goodness of this present creation and this passing life. But it is transitory. It will come to an end. The life of the resurrection, life in the Holy Spirit, is eternal. In the Holy Spirit human nature, made from the dust, is lifted beyond itself and deified, made one with God. And that is God’s gift to us that will never be taken away.

But it is a gift with a purpose. The Holy Spirit was not given to that little group of disciples in the upper room so they could keep it to themselves! No, they are sent. Sent into all the world, to complete the work that Jesus began. “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”

And that work, that mission, is peace, reconciliation, the forgiveness of sins. Because that is what the world so desperately needs. True peace cannot come about through a balance of terror, but only through the new life of the Holy Spirit. True forgiveness is a new beginning, a new creation, coming to us as a gift from beyond the worst that human beings can do. Jesus was the innocent victim betrayed and murdered and who comes back to his disciples from beyond death breathing forgiveness and love as a gift.

From now on there is nothing that cannot be forgiven. There is no-one for whom there cannot be a new beginning. There is no-one who is outside the power of God’s new creation. There is nothing that is not included in the mission of the Church, which is to spread the peace and forgiveness that come to us from the heart of God.

And if we are told “if you retain the sins of any, they are retained”, that does not give us permission to preach a partial gospel, or to exclude anyone from the good news. Is it not simply to say that from now on it’s up to us? That if we don’t go out and proclaim the forgiveness of sins, it won’t get done.

“As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” Peace, forgiveness, eternal life in the Holy Spirit. That is the message, the good news and the gift that we bear. And it is our unending joy in the risen Lord to live that life ourselves and to share it with those among whom we are sent.

Sermon Maundy Thursday 2013

noreply@blogger.com (Matthew Duckett) — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 14:15:00 +0000

Exodus 12: 1-4 [5-10] 11-14

1 Corinthians 11:23-26

John 13:1-17, 31b-35

Why is this night different from all other nights?

That question is asked at the Passover meal, the Seder, which was celebrated in Jewish homes throughout the world two nights ago. It is asked by the youngest child present. Why is this night different from all other nights?

And the oldest person present answers, bridging the generations, passing on the tradition. The different aspects of the Seder meal are pointed out, the things that make it special: unleavened bread, bitter herbs, the lamb bone recalling the sacrifices of old. The person answering explains the significance of these details, their meaning in the story of the Exodus, the liberation of God’s people from slavery in Egypt, long ago.

These things are said and done as a memorial. That doesn’t mean they are just a reminder of something that is now in the past, like a tombstone or a blue plaque. The Seder is a memorial which bridges the time between then and now, which makes the saving work of God in Israel’s past a present and effective reality for the people of Israel today.

Christians understand that, or we should do. It is part of the heritage we have received. Christians are people from all races and nations who, through Jesus, have come to believe in God’s promises to Israel, and to share in Israel’s hope of salvation for all the world. We, too, can ask, why is this night different from all other nights?

This night also began in a meal, the Last Supper, when Jesus sat with his disciples and recalled the saving work of God in the Exodus from Egypt. But at the same time he was looking forward, to the new saving work of God, which was to be completed over the next three days in his own suffering, death and resurrection. The new saving work which was to encompass all the world, all times and places and people.

The writer HV Morton has described Jesus at the Last Supper as holding two historical threads in his hands and forming the link between them both. One is the Old Covenant, the Law and the Prophets, God’s promises to his people Israel. And the other is the New Covenant sealed with his blood, the Church of all nations, the community of the Eucharist, the mission and priesthood of the Apostles. There is both rupture and continuity between the old and the new, and Jesus holds both together.

And so Jesus gives a new memorial, the Eucharist, by which the new saving work of God will be made present and effective for all time. And he gives a new commandment, the commandment of love, and through washing his disciples’ feet shows what that means.

The task of washing feet belonged to a slave or to the lowest servant. It was a job to be done by a person you didn’t notice. Jesus shows his commandment of love by taking the place of the lowest and most marginalised. It is love shown through self-emptying service. It is love which shows us where the saving work of God is being achieved. Which is where we wouldn’t notice, if Jesus had not drawn our attention there by his subversive action. On the margins, among the vulnerable and the excluded and the despised.

It is John’s Gospel which gives us this account of Jesus washing his disciples’ feet. Curiously, there is no account of the institution of the Eucharist in John’s Gospel, although that gospel is full of Eucharistic teaching about Jesus being the bread of life, about needing to eat his flesh and drink his blood.

But John tends to comment on great mysteries by telling of external signs. The Eucharist and the washing of feet can be seen as different aspects of the same mystery of self-emptying love. The washing of feet shows us, through external signs, the inner meaning of the Eucharist.

Christ “emptied himself”, says St Paul in Philippians, taking the form of a slave. He emptied himself by becoming human, and taking our nature upon him. He emptied himself in service to others and in the end to sharing our death upon the cross. He empties himself still in the Eucharist, humbling himself under the forms of bread and wine, the servants of our body’s need.

Because the Eucharist is God’s gift of his life to us in Jesus, it makes us like him. By feeding on Christ we are transformed into him, so that he lives in us in the world. The sacrament of self-emptying love makes us self-emptying, fills our hearts with the love of Jesus, with which to love the world. So the Eucharist impels us to the work of service, to the washing of feet. The Eucharist takes us to the margins, to the forgotten, the victimised, the excluded.

This evening Pope Francis is celebrating this Mass of the Lord’s Supper, not in his Cathedral or in any other of the great churches of Rome, but in a prison, a juvenile prison on the outskirts of the city. There he will wash the feet of young offenders. Through his words and actions in such a short time Pope Francis has reminded his own church, and Christians of other churches, of the true priorities of the gospel: to go out from the centre to a life of risky, self-emptying, loving service, on the margins. Because that is where Christ is, and that is where Christ calls us to be, too.

God has chosen and called us into his church, into the community of the Eucharist, to fill us and empower us with his love. Through his gift of himself to us we are caught up in that love - and it is love on the move. It is love pouring into the world, reaching to the furthest places, seeking out all, calling all home to the Father’s heart.

To live Eucharistically is not simply to come to Mass often, though we should. It is to live a life transformed by the Eucharist into self-emptying loving service. The Eucharist is the new memorial, the New Covenant in Christ’s blood. It makes present and effective God’s saving work in Jesus, in us, and through us in the world.

Why is this night different from all other nights? Because tonight Jesus gave himself under the forms of bread and wine, so that the world might live.

Why is this night different from all other nights? Because tonight Jesus girded himself with the towel of a slave and washed his disciples’ feet, to give them the commandment of self-emptying love.

Poured out in love, given in service, Jesus lives in his Church, present and effective for all time, to reach out and to save all the world. That is why this night is different from all other nights.

Sermon at Parish Mass Lent 5 2013

noreply@blogger.com (Matthew Duckett) — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 14:07:00 +0000

Isaiah 43:16-21

Philippians 3:8-14

John 8:1-11

On Monday I went to the Courtauld Gallery to see the Picasso 1901 exhibition. Monday is cheap entry day at the Courtauld, there were lots of people there, and I could only get a timed ticket. So while I was waiting I went to look at the other collections. Among the canvases by Rubens, Cezanne and Monet there was a tiny panel painting by Brueghel the Elder in grisaille, which is a technique of painting in oils in monochrome. It depicted the scene from today’s gospel, the woman caught in adultery and brought before Jesus.

Brueghel’s painting shows the moment when Jesus bends down and writes with his finger on the ground. And although the accused woman is standing in the centre of the scene, the bystanders and her accusers are not looking at her, but at what Jesus is writing. And they are reacting with amazement, even astonishment.

According to Brueghel’s version what Jesus is writing is, in Dutch, the words, “let the one who is without sin cast the first stone”. Now the gospel story doesn’t actually tell us what Jesus wrote, so Brueghel is guessing, and perhaps he just wanted to make sure that the scene was unambiguously identified.

There have been other suggestions about what it was that Jesus wrote. Perhaps he was writing down the names of the woman’s accusers, or their secret sins, even the names of the people with whom they had committed adultery. But I think we need to attend to the text. This gospel passage thinks it is important to tell us that Jesus wrote with his finger on the ground, twice, but does not think it important to tell us what Jesus wrote. So perhaps it is the simple fact of his writing that is significant.

This particular gospel passage hasn’t always been where it is now at the beginning of chapter 8 of John’s gospel. In some early manuscripts it is in other places in John, or even in Luke. It seems to have been a free floating story which moved around because people didn’t know quite where it fitted in the sequence of events in Jesus’ life. But it is surely an authentic reminiscence of Jesus, the merciful and forgiving Lord, the friend of sinners, who was always being opposed and tested by the Pharisees.

And in the canon of scripture recognised by the Church it has ended up in John’s gospel. John, as we know, makes great use of symbolic detail, and places an emphasis on the Divinity of Jesus, on Jesus being God’s word in person in the world. And I think these help us to understanding this story.

There may be a reference, for example, to the Prophet Jeremiah, who wrote

O hope of Israel! O Lord!
All who forsake you shall be put to shame;
those who turn away from you shall be recorded in the earth,
for they have forsaken the fountain of living water, the Lord.

That fountain of living water is something that Jesus has just referred to in the scene before today’s gospel, so perhaps here we are meant to see, in the woman’s accusers, those who have turned away from that water. Jesus writing on the earth may have reminded them of that text of Jeremiah.

But we are told quite specifically that Jesus writes with his finger on the ground twice. And in the Old Testament there are two scenes in which the finger of God writes.

The first scene is the giving of the ten commandments. In Exodus chapter 31 God is said to have inscribed with his finger the stone tablets of the covenant given to Moses. And one of those ten commandments of course is, “Thou shalt not commit adultery”. But in the gospels we see that Jesus himself is the lawgiver, indeed he is the Law in Person. And in Jesus we see that the finger of God has not stopped writing, and that the old law needs to be completed with the new law of forgiveness and love.

In the Bible the Law is not seen as a kind of arbitrary code imposed on the world from outside. It is rather something that is written into the fabric of creation. The flourishing of human beings in community and in communion with God is something intrinsic to creation, it is at the heart of the way things are. To live according to the law is to live in tune with creation.

And Jesus shows us that part of that law is forgiveness. The work of God as creator goes on. God is continually at work to restore, to reconcile, to forgive, to put right what goes wrong. And if we are to live according to the law, in tune with God’s creation, then we need to be forgiving. God’s will in creation is not condemnation but forgiveness, not accusation but grace, acknowledging our own need and God’s free gift meeting our need.

If we resist that law of forgiveness then we are resisting our own good. We will not be able to live in tune with the world, to flourish as God wants us to in community and in communion.

Which brings us to the second Old Testament scene where the finger of God writes: Belshazzar’s feast, that rather louche entertainment where the guests got drunk from the sacred vessels looted from the Temple in Jerusalem. And a ghostly finger appeared and wrote: mene, mene, tekel, parsin. Which the prophet Daniel interpreted as meaning: your days are numbered, you are weighed in the balance and found wanting, and your kingdom is overthrown.

In today’s gospel reading there is a kingdom that is found wanting and overthrown: the kingdom of the accuser, that is to say, the kingdom of Satan, because that name means “the accuser”. The kingdom of Satan is the world ordered according to accusation and condemnation, the world in which scapegoats and victims are identified and cast out. And Jesus is saying, this is not the way the world should be, this is not God’s purpose in creation, this is not the Law.

And the accusers, one by one, give up and leave. Their kingdom is overthrown. And the woman finds herself now alone with Jesus, spoken to, and able to speak for herself at last. She is not condemned. In Jesus she has found grace and forgiveness. She has been saved from the kingdom of the accuser and has entered the Kingdom of God.

And so Jesus tells her to remain in this state of grace, “go on your way and do not sin again”. She has been restored to harmony with creation and to communion with God. The law of forgiveness and love has found her and saved her, and now she is to live according to that law too.

Our whole life as Christians is the experience of being saved, of being restored to God’s purpose in creation. It is that experience of liberation, the joyful surprise of being snatched from the kingdom of the accuser and brought into the Kingdom of God, entirely through God’s gracious action in Jesus Christ.

But that does bring to us a challenge. Go on your way, and do not sin any more. It is for us to align our wills with the will of God, to choose to live according to God’s law, which is the pattern of life in all its fulness written into the fabric of creation. We are called to live in a way which respects and enables us and all our brothers and sisters to flourish. The path of Christ is a wholly new way of being in the world.

This is the meaning of the ten commandments. But it is also the meaning of the new law of forgiveness and love. It is to turn away from everything that destroys, from accusation and condemnation and self-righteousness. It is to love and forgive others as God has loved and forgiven us. To live according to God’s will is to attain our true freedom. Only so can we receive the fulness that God wills to share with us, which is nothing less than himself, his life and his Spirit shared with us and transforming us into the image of his Son.

Sermon at Parish Mass and Baptism Lent 2 2013

noreply@blogger.com (Matthew Duckett) — Sun, 24 Feb 2013 19:33:00 +0000

Genesis 15:5-12, 17-18

Philippians 3:17-4:1

Luke 9:28-36

In a short while we shall celebrate the baptism of Anna, and rejoice with her, and her family and godparents, as she is made a member of Christ’s church and born again through water and the Holy Spirit.

When Anna’s parents and godparents have made their declarations on her behalf about faith in Christ, I shall make the sign of the cross on Anna’s forehead, with these words:

Christ claims you for his own.

Receive the sign of his cross.

Do not be ashamed to confess the faith of Christ crucified.

This recalls the words which Jesus spoke just before the passage set for today’s gospel reading. Jesus has just predicted his death and resurrection, to the bewilderment of his disciples, and says to them:

‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it. What does it profit them if they gain the whole world, but lose or forfeit themselves? Those who are ashamed of me and of my words, of them the Son of Man will be ashamed when he comes in his glory and the glory of the Father and of the holy angels.

It is after these words that Jesus takes his disciples up the mountain, and they see his glory, the light shining from him as he is transformed. They see the glory of the Father, the shekinah, the overshadowing cloud which had hovered over the Tabernacle in the days of Moses. And Jesus speaks with Moses and Elijah about his departure, the exodus which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem. In other words, his death.

This revealing of glory on the holy mountain is the beginning of a journey. But it is a journey of contradiction - it is the journey with Jesus to Jerusalem and the cross. Beyond that, and only beyond that, lies the glory of the resurrection. As with Moses of old, this exodus is to accomplish the liberation of God’s people, liberation not from slavery in Egypt but from sin and death.

Even in this scene the death of Jesus is foreshadowed. On the night he is betrayed Jesus will take his disciples up another mountain, the Mount of Olives, to pray as he awaits his death. And there too the disciples will fall asleep, a sleep which is perhaps a symbol of their lack of spiritual perception.

But the glory of Christ and the glory of the Father are revealed on the holy mountain today, before Jesus leads his disciples along the path of contradiction and suffering.

In the Bible glory is about the reputation of God, about showing forth God’s nature. So the glory of Christ is a revelation of Divinity. It is not simply a dazzling vision, but something that will unfold its meaning through the path of suffering that Jesus is to take. God’s reputation, God’s glory, will be established in what is to follow, through darkness and the cross to the resurrection.

That is the path of exodus, of liberation from sin and death. Humanity was created to share God’s life but through sin has turned away from God’s good purpose. Sin itself is a mystery, we do not know where it came from. We simply observe that humanity, from the dawn of consciousness, has preferred to be turned in on itself rather than being open to God. Humanity tends to prefer rivalry, violence, division, possessiveness, jealousy, lust - all those things that close us in on ourselves and shut us out from communion with God and one another.

The way of the cross, which is the way by which we are liberated from all that, is simply this: God’s love entering into our unloveliness, to free us from ourselves and open us up once more to the love for which we were created. It is this which will re-establish God’s glory, God’s reputation, in his world.

The great Christian thinker St Augustine of Hippo taught that evil was simply a deficiency, the taking away of good from what God has made. So sin and evil have the ugliness of something marred and damaged, whereas goodness is beautiful, and God is supremely beautiful. This concept of spiritual beauty is of great importance. It has nothing to do with the skin deep beauty of glossy magazines and advertisements. It is the profound beauty of the soul restored in the image of God, reflecting God’s glory. It is the beauty of holiness. It is the beauty of Christ transfigured on the holy mountain.

But in the world as it is, marred by sin and spiritual ugliness, the beauty of God is both revealed and hidden. The beauty of God attracts us to draw us along the way of contradiction, the path of liberation which leads through darkness to the cross and resurrection, to the true knowledge of God. In this week of his retirement some words of Pope Benedict seem particularly appropriate: “True knowledge is being struck by the arrow of beauty that wounds man: being touched by reality, by the personal presence of Christ himself.”

On the path of liberation the beauty of God is made known in the lives he is transforming, and particularly in the life of the Church, and wherever holiness and goodness appear as the true meaning of what it is to be human.

The beauty of the liturgy, of sacred art, architecture, music, helps to draw us into this inward encounter with the beauty of Christ, which, in life as it is, is always a path of contradiction, drawn by glory into darkness through to the resurrection.

Every Sunday Mass is like the mountain of transfiguration, the beauty of God revealed in the liturgy, in the transformation of material things which are the outward signs of inward grace. But every Lord’s day is followed by the week of daily life, descending to the plain with its crosses and contradictions, when the glory of God sometimes breaks through and sometimes is hidden in darkness.

So too the pattern of our lives, from baptism to death and the resurrection into eternal life. Baptism itself is a sign of dying and rising with Christ, a sign of contradiction and of liberation. It is also a spiritual washing away of sin restoring the beauty which reflects the beauty of God. This is so for all, both adults and children, for Christ is redeeming the whole of humanity, in which all share one common human nature. Christ draws all to himself.

Saint Augustine, on his conversion to Christian faith in his adult life, wrote these words:

Late have I loved you,

O Beauty ever ancient, ever new,

late have I loved you!

You were within me, but I was outside,

and it was there that I searched for you.

In my unloveliness I plunged into the lovely things which you created.

You were with me, but I was not with you.

Created things kept me from you;

yet if they had not been in you they would not have been at all.

You called, you shouted, and you broke through my deafness.

You flashed, you shone, and you dispelled my blindness.

You breathed your fragrance on me;

I drew in breath and now I pant for you.

I have tasted you, now I hunger and thirst for more.

You touched me, and I burned for your peace.

As we baptise Anna today let us pray that the beauty of God may shine on her, and on all of us, as he draws us to himself and transforms us by his holiness, now and for ever. Amen.

Sermon Lent 1 2013

noreply@blogger.com (Matthew Duckett) — Sun, 24 Feb 2013 19:32:00 +0000

Deuteronomy 26:4-10

Romans 10:8-13

Luke 4:1-13

There’s been a lot of testing going on this week, mainly of beefburgers, ready made lasagne, and the like. Testing means examining something to find out what it really is, in this case beef or horse. And when today’s gospel says that Jesus was “tempted” by the devil, that means the same sort of thing. The tempting of the devil is not just trying to induce Jesus to do something he shouldn’t, it’s also finding out who he really is, by the way he responds to the temptation. Is he the Son of God, or not?

What comes just before this scene of temptation in the desert is Jesus’ baptism in the river Jordan, when the voice from heaven had announced, “You are my Son, the Beloved, with you I am well pleased”. And then Jesus, filled with the Holy Spirit, was led by the Spirit in the wilderness. So this going into the desert to be tested is part of his calling, part of what the Father wants him to. Not a diversion from it, but how it begins to be worked out.

Jesus, as well as being Son of God, is also Son of Man, the representative human. The ways in which he is tested are common to humanity, and he undergoes these temptations on our behalf. Jesus, says the letter to the Hebrews, was “in every respect tested as we are, yet without sin”. So these are representative temptations, of the representative human - Jesus is tested, as all of humanity is, in particular ways.

What these temptations have in common is that in all of them the Devil presents a false idea of God (and therefore of being the Son of God), to see if Jesus will fall for it.

The first temptation, command this stone to become bread. This is the temptation to self-sufficiency, I have all I need, I provide all I require, I’m in control, I’m not going to let go, I don’t need anyone else. It is the temptation to put ourselves at the centre, to make a god of our ego.

But in truth it is God who is at the centre, God first, not me first. God creates and provides, and gives our being, entirely out of his own generosity. Everything we have is gift. So we don’t need to grasp and control. We do need to recognise our dependence. Letting go means opening my hands so that God can hold me, an act of faith and trust and worship.

I was very moved this week by Pope Benedict’s unexpected resignation, and I’m sure christians from many different churches will feel the same. How easy in that position to buy in to the personality cult, to think that everything depends on you, that you must carry on at all costs. And what courage and humility and faith it must have needed to say, I can’t do this any more, you need to find someone else. But what an example of faithful, Christian, letting go. We of course don’t have such a burden to carry, but we can nevertheless be taken over by the ownership and control of what we have. Lent, the wilderness, is a place where we can examine ourselves, find out where we need to stop holding on, so that God can hold us.

The second temptation, the offer of all the kingdoms of the world. And in fact in Luke’s version this probably means the Roman Empire, because Luke is very conscious and critical of the political realities of his day. This is the temptation to see the way the world runs as god, the supreme truth, the way that life should be ordered. Violence, injustice, oppression, exclusion, might is right. And Luke simply assumes that the devil does actually run the political structures of the world. The devil personifies all that is destructive, the spiritual personality of the empire.

But the God of Jesus is the God who liberates, who is on the side of the victims of the world and its political structures. The Kingdom of God stands over against the Empires of this world. So we don’t have to collude with oppressive power and we can be called to make a stand against it - including in politics. Whoever says that the Church should keep out of politics hasn’t begun to take the Bible seriously. But also in the workplace, in the home, in our relationships - and recognising also the ways in which we ourselves oppress and exclude.

The third temptation is the most subtle: throw yourself down from the temple, and God will send his angels to protect you. This is the most subtle false idea of god, because it seems to be talking about God. But actually the god who is being suggested here is a god of control, a god on demand, a god who does what we want. This is a spiritual power that we can manipulate - so although the devil talks about “god”, look who is still at the centre - me and my demands.

The true God does not intervene on demand to arrange the universe according to our whims. The true God allows us our freedom, because he has created us in love, to be free to love. The true God is not a controller, but a lover. His will is our greatest good and our peace. In abandonment to Divine providence we will find all we need. But we have to be free to choose his will, to say, as Jesus will say in Gethsemane, not my will but thine. And there is our true freedom - the freedom to love.

Today there is so much idolatry even among Christians - the prosperity gospel and miracle cults abound on the fringes of Christianity, but even in the mainstream churches Christians can be bewildered when they pray for something that seems to them to be good and it doesn’t happen. In God’s will is our peace, and our prayer is first of all aligning ourselves with that will: Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done - before we ask for our daily bread.

Jesus passes the tests. He recognises, and refuses, the false ideas of god presented to him. And therefore he is truly the Son of the true God. Jesus in these temptations represents humanity, and in him we are adopted as sons and daughters of God. We too are called to struggle with the same temptations, because we follow the path of Jesus, which is the way of being truly human. Unlike Jesus, we do not always pass the test. We are not without sin, but through forgiveness and grace we are called to continual conversion, to turn away from these false gods to the one true God.

Times of wilderness and testing do not mean that God has abandoned us. Jesus was led by the Spirit in the wilderness, and sometimes in our lives the Spirit will bring us to a place where all that is familiar and comfortable and safe seems to have been taken away. But this is so that the Spirit can free us from false gods and lead us to depend more faithfully and trustingly on our loving heavenly Father. And the abstinences and disciplines of this season of Lent can help make a space for this too, so that as far as we are able within the duties of our life we follow that path into the wilderness during these 40 days.

Lent is a time for the wilderness, for silence, space, prayer, self-examination. For the purification of the heart from false gods so that we can find our true peace and lasting joy in the true God who creates us, and loves us, and saves us.

Sermon Epiphany 3 2013

noreply@blogger.com (Matthew Duckett) — Sun, 24 Feb 2013 19:27:00 +0000

Isaiah 62:1-5

1 Corinthians 12:4-11

John 2:1-12

I think I must have first seen the Wizard of Oz in the cinema, rather than on the television at home. My reason for thinking this is that when I was little we only had a small black and white telly, and one of the great features of the Wizard of Oz is the use of technicolor. The opening sequences in Kansas are in black and white until the storm comes and Dorothy gets carried off by the twister. Then she opens the door of her house and steps out into a wonderful colour landscape. She has arrived in Oz! That’s still a stirring effect when we see it now, but in 1939 it could have been the first colour film that many people had seen. Imagine the impact then. “Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas any more.”

Well today we have heard the Oz moment from John’s Gospel, the wedding at Cana. When Jesus reveals his glory it is as if a whole new dimension appears, like seeing the world in colour for the first time.

This is the third of the gospels of Epiphany, which relate in different ways the manifestation of God in Jesus. From Matthew’s gospel we had the story of the Magi following the star to find Jesus, the one who is born to be king. From Luke we heard the story of the baptism of Jesus, when heaven was opened, the Holy Spirit came down in the form of a dove, and the voice from heaven declared that Jesus was his beloved Son. And today we have the story of the marriage feast at Cana in Galilee, the first of the signs that Jesus gives in John’s gospel.

All of these stories are about the revelation of God in Jesus. “Epiphany” means “manifestation”, it is about something going public, being seen. And all of these stories, in one way or another, point to what lies ahead in the story of Jesus. They show that the glory of God will be made known in Jesus above all in his suffering, death and resurrection. Epiphany points to the cross and the empty tomb.

So when the Magi came to Jesus, they gave him gold because he was a king, frankincense because he was God, and myrrh. Myrrh for embalming and burial, the spices of Good Friday already mingling with the incense of adoration of the Christ child.

And when Jesus was baptised by John, he went down into the waters of the Jordan and was raised up again, a figure of his death and resurrection, just as is our own baptism in the waters of the font.

But, we might wonder, how is the wedding at Cana hinting at the death of Jesus? There doesn’t seem to be an obvious link. But John is such a good storyteller. The scenes in John’s gospel are like panels in an altarpiece, little pictures full of detail and meaning, which if you see them all at once you can see how the details and imagery connect from one scene to another, bringing out new depths of meaning.

So, the story of Cana begins, “on the third day”, which immediately is a hint of the resurrection “on the third day” that is yet to come. “And the Mother of Jesus was there.” The Mother of Jesus appears twice in John’s gospel: here in this scene, and at the cross. Jesus says, “my hour has not yet come”. In John’s gospel, the “hour” of Jesus always refers to the crucifixion, which is seen as the fulfilment of everything that Jesus has come to do, Jesus reigning from the cross, pouring out his life, his spirit, into creation. So, too, at Cana we are told that Jesus “revealed his glory”; and in John the glorification of Jesus, like the hour of Jesus, is the cross.

So in this scene at Cana the glory of Jesus points forward to his death and resurrection. But it also looks to the context of Jewish belief in which this story is told. That is the world which awaits the glory of Jesus. There were six stone waters jars for the Jewish rites of purification. These represent all the promises and hope of Israel, God’s promise that he would purify his people and make them his own. And in fact the jars are of such a size that they would normally be found in the temple, rather than a private home. But they are empty; Jesus commands them to be filled. The law does not need to be abolished, but filled up, transformed, with the glory and grace of God which is what the law anticipates. The ten commandments are not out of date! But they are there in anticipation of grace: if you live in expectation that God will fill you with his Spirit, then of course you will repent of killing, and stealing, and adultery, and so on, because God wants you to be like him, and God is not like that. John has already told us this in his prologue: “the law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.”

This is what Jesus has come to do: to restore and complete the work of creation, to fulfil the law so that it overflows into grace, to pour out God’s glory into the world. All of this Jesus will achieve through his death and resurrection, and it is foreshadowed in this wedding feast.

So Jesus gives this sign of transformation and glory, the water becomes wine. The wine of the new creation, the good wine which has been kept until the last, the wine which transforms this wedding feast.

What are weddings about? Well, amid all the celebration and feasting, the one essential thing that a wedding is about is union, the union of bride and groom. But where are the bride and groom in this story? They seem to be conspicuous by their absence. But the prophets in the Old Testament spoke about the wedding feast of the kingdom of God, which is also about union: the union of heaven and earth, of God and humanity, God’s spirit poured out into creation making all things new.

And Jesus himself is the bridegroom, John the Baptist calls him that. So here, at Cana, Jesus appears as the Lord come to marry his people, his bride, Israel to whom whom he was betrothed of old, Israel now expanded to include all believers of all races and nations. “Jesus revealed his glory, and his disciples believed in him.”

And that is the feast to which we are called. Jesus has come to fill up our old vessels of water with the new wine of his kingdom. He has come to pour out his spirit into creation, making all things new. He has come to celebrate the marriage of God and humanity, of heaven and earth. And we are called to this feast of union with God, to be filled with his transforming glory. From Bethlehem to Calvary, from our birth to our death, God’s glory is present in Jesus to transform the world.

Now I’m sure most of us can easily identify areas of our lives which are not filled to overflowing with the glory of God. But this work of transformation is a gift of God to us, not something that we have to achieve ourselves. It is grace, God’s free gift.

That grace is given to us, and the feast of the kingdom is anticipated, in Baptism and the Eucharist, through which God’s transforming power enters our lives under sacramental signs. The new wine of Cana recalls the water and blood that poured out from the side of Jesus on the cross, the tide of sacramental grace which is making all creation new. God’s glory fills up to overflowing the ordinary things of life, bread, wine, water, human lives, transforming them with his presence and his very self.

The grace of our baptism endures throughout our life, God’s action joining us once and for all to Jesus in his death and resurrection. But the Eucharist brings new grace every week, every day. It is the feast of transformation in which bread and wine, our life and our labour, are transformed by Christ, filled with his presence, made new. Today, as in every Mass, that grace is poured out to fill and transform our lives. One of the Collects for the Epiphany season expresses this very well. It is a good prayer to use in preparation for the Eucharist:

Almighty God,

in Christ you make all things new:

transform the poverty of our nature by the riches of your grace,

and in the renewal of our lives

make known your heavenly glory;

through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord. Amen.

Remembering Edith Thompson

noreply@blogger.com (Matthew Duckett) — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 11:36:00 +0000

Address at University College London on the 90th anniversary of Edith's death

9 January 2013

For about 20 years now a service of remembrance has been held on this day at St Barnabas, Manor Park, Edith’s parish church, where she and Percy were married in 1916. It was while I was there as a student on placement that I first encountered her story. Parish churches have a particular role in English culture, as they are there, available, for the wider community, of all faiths and none, as well as for the congregation of worshippers. They are historic buildings, visible signs of continuity, places which hold the memory of a locality.

Remembering is about giving life, like putting back together a body, re-membering. It is about finding our place, our membership, in the community of narrative. Just as the Eucharist, the central act of Christian worship, for which parish churches were built, is an act of remembrance, anamnesis, not forgetting.

People remember because they are concerned about keeping faith with the truth. By truth I don’t simply mean empirical facts, though those are important, things like the evidence in a trail and the verdict of a court. I mean a commitment and attention to the truth of the human person, the profound and mysterious identity which stands before us and yet which eludes reduction to mere data. Each human person is unique, unrepeatable, a world of possibility and a depth of mystery. And that unknowability is perhaps part of what is meant when the Book of Genesis says that human beings are created “in the image of God”.

Attention to the truth of the person matters because it is so often obscured and forgotten, and when that happens the person herself is in danger. Would it have been possible, I wonder, to have hanged Edith Thompson if her character had not first been blackened, if she had not been reduced from the mystery of a person to the merely empirical mask of an immoral adulteress?

The anthropologist René Girard has I think contributed greatly to our understanding of how the mask of myth comes to obscure the truth of the person. According to Girard, human desire is mimetic, that is we imitate – unconsciously – one another’s desires. So I and the person I am imitating will desire the same thing, and if we can’t both have it we are in danger of rivalry, and even of conflict and violence, for desire is never static, and forgetting the original object of rivalry shifts into a mutual obsession of the rivals themselves. This triangular nature of desire is well known, but Girard’s genius lay in showing how these triangles join up, how desire and rivalry can spread through the interconnecting networks of a wider group, a whole society.

And if a whole society is threatened by its own violence, mimesis produces another phenomenon: the scapegoat. The mimesis of the group resolves itself against a convenient victim, all against one. The violence that threatened the group is defused by being unleashed against someone who, crucially, has to be seen by the group as deserving what they get. So, classically, scapegoats are held guilty of taboo breaking crimes, of offending the gods, of bringing the plague, of mysterious and impossible poisonings, and so on. The key thing is that they must seem to be completely different from the group. The truth of their human identity – that they are actually just the same as everyone else – has to be obscured for mimesis to do its unconscious work.

In Edith’s story I think we can see both these things going on: both the triangularity of desire and its disastrous consequences, and the escalation to her designation as the scapegoat, the descent of the veil of myth over the truth of the person. Before the court she became a different kind of being, removed to the other side of a boundary of taboo where, somehow, death did not appear as violence but as justice.

Girard himself, having been an agnostic, became a Christian once he had read the Bible, for he realised that the Bible generally doesn’t do this. Unlike the other ancient texts he had studied, the violence in the Bible – and there is a great deal of it – is not disguised, the humanity of the victim never quite disappears from view. This is perhaps most obvious in the crucifixion of Jesus. The whole scapegoat mechanism is in plain view: the murderous mimesis of the mob, the accusation of blasphemy, the ritual boundary of separation outside the city wall, the actual innocence of the victim, the unconsciousness of his killers. “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” What it all amounted to was a denial of truth. Jesus, on trial for his life before Pontius Pilate, said that he had come into the world to bear witness to the truth, and Pilate had replied, “truth - what is that?”, before washing his hands of the whole notion.

Avis Graydon also came to faith after her sister’s death, and remained devout for the rest of her life. It was Avis who requested that there be an annual Mass offered for members of the Graydon family on the anniversary of Edith’s death.

But of course it is not only Christians or religious believers who wish to remember Edith, to keep her story alive. Attention to the truth of the person is fundamentally about recognising our common humanity. It is about resisting the veil of myth that tries to reduce a person to a scapegoat. The deaths of Percy, Edith and Freddie were acts of absurdity, a denial of meaning, a turning away from the truth of the person.

And such denials and absurdities have not ceased. The death penalty persists in many parts of the world, and we cannot afford to be complacent about it never coming back here. It worries me that we have a government which likes making noises about unravelling our commitment to European Law and human rights. It worries me that in December British subject Lee Aldhouse was extradited to Thailand to face a murder charge apparently without the UK authorities first obtaining the usual assurances that the death penalty would not be sought. It worries me that our government wants to bring in a law to allow homeowners to kill intruders, the Prime Minister announcing the plan to the applause of his party conference and saying, “When that burglar crosses your threshold, invades your home, threatens your family, they give up their rights”.

As a Christian priest I am someone who remembers a particular narrative, who interprets the world through the story of a particular person who was betrayed and handed over to death. Christians place that narrative in a framework of faith because we believe that it did not end with the killing of the victim on Good Friday, that after human violence had done its perennial worst something new, unlooked for and wholly creative entered the world. For Christians the resurrection points to a creative principle behind the universe which simply will not give up on us; it is an assurance that absurdity will not win in the end, that the truth of the person will not finally be lost, that the human project will not ultimately fail.

I would like to suggest that that leads us to a common ground, whether or not we happen to identify with a particular religious narrative. Believers view the project of creation as embracing the whole cosmos and everyone in it - not just the minority with a religious outlook. And it seems to me that, whatever one’s faith, to be attentive to the truth of the person entails rejecting absurdity and the denial of meaning. It is to be committed to a true humanism which affirms that each person is unique, unrepeatable, and profoundly mysterious, and that therefore each person actually matters. It is to keep faith with the truth. And that, I would suggest, is reason enough for us all to remember.

Sermon at Parish Mass, Epiphany 2013

noreply@blogger.com (Matthew Duckett) — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 11:16:00 +0000

Isaiah 60:1-6

Ephesians 3:2-3a, 5-6

Matthew 2:1-12

The TV quiz programme “QI” sometimes has some trick questions to which no-one knows the answer, such as “how can you tell the age of a lobster?” and “what do the signal bars on your mobile phone mean?”. The contestants can win extra points if they spot this and wave their “nobody knows” card.

Another “nobody knows” question that could be asked is, “who were the Magi?” We meet them, of course, today, the feast of the Epiphany, and we know what they did in their brief appearance in St Matthew’s Gospel. But Matthew just says that they were Magi, magoi in Greek, without explaining what that means. He says that they came, literally, from “the land of the sunrise”, which is poetic, but doesn’t actually locate them anywhere. The land of the sunrise is like the end of the rainbow: however far east you travel, it’s always further still. He also doesn’t say how many there were - the idea that there were three of them is surmised from the fact that there were three gifts. And he certainly doesn’t say that they were kings.

So these Magi, these visitors from the land of the sunrise, are quite mysterious. They must have been wise, scholarly, well versed in astronomy, and with the means to undertake a long journey carrying expensive gifts. And that’s about all the clues we have. They could have been priests or astrologers from Persia or Babylon. But they could equally have come from almost anywhere else. And perhaps that’s the point. The Magi represent the whole gentile world, the whole world outside Judaism, with all its richness, learning, and wisdom.

Quite early on the tradition of the Church amplified the story of the Magi to make this point. In art, we usually see them as men of three different races, representing the three known continents of the time: Europe, Asia and Africa. Quite often, too, one is old, one young, and one middle aged. They were assigned exotic foreign-sounding names - in Western tradition those that stuck were Caspar, Melchior and Balthasar, but other parts of the church have different names. The Magi are very inclusive! The very mystery that surrounds them makes them universal.

They are outsiders - people from beyond Judaism, outside the covenant and the law of Sinai - and yet they receive a sign from heaven calling them in to the heart of all that the law and the covenant mean, into the heart of God’s revelation of himself. They represent all the longings and insights of every culture and race, converging on Jesus. They are drawn out of themselves by the mystery of Christ’s birth, only to find themselves on the inside after all, at the heart of the mystery that called to them from afar.

And they are called to worship. That is the most important thing that the Magi do. Before they present their gifts, they worship the Christ child. They fall down before him and worship.

The Magi are called out of themselves, out of their familiar world, to seek Christ, and worship him. And these mysterious outsiders stand for all of us. The vocation of all human beings is to be drawn out of ourselves into the mystery of God. The journey of the Magi represents our own interior journey, our fundamental orientation as created beings - to go beyond the boundaries of our ‘self’, so that we can truly find ourselves in God. And it is also, paradoxically, a journey into unity, just as the Magi gathered at the crib represent all nations gathered into one in Christ. It is a journey which seems to have two directions, which are really one: into the mystery of God, and into unity in Christ.

For Christians this is expressed above all in the worship of the Church, the liturgy that we celebrate day by day and week by week. Our corporate worship reminds us both that we are drawn together as one people, united in Christ, and that we are called beyond ourselves into the mystery of God.

This is realised above all in the Mass, the Eucharist, which is the one act of worship we have received from Christ, “do this in remembrance of me”. Although a priest or bishop presides, Christ himself is the true celebrant at every Eucharist, his real presence is at its heart. The Eucharist is the highest worship we can offer, for in it we are united with Christ in his own offering of himself, his eternal and perfect worship of the Father.

It is in the Eucharist above all that we see the two directions of worship, like the two directions of the Magi’s journey. We are gathered together in one, made one Body in Christ through the sacrament of his Body - not just this congregation gathered here today, but every Eucharistic community throughout time and space, all are one body, one Church.

And the Eucharist also points us beyond ourselves into the mystery of God, into the very worship of the Trinity that the Son offers to the Father in the Holy Spirit. In the Eucharist every human group is broken open and made partakers in the cosmic mystery in which we worship with angels and archangels and the whole company of heaven.

All the apostolate and service of the Church flows from this worship, from partaking in the life of the Trinity. Just as the Magi bowed down in worship, and then offered their gifts, so too the Church lives a life of service and self-giving in the world because we draw that service and self-giving from the heart of the worship of God. It is a grave mistake to see the Church as a human group committed to social activism first, and worship second. The Divine worship given to us in the Eucharist is fundamentally what we are about; everything else flows from that.

The two directions of worship are expressed physically and symbolically in how we celebrate the Eucharist. The use of set liturgies, holy days, vestments, forms that have been hallowed for centuries, are not actually part of Christ’s commandment to us, but remind us that the Eucharist is something we do not devise ourselves. It is worship that comes to us from beyond us, that we receive and enter into.

And the adornments of worship, music, incense, lights, images, all speak to us of the transcendent, our worship drawing us beyond ourselves into the mystery of God. But at the same time we gather together to celebrate the Eucharist as the people of God, joining in the assembly with our brothers and sisters every Lord’s day.

As you may have noticed, during Christmastime we have rearranged the sanctuary and have been celebrating Mass facing East, in the older tradition of the Church. This is a temporary arrangement, partly occasioned through the way we have had to use our limited space at this season. But it does help to remind us of the transcendence of our worship. As we pray we all stand facing the same way, facing East, the sunrise, the symbolic direction of the resurrection. This helps to remind us that our worship calls us beyond ourselves, from out of the closed group into the mystery of God.

And when the altar is back and we celebrate in our more usual way, with the clergy facing the people, we will be reminded more of being gathered together into one in Christ.

But whichever way we arrange the sanctuary, we need to bear in mind that both things are always going on: our worship draws us out of ourselves into God, and at the same time draws us together into the unity of the Body of Christ. Our worship would be impoverished if we forget one or the other.

This feast of the Epiphany, at the beginning of a new year, is a good day to commit ourselves afresh to offering the best we can in intelligent and lively participation in this greatest act of worship. Christ calls us, like the Magi, to seek him and worship him, so that we can be drawn into the very life of God, and at the same time discover our unity with one another in Christ. This is our fundamental vocation as human beings. The Church worships in Christ, with heaven, and on behalf of all creation, so that in God’s purposes all things may find their fulfilment in his Kingdom.

Parish Bulletin, Christmas 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Matthew Duckett) — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 10:41:00 +0000

As I write the second TV series Merlin is currently showing on Saturdays. Its retelling of Arthurian myth has both ancient and modern elements; set in a world of magic, mystery and high adventure, it uses this backdrop to explore issues of our own time: pluralism, belonging, the place of the individual in society. But something is missing from the tale: faith. There are plenty of references to the “old religion” of magic and druidism and the spirits of nature, but none to any “new” religion. There is no church or cross or image of a saint anywhere in sight, nor any mention of any belief system other than the forbidden arts of magicians. The BBC’s Camelot, it seems, is a secular realm in which faith has been sidelined and the spiritual is mistrusted, a metaphor perhaps for our own age whose inchoate spiritual longings seem at odds with any too confident public expression of faith.

The Arthurian myths became popular, formulated into epic poems, in the high middle ages and then, too, explored issues of their own time. In retelling the stories of a past golden age these poems were commentaries on their contemporary society, but unlike Merlin are rich in Christian symbolism and insight. In an age of violence and aggression, it is Christ and the saints who inspire the best actions of the characters, and the chivalry of the knights, which could have been a violent ‘code of honour’, is reinterpreted as the heroic quest for the Christian virtues. And yet, alongside these, is a world of pre-Christian belief, of magic and ‘faerie’, of wizards and nature spirits who somehow seem to have carried on existing in this Christian narrative.

The mediaeval poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is one of the great stories of Arthurian myth. It begins with the celebration of Christmas at Camelot. There is feasting and merriment:

For there the feast was unfailing full fifteen days,

with all meats and all mirth that men could devise,

such gladness and gaiety as was glorious to hear…

With all the bliss of the world they abode together,

the knights most renowned after the name of Christ,

and the ladies most lovely that ever life enjoyed.

(From JRR Tolkien’s translation, Unwin, 1975.)

But, too, there is Christian worship, the very reason for the feast:

When the king was there come with his courtiers to the hall,

and the chanting of the choir in the chapel had ended,

with loud clamour and cries both clerks and laymen

Noel announced anew, and named it full often.

Into this scene comes the Green Knight, an extraordinary apparition, with green skin, green beard, green clothes and on a green horse. He sets a challenge to the knights, taken up by Sir Gawain, who then has to seek out the Green Knight a year later, in his ‘green chapel’ in the forest. His quest sets him many challenges rich in Christian meaning and symbolism.

The Green Knight is almost certainly the ‘Green Man’, a mysterious figure, half man, half tree, found carved in many mediaeval churches. He is probably a survival of a pre-Christian nature deity, a symbol of rebirth, herald of the return of spring and new growth. His appearance in churches, and in Christian-framed narratives such as Sir Gawain, has puzzled some. Should he really be there? Nor is he the only reminder of a pre-Christian age. Across our country, customs such as well dressing and maypoles remind us of folk history and instinctive beliefs that go back long before the coming of Christianity.

The feast of Christmas was instituted by the Church around the fourth century to mark the birth of Christ, but it builds on a pre-Christian celebration. December 25 was chosen to mark the birth of Christ as this was already a day of feasting marking the winter solstice, “Yule” as it was known in northern Europe. This celebration in the depths of winter of the imminent return of the sun and new life was deemed appropriate for the birth of the Son of God, the light of the world and the creator of life. But many of the customs of Yule continued. Holly and ivy, evergreen in the midst of winter, and representing masculine and feminine principles, were revered by the Celts; and were later given a Christian symbolism in carols. They are still used to decorate our homes and places of worship at the time of the solstice.

The old Yule had celebrated creation and the insight that this was a divine gift. But it did not say much about what the ‘divine’ might actually be like. The fear that the gods might turn out to be cruel, capricious or uncaring still lingered. But in the birth of Jesus a new light shone into the world: God dwelling among us as a vulnerable child, showing that God is love by enacting that love in a human life. In WH Auden’s long poem For the Time Being the angels, announcing the birth of Jesus to the shepherds, sing:

After today

The children of men

May be certain that

The Father Abyss

Is affectionate

To all Its creatures,

All, all, all of them.

St Paul, speaking to the philosophers of Athens in Acts chapter 17, asserts that God is not far from anyone, for “in him we live and move and have our being”. That insight seems to be common to all times and cultures. But in the birth of Jesus we see so much more. His coming into the world is God’s revelation of himself, what we could not have known with certainty from nature alone: that God is personal, that he loves us, and has created us so that we can share in his divine nature forever in heaven.

Jesus, born for us in our world, is both the face of God turned towards humanity and the face of humanity turned towards God. He is the meeting place, where earth touches heaven, where human lives touch their ultimate meaning; and he shows that the nature of that meeting is love.

This is what the poets of the old Arthurian myths knew, but the modern scriptwriters of Merlin seem to have forgotten. The old insights and mysteries and celebrations of pre-Christian days are not annulled by the coming of Christ, but find their place in a larger picture and a greater light. The gift of creation, as it were, turns out to have a gift tag on it, and it reads: “from your Father, with love”.

So, this Christmas, enjoy that gift: food and wine, feasting and merriment, friends and family. Enjoy the crisp frost under foot of a walk in the countryside or through a park, and look out for a Green Man if you happen to be visiting any old churches. Enjoy the long dark nights, knowing they will soon give way to the growing light and springtime in the cycle of the seasons, of death and rebirth. But I hope you will also celebrate the birth of Christ, the light of the world, the Word of the Father through whom all things were made, born in time in substance of our flesh, Jesus, the Redeemer and Lord of all creation.

My very best wishes for a merry Christmas and a happy New Year to you all.

Father Matthew

Sermon Christmas 1/The Holy Family 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Matthew Duckett) — Sun, 30 Dec 2012 18:54:00 +0000

Images are copyright, but click here for a picture of "Our Mother"

1 Samuel 1:20-28

1 John 3:1-2, 21-end

Luke 2:41-end

Last year I went to the Grayson Perry exhibition at the British Museum. Among the artist’s works on display was a pair of sculptures called ‘Our Father’ and ‘Our Mother’. Made in cast iron, they depicted a man and a woman, leaning on sticks, each of them bent over beneath the weight of an enormous pile of baggage, loaded on to their backs and hanging off them all over.

The Father figure was laden with guns, grenades, tools, books, barbed wire and coffins. The Mother carried baskets of fruit and bread, water flasks, mixing bowls, religious icons, and a baby. Both of them, somewhere in their bundles, also carried a withered corpse - their own father and mother, who had themselves carried these burdens before.

Having lost my own parents some years ago I found that I was very moved by those sculptures. They seemed to me to be deeply compassionate; they told the truth, but without blame. None of us is born into a vacuum. We all inherit, in one way or another, the baggage that passes down the generations - the weight of expectations, hopes, success, failure, all the things that people can’t cope with or even name, all the limitations that come with our upbringing and that of our parents and grandparents. Now most families try to do their best with what has come down to them, but sadly we have to acknowledge, too, that families can also fail even to the extent of being wilfully cruel and abusive.

But however good the human family is, however loving and caring, it can never be everything. It can never be quite the idyllic group dwelling in unity that is sometimes romantically imagined. Children, particularly, are always different - unique, unrepeatable individuals, never the same as their parents, always to an extent new, unknown and unknowable, surprising and strange.

The process of discovering this can be painful and difficult, for both child and parents. Individuation is a necessary and healthy part of growing up, but it does mean discovering our separation, that we are not simply an extension of our parents. That our need for belonging, for completion, is one that our human family can never meet.

There is, as it were, a tragic dimension to the family, the dimension of inevitable separation and difference, of failure however hard we try, and the Bible pulls no punches in describing it.

From Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel, through the Patriarchs and the Kings, the Biblical family is something that always seems to be going wrong. Stories like that of Samuel, Hannah and Elkanah that we heard today, where things seem to go right, are exceptions requiring Divine intervention. There are more dysfunctional relationships in the Bible than in even a Christmas episode of ‘East Enders’! And I do wonder sometimes if those Christians who make a lot of noise about ‘traditional family values’ have actually read the Bible. Indeed, the Swiss Protestant theologian Karl Barth, who certainly had read the Bible, once commented, “the idea of the family is of no interest at all for Christian theology”.

But then, in the fulness of time, God sent his Son. Born fully human, he shared our human life not in the abstract, but in all its particularity, in all its limitation. And so he was born, as he must be, into a human family.

St Luke portrays that family with particular intimacy in his Gospel, and today, uniquely among the gospel writers, he gives us a glimpse, not of the baby Jesus, but of the adolescent. Jesus in today’s reading is twelve years of age, which was the age at which Jewish children assumed their own responsibilities under the law. We see Jesus at that symbolic point of individuation, his emergence from the shadow of his parents as his own proper person. That day, perhaps for the first time, Jesus seemed to his parents to be new, strange and unknown.

I expect many of us can remember a moment like that, in our teens. And if you haven’t got there yet, don’t worry - it’s alright! That time when we realise that we need to do and express our own thing, and the fussing and anxiety of parents or guardians seems to us to be focussed on a place, on a stage of life, that we are leaving behind.

For many of us that might have marked the start of what are sometimes called the difficult years, of teenage rebellion in one form or another. This is really part of ordinary development, of emergence from childhood, as psychologists such as Carl Jung have described. But for Jesus, as soon as he appears as his own person, in his own right, his focus is not on himself, but on his Father. “Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?”. And of course this Father is not his human foster father Joseph, but God.

Luke, in his description of the Holy Family, does what he often does. He gives us a ‘great reversal’ - the turning round and reordering of the world as Jesus comes to proclaim the Kingdom of God. The putting right of all that has gone wrong. So the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph seems to be the ‘traditional’ human family turned on its head. The most important person in this family, the person at the centre, is the child - who traditionally would have had no rights or position at all. The next most important, the one with a speaking role, and who ponders these things in her heart, is his mother - not, as might have been expected in a patriarchal society, his father. And Joseph seems to be the least important. In the gospels, he doesn’t actually get to say anything at all.

With the coming of Jesus, everything that has gone wrong in human society from the beginning is being turned round, and transformed into the Kingdom of God. And that includes the family. With the coming of Jesus, the tragic history of humanity is broken open, and a new beginning is made.

Beyond the limitations of the human family, Jesus points to a new relationship, a new way of belonging. Humanity, re-created in Christ, is complete at last. “Call no-one on earth your father”, says Jesus elsewhere in the gospels, “for you have one Father, in heaven”. No human family, no human ‘other’ can complete us. No family or network of relationships can fulfil the need for belonging and unity to which we aspire, but cannot reach by ourselves, but only by grace.

Now of course it is right to affirm the goodness of human relationships and the family. When families work well they are communities of love, nurture and protection whose members remain committed to one another through good times and bad. Human relationships can reflect the goodness of God in creation. But they also point beyond themselves to something greater, which is one reason why the Church traditionally has regarded marriage as a sacrament - a sign mediating grace.

Jesus points us to God as our Father. Only in God do we find the ground and source of our being, the one ‘Other’ who completes us and makes us whole. Only in God can we truly name as brothers and sisters all our fellow human beings, because we discover that they belong to us, and we to them, to the extent to which we also discover ourselves in Christ.

If we allow Christ to make us anew, through his grace, then we will enter his kingdom, which is the true human family at last: redeemed, made new, whole and complete, finding itself in one another and in God. And that is good news for all of us, whatever our family background may be, whatever life has been, whatever relationships and communities we are part of. Jesus offers a new beginning, a new way of being human. Not in some idealised world remote from the reality of our lives, but here and now, coming to meet us, turning the world around right where we are.

Sermon at Parish Mass, Advent III 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Matthew Duckett) — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 08:24:00 +0000

Zephaniah 3:14-18

Philippians 4:4-7

Luke 3:10-18

This year our parish has been helping with a food bank for the first time, in addition to our long established work with the night shelter. Food banks are part of a response to a growing need seen across our country; as benefits are cut and prices and rents rise, more and more people are finding that they can’t afford to eat. An article in the Evening Standard a couple of weeks ago highlighted this, there was one person who walked 12 miles to the food bank and 12 miles back to get food for their family, because they couldn’t afford even the bus fare.

The fact that we need things like food banks and night shelters may come as a surprise to many. I’m sure that among our congregations there is a broader understanding and a spirit of Christian solidarity, but I wonder how many in society at large will understand what it is like to lack the basic necessities of life, in London in 2012. Those who are in need of this kind of assistance are not necessarily obvious at all. They could be friends, neighbours, church members. They may very well have homes, and be well dressed, but still be in need of help. Can we see those who are in need in our midst? Can we see what to do?

Today in the gospel the people ask John the Baptist, “what then should we do?” John has just announced the coming of the Lord to redeem Israel, “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight”. And the people realise that this means they need to do something. They need to respond to this good news. John is the last of the prophets, and like the prophets of old his message is that God is coming to his people with judgement and salvation. Judgement, to expose and bring to light what is wrong, so that the people might repent, and turn to the Lord once again, and be saved.

John the Baptist is the last of the prophets, the voice crying in the wilderness, and because he is a prophet he sees what is wrong with the society in which he lives, and proclaims a message of repentance.

Notice who he is proclaiming the message to. People who have two coats - that is to say, people who have more than they really need. Tax collectors, who raised money for the Romans but were in the habit of charging higher than the official rates to line their own pockets. Soldiers, who clearly at this time extorted money by threats.

John is not saying to those who are already poor, “be content with what you have”, rather, he is speaking to those who have been causing poverty by their own greed. He is calling them to renounce their greed. His call to repentance is very much about how people’s actions impact on the community. In Luke sin is never an individual private thing, it is always bound up with how we live in the world, how our choices affect and shape the society around us.

And notice, too, that the people have come to John to hear his message, even though he's all the way out in the wilderness - he hasn’t gone to them. There is something attractive about John’s message of repentance. It is indeed good news, even though it means giving up greed and excessive riches. There is something much better on offer. Forgiveness of sins, a new beginning, a fresh start. And this is to prepare the way of the Lord, to open the way for God’s kingdom to come in.

This is the whole movement of Luke’s story, as he tells it in his Gospel and in Acts. Jesus is the Lord and Messiah who has come to restore his people Israel, and through Israel to bring all people, all nations, home into God’s kingdom. And the way into God’s kingdom is repentance for the forgiveness of sins. Repentance means turning away from everything that builds a society contrary to God’s will, oppression and alienation, robbery and extortion, injustice and exploitation. Repentance means aligning ourselves instead with God’s purposes and learning to reflect his righteousness in the world.

That call, that good news, is for us too. Luke knows how to tell a good story. At the beginning of his gospel the people ask John the Baptist, “what then must we do?” And at the beginning of Luke’s second book, the Acts of the Apostles, the same question is asked to Peter on the day of Pentecost, “what must we do?” and the answer is the same: “repent, and be baptised, every one of you”. The story of the Church, like the story of Jesus, begins with the call to repent.

Advent, this season of self-examination and preparation, is a good time to reflect on that. In what ways do we need to repent? Are our choices, our actions, helping to build a just society in which all can take part? Or are we helping to exclude others, to keep them in poverty and deprivation? Luke tells us to look to the poor and dispossessed, those on the margins, because that is where God’s attention is, too.

Now that call to repentance is something we need to hear for ourselves. There is a temptation to think that all the injustice and exploitation in the world is caused by other people - the bankers have been blamed for a lot in the last few years. Well, if you are a banker you do need to hear the message of repentance, but so do we.

So do I. If I buy some coffee or a shirt which are really cheap because they have been made with exploited labour in some other part of the world, do I not need to repent? Do I not need to see what I am doing, and turn around? The sobering edge of the Advent message is that we need to hear God’s judgement in our lives if we are also to receive his salvation.

Things like food banks and winter night shelters are not just isolated charity projects, unconnected with the rest of life. Yes, part of our response to the gospel, our repentance, consists of helping those in need according to our ability. This is right and good. But we also need to see that these things are symptoms of something in the world that runs deeply contrary to God’s purposes. When some people are hugely affluent there simply shouldn’t be people who are starving. But there are. The Gospel calls us to examine the causes of injustice, as well as dealing with its consequences.

Christ comes to us with the command to model God’s righteousness in a world which tends deeply to resist that righteousness. The Gospel calls us to conversion, to repentance for the forgiveness of sins, not only for our own sakes, but so that God’s kingdom can spread in the world. And that is the true way to prepare for the coming of Christ, and the feast of Christmas. As someone is said once to have prayed, “O Lord, convert the world - and begin with me.” That’s a good prayer for Advent. Amen.

Sermon at Parish Mass, Christ the King 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Matthew Duckett) — Sun, 25 Nov 2012 18:22:00 +0000

Daniel 7:13-14

Revelation 1:5-8

John 18:33-37

What are kings for? What do they do? If we’re asked that we might think perhaps of our own United Kingdom. It’s been a good year for our monarchy, with the celebrations of the diamond jubilee, our own visit from Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall, and signs that the monarchy is more popular than ever.

Of course, ours is a constitutional monarchy in a parliamentary democracy. It wasn’t always so. This year has also seen the discovery of what may well be the remains of Richard III, killed at the battle of Bosworth Field in the deadly struggle between two rival dynasties, the Plantagenets and the Tudors. Those were days when Kings had real political power, which could be arbitrary, capricious and cruel.

And it was much the same in Biblical times, as Jesus himself tells us in today’s gospel reading. This is a scene of contrasts, Pilate and Jesus standing for two completely different understandings of power. Pilate represents the earthly power, that of the Emperor, by whose authority Jesus in the end will be put to death. But Jesus reveals the power of God; he is the Word of the Father come to reveal God to the world.

Jesus says, “If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.” Jesus says instead that his purpose is “to testify to the truth” and that “Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to [his] voice”. Although it doesn’t seem obvious, somehow, the kingdom of God is not to be found in exercising power but in entering the truth.

This takes us back to chapter 8 in John’s Gospel, where Jesus talks about his mission to make known the truth and about the world’s failure to understand. To a group who rejected his teaching he said:

You are from your father the devil, and you choose to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him... But because I tell the truth, you do not believe me. Whoever is from God hears the words of God. The reason you do not hear them is that you are not from God.

No wonder that Pilate, in reply to Jesus in today’s gospel, says, dismissively, “what is truth?”

Jesus teaches us that the kingdoms of this world are characterised by people defining themselves in opposition to other people, setting themselves over against other groups, and seeking to maintain that division by violence. They depend on regarding your so-called “enemy” as somehow fundamentally different from you: someone who is disposable. It is your enemy, not you, who is the cause of your trouble, the source of the violence you suffer. He must be eliminated! And your enemy may well think the same about you.

According to Jesus, this is founded on a lie, on the rejection of the truth. And that truth is first of all the good news about God. “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” This is the truth to which Jesus bears witness. The purpose of creation, of human existence, is love, and the good news about God is love which will not compromise with half measures, love that longs to share the life of God with all people. All people. We are all in this together, all equally in need of knowing that love and receiving that life.

So there can be no over against other people, no division or violence, in the Kingdom of God. God is light and in him is no darkness at all. Those who see the light, who hear the truth, and respond to it, enter that Kingdom. They leave behind the old way of being human, which was founded on a lie, and enter God’s truth.

And it is that truth to which Jesus bears witness in this scene, most acutely, most personally. Because Jesus is the innocent victim who stands for all human victims, all people who have ever been seen as “the enemy”. Jesus is the enemy! He must be - look at how all the people are rioting and demanding his death. And so Pilate sees him as disposable, different, not the same as him, and hands Jesus over to death. In his unjust judgement Pilate rejects the truth and enacts what the kingdoms of this world are like. And in his acceptance of suffering and death out of love for the world, Jesus enacts the Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of the truth.

Pilate rejects the truth of the person before him, and so fails to see the truth of God. But those who receive the truth which Jesus speaks become children of God. They become witnesses who testify to the truth. They enter his kingdom and live according to the new way of love, leaving behind the old way of division, of defining ourselves over against others.

That of course is not always easy, particularly when people disagree about things which they think are very important. The past week has seen the Church of England in crisis over the rejection by General Synod of legislation that would have enabled women to become bishops. For the most part the speeches in Synod itself were thoughtful and respectful, resisting the temptation to caricature opposing views, wanting to find consensus and a shared way forward.

But that can’t be said of much of the reaction that has followed. There has been a huge emotion dump as this process that has taken so much energy and care over 12 years has collapsed. That emotional energy has got to go somewhere, and it is understandable that some people are hurting and angry, while others are relieved. But there has been much unhelpful and unedifying commentary, knee-jerk reactions, pinning of blame, name calling, and caricaturing of others.

That will not help find a way forward for our church. But more seriously, if we fail to recognise one another in the truth of our identity as beloved children of God, then we are in danger of slipping back into the old way of being human, the way of the kingdoms of this world.

As the Church of England seeks to find a way forward it is important that we do so with a profound attention and respect for the truth of the other person. The truth that the person who disagrees with me is nevertheless caught up with me in God’s embrace, and that we are called together to bear witness to the truth of God’s patient, transforming love. There is no-one who is “the enemy”.

That doesn’t offer any instant answer or easy solution. But the church is not called to reflect the values of the world, with its oppositional politics and imposed conformity. The church is not called to be “relevant” or “credible” in terms that the world might want to impose. God’s kingdom is not of this kind. Our task is to bear witness to the truth. Because although God’s kingdom is not from this world, it is for the world. It is the kingdom of Jesus Christ, who, because God so loved the world, was sent into the world, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. And that truth is something to which we can all bear witness.

Sermon, Parish Mass, All Saints 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Matthew Duckett) — Sun, 25 Nov 2012 18:15:00 +0000

Revelation 7:2-4, 9-14

1 John 3:1-3

Matthew 5:1-12

What kind of city would you like to live in? A week ago the Camden New Journal was much taken up with the “Wheelie Bin Rebellion”; the front page and the letter writers highlighting the resistance of some borough residents to having wheelie bins for waste disposal in their front gardens.

On a rather different level, the Evening Standard has been running a “Ladder for London” campaign which aims to get disengaged and disadvantaged young adults into employment though apprenticeship schemes, young people who would otherwise be unemployed and lacking in opportunities.

Both stories are linked in a way, in that they are both about the kind of society that we would like to live in. Is the space in which we live enjoyable? Is it beautiful? Does it work, practically? Who is able to participate in the communities we build? And who is left outside?

Today we heard the beatitudes: Jesus’ description of a society that that he calls “blessed”. To be blessed is to be in tune with God’s purpose in creation. You are blessed if you inhabit the world in a way that reflects what God is like. And, according to Jesus, it is the victims, those on the margins, those who live precariously, those who take risks for peace and justice, those are the ones who are blessed, who reflect what God is like.

Now, the prevailing power structures of the world say something quite different: happy are the strong, the powerful, the rich, the successful. The world says it’s the winners, not the losers, who determine what society is like. You’re happy if you climb to the top of the heap, and never mind those you’ve trampled underfoot on the way.

Jesus preaches something radically different. In a world which is fallen and distorted by sin, a society which reflects what God is like is bound to appear as a contrast, as a protest, against the way things are. A stumbling block to be rejected. Just as Jesus can only do the Father’s will and reveal his love, in the world as it is, on the cross.

But the society described in the beatitudes, which is such a sign of contradiction to the world as it is, is nothing less than the Kingdom of God and the Communion of Saints. This is the great truth which we celebrate today. The Communion of Saints is human society made holy - that’s what the word “saint”means. It is human society perfectly reflecting what God is like. It is humanity sharing the Divine nature.

Jesus, in theological language, is God incarnate. Jesus is the meeting point, the face of God turned towards humanity, and the face of humanity turned towards God. And Jesus shows us God as Trinity. God is the Son finding himself in the Father and the Father knowing himself in the Son and both delighting in one another in the self-giving love of the Holy Spirit.

And because humanity is made in the image of God, we can only reflect what God is like in communion, in society. We only find our true selves in mutual love and self-giving, each to the other, reflecting the life of the Holy Trinity.

In the beatitudes Jesus calls us to enter into and reflect that life by repenting of our individualism, our self-assertion and self-aggrandisement. We can only find our true selves by turning our attention away from ourselves to God, and finding ourselves in God in one another.

So, blessed are the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek, those who hunger and thirst for what is right, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, the persecuted. Blessed, because they are finding themselves in God, in one another. Blessed, because they are entering God’s Kingdom, and becoming the Communion of Saints.

And this vision of Jesus has very little to do with religion. Jesus nowhere says, “blessed are the churchgoers” or “blessed are the devout”. Instead, the beatitudes are about what it really means to be human. They are the blueprint for being human as God intended in creation. Because to be fully and truly human is to be holy, to be in the Communion of Saints.

Jesus’ vision of society is more than just human beings getting along with one another. It is not a naïve humanitarian dream. Human society ordered as it should be is founded and rooted in God. Human relationships become transfigured in the light of God the Holy Trinity. True society, is what happens when we acknowledge our need of one another and recognise and receive each other as we find ourselves in God.

The beatitudes express this perfectly: “blessed” and “happy” mean the same thing. True happiness, true blessedness, lie in becoming perfectly what God has created us to be. As St Irenaeus said, the glory of God is humanity fully alive.

The Communion of Saints is the mutual recognition that God is the ground of our being. It is seeing the ultimate truth about one another, and in that seeing there is blessedness. This is the beatific vision, the “blessed” vision. In that Communion the veil is parted and the dualities of our earth-bound sight fade away. Time and eternity, earth and heaven, no longer stand apart. The living and those we call dead are bound to one another in one communion and fellowship in Christ our Lord. We have a foretaste of this in the Eucharist, this astonishing action in which all the saints in heaven and earth in every age are truly one, worshipping with the angels and archangels, breaking one bread, becoming what we receive, one body, in Christ.

Eternity and time intersect on the altar, and worshippers on earth stand in the sanctuary in heaven. And glimpses of glory overflow and appear wherever in this world the Kingdom of God is becoming real, wherever human society begins to reflect the life of God. And, most often, those glimpses will be not where we expect, but on the margins, among the dispossessed and the ignored, among the poor and the meek whom we so easily fail to see. This should not surprise us - Jesus has told us this is where the Kingdom is happening! But so often still it does.

Last week, at the end of a busy day in the parish, visiting, celebrating Mass, praying with people, I got on the bus to begin my journey home, thinking, I rather suspect, “oh well, that’s a day well spent, now I can have a well earned gin and tonic”. A dishevelled man was sitting on the bus, drinking from a can of beer, quite possibly going nowhere where he could relax or be comfortable. He saw my collar, and this touched off some deep vein of hurt and alienation. He started swearing and shouting at me. For the first time in the day I felt quite helpless. His rage was directed, I suppose, at what he saw as authority and privilege and being at the centre of things instead of on the edge. And I realised how much I had been unconsciously assuming those things myself. It can be uncomfortable but very teaching to see yourself as others see you.

I had no idea how to respond, and stood there mute, looking away. He gradually quietened down, and as I was getting off the bus, I glanced in his direction. The man sitting next to him, who looked nearly as careworn as he did, had taken his hand and was gently massaging his fingers, and my man with the beer can was leaning against him and, I think, crying.

And that was where I saw the Communion of Saints, that day. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

Sermon at Parish Mass, St Margaret’s Leytonstone, Trinity 19 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Matthew Duckett) — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 08:15:00 +0000

Amos 5:6-7, 10-15

Hebrews 4:12-end

Mark 10:17-31

What do you give a man who has everything? Well, the shops are already filling with their stock for Christmas and the advertisers will soon be urging us to part with more of our cash for this or that present that we must give, or perhaps this or that thing that we want ourselves, and have to get someone else to give to us. And sadly some families will get seriously into debt to buy things they don’t need.

What do you give a man who has everything? The man who kneels before Jesus in today’s gospel seems to be a man who has everything. He is rich, he has many possessions. Besides that, he has kept the whole law from his youth onwards. He has everything he needs, he has ticked every box. He is the perfect “self-made man”.

And yet for some reason he feels impelled to run up to Jesus and kneel before him. And he asks, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”. Eternal life is the life that God lives, the life of the Holy Trinity which is complete openness to the other, overflowing in love and generosity, giving, not grasping, entirely free from acquisitiveness, rivalry and envy. Perhaps this man, in the presence of Jesus, has suddenly caught a glimpse of what the life of God is like, and has seen the contrast with his own life of self-made self-sufficiency. Despite his seeming to possess everything and to have achieved everything, he senses that somewhere there is a huge gap, a deep longing and a desperate need. And it is to Jesus that he feels he must turn.

And Jesus, we are told, looked at him and loved him, though there is a sharp irony in his response. “There is one thing you lack”, he says - to the man who has everything. And the one thing he lacks is - that he has everything! “Sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then, come, follow me.”

The one thing he lacked was to stop grasping onto what he imagined was his own, his self-constructed image built up through endless acquisition of possessions and spiritual achievement. The one thing he lacked was the ability to receive as a gift the life that God wanted to share with him. What do you give the man who has everything? It’s a trick question. You can’t give him anything, because he’s stopped being able to receive.

This encounter comes just after the scene in last week’s gospel where Jesus welcomed the little children and said “whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will not enter it”. And now, in contrast, we have today’s scene with the rich man who is unable to receive the kingdom, because he has too many possessions.

The contrast is between being able to receive to the Kingdom of God as a gift, and hanging on to all the acquisitiveness and cravings and illusions that we accumulate and label as “mine”. We can only receive the Kingdom as children because little children simply receive. They have nothing to bargain with, and know perfectly well that life comes to them entirely gratuitously and not by their own making.

To put it more simply, it is a contrast of desires. On the one hand our own disordered desires, cravings, compulsions and the addictions which are always outpacing our ability to satisfy them, desires which close us in on ourselves. And on the other the desire of God, which is the giving of himself in complete openness, generosity and freedom.

God’s desire is life which rises continually from the very source of life, pouring itself out without ever being exhausted. God’s desire is realised in Jesus, who is God’s own gift of himself, God’s own image of himself, God’s own life so completely and perfectly poured out, without diminishing its source, that he is God himself, the Son eternally born of the eternal Father. Jesus is God’s desire entirely realised in a human life, and a human life entirely realised in God.

If we learn to desire as God desires, then we will leave behind the disordered, death-bound desires that close us in on ourselves. By no longer grasping onto the false life that we think we can create for ourselves, we will come in free and generous openness to the life of God, receiving that life as a gift and not grasping it as “mine”.

So the call that Jesus gives to the rich man, in one way or another, is the call to us too: to give up everything, so that we might have treasure in heaven. It is the call to repentance, which is not so much saying we are sorry as the complete turning around of our lives, re-ordering our lives according to God. It is the call to the conversion of desire. To leave behind our old disordered desires which close us in on ourselves, and to be open instead to the entirely gratuitous life of God which is given to us in Jesus.

The Archbishop of Canterbury spoke about this last week when he addressed the Synod of Bishops in Rome for the 50th anniversary of the Second Vatican Council. He reminded the bishops of the remarkable revival in those 50 years, and the urgent need, of contemplative prayer for all Christians.

Contemplative prayer is nothing complicated. It is the prayer of the heart in stillness and silence. It is prayer which is simply focussed on loving attention to God who alone can draw us out from our closed-in selves. It is God alone who can expose and convert our corrupted desires. It is God alone who can draw us into his own desiring, the perfect outpouring of the self to the other that is shown to us in Jesus. It is God alone who will remake us in the image of Christ, which is God’s own image of himself.

When we are open to receiving God’s life as a gift freely poured out for us, then we will find that we are open to receiving everything else as a gift as well. Contemplative attention to God bears fruit in a contemplative habit of life. In being freed from our self-centred desires we are able to see, and rejoice in, the gratuitous generosity of the whole of creation. Even, as Jesus today tells us, in this life, in this age.

The Trappist monk Basil Pennington had lived for many years with his order in voluntary poverty, hard work and contemplative prayer. Then in 1973 he had the opportunity to spend some time on Mount Athos, the Greek Orthodox monastic centre.

In his notes Fr Basil speaks of how, for him, his life of renunciation opened him up to receiving everything as a gift. Everything he experienced, the natural beauty, the hospitality of the monks, came to him with a fresh intensity and richness because they were a free gift from the abundance of God, and not anything that he had to grasp or possess. He felt he was receiving the “hundredfold” reward that Jesus promises in today’s gospel.

We cannot free ourselves from our disordered desires by simply trying to drive them away. Because that is still to focus the attention on ourselves, on something we are trying to achieve. We can only be free from our desires by not looking at ourselves any more but at God, and allowing him to covert us, to remake us in his image.

That is true all the time, and not only as we approach the Christmas shopping season. But it is a timely reminder. Before you make your Christmas lists, may I suggest you make time for contemplative prayer, silent meditation, if it is not already part of your pattern of life. Ten or twenty minutes every day is not much, compared to the time we spend on the internet or watching television. There are meditation groups which people can join, but really there is nothing to it.

Sit still, be relaxed but attentive, let go of any noise and bustle that may be going on, and repeat a simple prayer such as the Jesus prayer to still the mind and descend into the heart. “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, be merciful to me, a sinner.” And in the silence of the heart, be attentive to God revealing himself, forming in you his own image, who is Jesus, in whom alone we find our true life.

What do you give the man who has everything? Nothing, because he is no longer able to receive. What do you give a child, who is simply open to receive what is given? The Kingdom of God.

Sermon at Parish Mass, St Mary’s Somers Town, Trinity 18 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Matthew Duckett) — Sun, 07 Oct 2012 16:09:00 +0000

Genesis 2:18-24

Hebrews 2:9-11

Mark 10:2-16

The parish where I live in east London has a fete every summer, with cakes, teas, tombola, and all the usual things going on in the churchyard and garden round the church. The sound system and music have been provided for years by a member of the congregation whose repertoire includes Agadoo, the Birdie Song, and all the Country and Western classics of the most pessimistic and despairing variety.

One year, by co-incidence, a wedding blessing took place in the church at the same time as the fete. And at the end the happy couple emerged from church to be greeted by Dolly Parton blaring out of the loudspeakers with, “D-I-V-O-R-C-E”...

Sometimes I think that the Church, when speaking on matters of personal relationships and morality, gets into loudspeaker mode: booming out things that we think we need to say to people without bothering to listen or to get alongside.

We, as followers of Jesus Christ, carry his good news for the world. But passages like today’s Gospel can seem difficult. Jesus says some quite clear and uncompromising things about divorce. Now that’s not an abstraction. Divorce is a real issue affecting many people both inside and outside the church. Real people, in churches up and down the country, our brothers and sisters, listening to the gospel with us today, and perhaps finding it rather painful. The gospel is not best preached from loudspeakers.

But the gospel is good news nonetheless. And today’s gospel reading is, at least, good news about marriage. But, more deeply, it is good news about being human, about God’s purpose in creating humanity. That is good news for everyone, married or not. But to understand how it is good news, we need to look more closely at the context in which Jesus gives this teaching, and what he is responding to.

The place where this encounter happens, according to Mark’s Gospel, is “the region of Judea beyond the Jordan”. That is, it is the same place that Jesus went to be tempted by the Devil for forty days. And the same word is used of what the Pharisees do, they ask him a question “to test him”, just as the Devil did.

Now this testing, the question that the Pharisees put to Jesus, is not really an attempt to get to the truth about something. The Pharisees think they already know the answer, they are just trying to catch Jesus out to find some basis of accusing him, as they do on a number of other occasions.

They ask if it is against the law for a man to divorce his wife. The Pharisees think they know the answer to that because the Bible says that men can divorce their wives: Deuteronomy 24:1-4. But Jesus replies that this actually isn’t a commandment from God - although it’s in the Bible - it is just a concession to human weakness.

Jesus has a radically different approach to the Bible than the Pharisees, and indeed than some Christians of our own day. You can’t simply come up with the answer to difficult questions by quoting isolated Bible texts. You need instead to understand the big picture, the big story that the Bible tells. That means looking at what is true “from the beginning”, as Jesus says, the truth of human beings in creation.

Now, “in the beginning”, in Hebrew thought, doesn’t just mean something that happened a long time ago. It means something that is foundationally true, an underlying principle.

So Jesus reminds the Pharisees that “from the beginning” God made human beings male and female, but not so that they could remain for ever separate. No, human beings are created to seek unity. According to the extract from Genesis that we heard this morning, Adam, who represents the human race, was initially alone. But then, to provide a companion, God performed that operation with the rib, and drew out from Adam a new, separate identity. Adam, humanity, was divided into two individuals, male and female. Divided not to remain alone, but to seek unity. To seek to return into one body which is no longer alone but now a new reality, a true communion of distinct persons.

Here we are at the heart of what Jesus is teaching. The purpose of marriage is the purpose of being human. It is to seek unity, a return into one body, one new human nature, a true communion in which our individuality is not lost but fulfilled.

Jesus presents here a high and beautiful ideal of marriage, of unity founded on mutual love. This contrasts with the idea current at the time, when marriage was seen more as a convenient arrangement to do with property. Marriages were arranged by negotiation between families - the men of the families - and the wife was seen as her husband’s property. So divorce was allowed - by men - in much the same way that you might decide to sell your house or other property and move to a new one.

Deeper than this contrast of ideas about marriage, we have a contrast of desire. The Pharisees’ approach to Jesus is motivated by a desire for rivalry, for accusation, for defining themselves over against Jesus. It is a desire for division. “Us against him.” But Jesus presents a model of desire in marriage which is a desire for unity. And that desire for unity, says Jesus, is what is true “from the beginning”, in God’s purpose in creation. Marriage is about the conversion of desire, from division to unity, through mutual self-giving and belonging. An end which can only really be served by faithfulness and life long commitment.

Now although Jesus holds up marriage as his example, the union of different persons in one body is an idea that runs through the whole of the New Testament, and it is called the Church.

The Church is a body - the Body of Christ. Those who are baptized into Christ, the New Adam, are united in him in his renewed humanity. In the Church all humanity is being remade by grace in one Body as a communion of distinct persons, the image of God the Holy Trinity. In the Church our desire is being converted from disorder and division into unity. The New Testament teaching about the Church is so close to Jesus’ teaching about marriage that St Paul in Ephesians calls the union of husband and wife “the mystery of Christ and the Church”.

And this perhaps is why marriage is called a sacrament, although it is a way of life common to all religions and none, because for Christians it is a sign pointing to the new reality of the Church which we enter by grace.

Of course, not everyone is married, and marriage isn’t the only way of life for Christians, or the only way of seeking unity in Christ. We enter the Church by baptism, not by marriage. For those who are “single” - though that is such an inadequate word - friendships, extended families and neighbours are true and valid expressions of human community. Then there is the celibate life lived in community, that of monks and nuns, which is recognised and blessed by the Church because it too is a sign of unity in the Body of Christ, enacted through lives of simplicity and prayer.

Today the church, like Martha, seems to be anxious about many things: the rise in cohabitation, civil partnerships, and what is essential to our understanding of marriage and sexuality. Nevertheless, beyond these things, the foundational reality remains the one new humanity that God has established in Christ, the end that we must keep in view. Marriage stands as a sign of that reality, of the faithfulness and commitment of Christ to his Church. But the Church is for all people, in all kinds of relationships, and the call to all of us is to seek unity in Christ through faithful self giving, mutual belonging, and the conversion of desire from division to unity.

Whatever people’s circumstances and personal relationships, for Christians all boundaries of “singleness” and isolation, all categories of difference, are overcome in the Church, which is the community of the Eucharist, the sacrament of unity in the Body of Christ.

In the Eucharist we receive by grace our belonging together and our unity in Christ. That is our purpose in creation, and what God has made possible for us in Christ. Our life as a church community should reflect that in the way we welcome all people, of all states of life. We are one in Christ, one body, partakers of one bread, the sacrament and sign of the unity of all things in Christ, which is our good news.

Sermon at Parish Mass Trinity 17 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Matthew Duckett) — Sun, 07 Oct 2012 15:47:00 +0000

Numbers 11:25-29

James 5:1-6

Mark 9:38-48

I wonder how many people here like solving sudoku puzzles. I don’t do them very often, but on a long journey they are a useful way of passing the time whilst keeping the brain cells stimulated.

If you’re as good at sudoku as me, you’ll be familiar with that sinking feeling, usually when you’ve filled in most of the grid, that it just isn’t going to work out. Somewhere back along the line you’ve put one wrong number in a cell, and that makes everything else wrong, too. There’s nothing for it but to undo the whole thing, go back to the beginning and start again.

In today’s gospel reading the disciples are trying to solve the puzzle of Jesus. Who is he? What is he about? They think they’ve got the answer, but actually somewhere back along the line they’ve got something basically wrong, and that makes the whole of their understanding of Jesus wrong. There is nothing for it but to go back and undo the first mistake, and start again.

They think they’ve got the answer, because about a chapter back in Mark - two Sundays ago in our readings - Jesus had asked them who they thought he was, and Peter had said, “you are the Messiah”. And he was right, but he didn’t understand what that meant. He thought the Messiah was about power and control and imposing God’s kingdom by force.

But Jesus tried to teach him that instead the Messiah must be rejected and suffer, and be put to death, and rise again. None of which Peter understood. And when he tried to talk sense into Jesus he earned the stinging rebuke, “get behind me, Satan!”. Peter, he said, had to stop thinking in a human way and start thinking in God’s way.

But as they carried on their journey up to Jerusalem, it didn’t get any better. They saw the glory of Jesus revealed on the Mount of Transfiguration, but then Jesus had told them a second time that he was going to be betrayed, and killed, and would rise again. And they had no idea what he was talking about. Blank. Not a clue.

So then the disciples started arguing which of them was the greatest. They were still inside that mindset of power and control and imposition. So Jesus took a little child, someone without any power or control, no position in society, unable to impose anything. And Jesus said, if you welcome this little child, you welcome me. This is what I’m about. This is the imagination you need to get inside to understand the Messiah.

But, as we heard today, still they don’t get it. “Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us.” They’re still thinking in terms of power and control, and therefore rivalry and fear. They think that when Jesus imposes his Kingdom, they are going to be his inner circle, his right hand men. So they can’t have anyone else threatening that position.

But Jesus says, simply, don’t stop them. “Whoever is not against us is for us.” There simply is no need, no place, for rivalry and fear in God’s kingdom. Because God’s kingdom is about love being made known in a world which is deeply resistant to love. It is therefore about love being made known in the excluded, the powerless, in the victim of human rivalry and fear and control. It is about love made known in a Man on a cross.

Now to the disciples, and to anyone who is still thinking the way the world thinks, that is a contradiction and a scandal. And scandal is the big theme that runs through today’s Gospel reading, and indeed through most of the New Testament.

Scandal, skandalon in Greek, crops up all the time, though we aren’t always aware of it because it’s translated in a number of ways: scandal, stumbling-block, offence, obstacle, and sometimes as “sin”. The image is of a block of stone in your path that you fall over or can’t get round, but at the same time that you can’t leave alone. It worries away at you. And the big scandal of the New Testament is the crucified Messiah, a seeming contradiction which is an obstacle to faith for those who can’t understand it. St Paul says in 1 Corinthians “We proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling-block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.”

Jesus does not want the disciples to avoid the approaching scandal. The scandal that the Messiah, the saviour of Israel, is going to end up on a Roman cross. But they still want to think that there isn’t a scandal. So he confronts them directly with what seems to be very scandalous teaching:

If any of you put a stumbling-block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea. If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off... And if your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off... And if your eye causes you to stumble, tear it out...

This saying of Jesus is really quite shocking. And it is meant to be. But it is not really about hands and feet and eyes so much as about the scandal itself, the stumbling block. And there’s irony in it, because if your foot or your eye caused you to stumble, you wouldn’t exactly cure the problem by cutting it off or tearing it out.

Jesus is trying to focus the eyes of the disciples on the scandal, the stumbling block, that they are trying to avoid. They are still thinking of the Messiah in earthly terms, of power and control and fear, and that is an obstacle for them. They need to unlearn that, to go back to the beginning of the puzzle and start again, and learn that God’s kingdom is quite other from what they had thought. They need to learn that God’s kingdom will be brought in by a Messiah who will be rejected, and killed, and will rise from the dead.

In the end, they still don’t get it, and they still won’t understand, right up to Good Friday itself, when the betrayal and crucifixion of Jesus will finally completely shatter their whole conception of what God and his Kingdom are about. And it was only once everything they thought they believed had been taken away from them, that they could start from the beginning again.

And they began again when the risen Christ came to them, forgiveness and love triumphant beyond the worst that the world could do. They began again, this time with the new imagination of God transforming their minds, their lives, and, through them, beginning the transformation of the world.

We too are called to that path of radical transformation, of beginning again in God’s Kingdom. Like the disciples, we too need to be alert for the scandal we are trying to avoid. Scandal can mean many things: stumbling-block, obstacle, offence, sin. What is there in our own lives which is an obstacle to our coming to Jesus, to us giving ourselves totally to him? Where are we still following the way the world thinks, the way of power, control and fear? Where is it that we still need to be liberated by the fearless, deathless love of God?

This affects not only ourselves but others too. Sin has an effect in the community. “Take care that you do not cause one of these little ones to stumble.” What we do can become an obstacle preventing others from coming to Jesus. Greed keeps others poor, deprives them of the necessities of life. Anger leads to violence, both physical and emotional. Lust erodes faithfulness in families and relationships.

Jesus calls us to turn to him, whatever our stumbling blocks, our scandals and sins. Jesus calls us to repent and be forgiven. And in that forgiveness, that embrace of God’s love, to find our minds transformed as we leave behind the way the world thinks, trapped in power and control and fear, and are set free into the unlimited, deathless, utterly vivacious love of God.

Sermon at Parish Mass, St Mary's Somers Town, Trinity 11 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Matthew Duckett) — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 16:37:00 +0000

Proverbs 9:1-6

Ephesians 5:15-20

John 6:51-58

“This may be a wicked age, but your lives should redeem it.”

The Letter to the Ephesians over the last few weeks has been painting a picture of contrasts: the new life of believers in Christ contrasted with the old life of sin and corruption. In the past they were dead in their sins but now have been saved and raised to new life in Christ. Therefore, believers must leave aside their old way of living: lies, anger, theft, evil talk, immorality. These things no longer have any place in the life of those who are in Christ.

Throughout Ephesians, Paul also contrasts the present age and the age to come. These are not simply periods of history, like the space age or the iron age, but represent two very contrasting ways of living and being, two opposed value systems, two different and incompatible imaginations.

This present age is what we might call the age of sin, governed by envy, rivalry, violence and death. The age to come is the age of God’s Kingdom. It is the age when God’s rule will be manifested in the world. It is the age in which love, justice and peace will be all in all. It is the age which the Bible compares to a great feast, of super-abundant, never-failing rich food and fine wine.

These two ages are not however consecutive periods of history. The age to come, the age of God’s rule, is not something that will come about only after this present age of sin and death is over. The Biblical picture is much richer than that. The age to come in fact is a reality which is already present. In Ephesians 3 Paul says this is a mystery “hidden from ages in God” and now brought to light in Christ.

The age to come entered the world in Jesus, because Jesus is God’s kingdom, God’s rule, in person. The preaching of Jesus was not abstract teaching, but what he was himself enacting: forgiveness, healing, the restoration of human society through the renunciation of envy and greed. These things characterise the age to come. The Kingdom of God, said Jesus, is among you - already. Let those who have eyes to see, see.

And of course this present age would have none of it and put him to death. But Jesus was raised from the dead because God’s Kingdom is triumphant and is the final word on human sin.

Christ has conquered, and the age to come is already present for those who are in Christ. Christ is risen, and those who are in Christ are raised with him into his Kingdom. In Christ we share in the life of the resurrection, which is the life of God in whom there is no death.

So we could call this present age the age of death, because death is what defines its imagination. Resources are limited, life is short, so grasp what you can while you can, before you die. And this leads us only into envy and rivalry and violence. The age of death ends in death.

And we could call the age to come the age of the resurrection. It is the age of limitless life, which we do not have to grasp at because it is a gift from the never failing generosity of God our loving Father. It is life entirely without death, without rivalry, without violence, because it is the life that God lives. The age of the resurrection has no end.

But the heart of Paul’s message in Ephesians is that if we are reborn in Christ we are already beginning to live in the age of the resurrection, even in the midst of this passing age of death.

That contrast requires, as Paul says, the radical reordering of our lives. It requires, in fact, repentance, turning around. We are to redeem the age by living according to the age to come whilst still in this passing age.

This is nothing less than a collision of worlds. As Paul repeatedly says, it requires lifelong discipline. Christ has freed us from this passing age of death, but it still retains a powerful allure. The world is very attached to the imagination of death, as we see only too well every time we turn on the news.

Nevertheless, to redeem the age is to transform the world. It is to make the age of the resurrection more concrete, more visible, in the midst of the age of death. The gospel message is not escape from this evil world to a heaven somewhere else, after we die. The gospel message is transformation of this world, the redeeming of the age. We are to live our lives according to the resurrection here and now.

This is where any true theology of liberation begins: Christ is risen, bringing the age of the resurrection to light in the midst of the age of death. We should not be surprised if the gospel often speaks most powerfully to those who are the victims of the age of death, the oppressed and downtrodden of the earth. After all, Christ’s resurrection is foreshadowed in the Exodus, the liberation of slaves from Egypt. And whether in the favelas of Brazil, or in South Africa under Apartheid, or in the slums here in the time of Father Jellicoe, Christian lives lived according to the Gospel redeem the age.

Christian life is of course life lived in the Church. St Paul is absolutely clear that if we are in Christ then we are one body, one new humanity, in Christ. That being one body in Christ is expressed and made real though the sacramental life that Christ has given us. We are made one body through Baptism and the Eucharist. Through those sacraments we receive the life of the age to come. As Jesus says in today’s gospel, “He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood lives in me, and I live in him. As I, who am sent by the living Father, myself draw life from the Father, so whoever eats me will draw life from me.”

And of course to many of those who listened this was incomprehensible and offensive language. “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” The words of Jesus provoke a violent reaction. But this too is about the collision of worlds. It is about the age of death failing to understand the age of resurrection. Because if your imagination is bounded by death, then talk about eating flesh and drinking blood can only sound like cannibalism. Someone can only give his flesh to eat if he’s dead. And that does not lead to more life but less.

But if you are in Christ, and beginning to live in the age of the resurrection, then indeed the flesh and blood of Christ are the source of limitless life, the life he draws from the living Father, and which he pours out to us continually without being diminished. In the Eucharist we are fed with the boundless, limitless life of the resurrection.

And when and where do we celebrate the Eucharist? Not in heaven, but on earth. In the midst of this passing age, the age of death, we feed on the flesh and blood of Christ, the life of the age to come. The Eucharist is the sacrament of the Church, and the Church is the sacrament of the transformation of the world, the new humanity, living from the deathless life of God.

Our participation in the Eucharist calls us to live with the same openness and generosity that God shows to us. We are to be open to the life of God, which is limitless, and to leave aside our old life of sin, which ends only in death. And the generosity of God is infectious. By being forgiven, we become forgiving. By being liberated, we become liberators, co-workers with Christ in his transformation of the world.

This is why the gospel of the resurrection is, necessarily, a social gospel, a gospel of liberation. If we live according to the resurrection then we must oppose injustice, oppression and violence in the world around us. Anything which destroys or diminishes humanity does not belong in the age to come, and we are already beginning to live in that age even in the midst of this present age.

“This may be a wicked age”, says Paul, “but your lives should redeem it.”

Sermon at Parish Mass and Baptism Trinity 7 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Matthew Duckett) — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 16:32:00 +0000

Jeremiah 23:1-6

Ephesians 2:13-18

Mark 6:30-34

“He had compassion for them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd.”

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m very much a town person, unfamiliar with the ways of the countryside, although of course acknowledging like all of us our dependence on farming and agriculture.

But the image of sheep is a very familiar one to all of us in the Bible. It is an image of the people of God, and in the Old Testament that meant the people of Israel. Sheep go around in flocks, they are not isolated individuals, so this tells us that the people of God belong together. Unity is part of what it means to belong to God as his people.

But sheep also need quite a bit of looking after. They need a shepherd to keep them together and stop them from wandering off. And they also need to be protected from predators and thieves. Sheep are not terribly resourceful. They are dependent, and need to be able to trust their shepherd. They need a good shepherd.

In the Old Testament, the metaphor of a shepherd is used of God himself: God watches over and looks after his people. But the Kings and rulers of Israel were regarded as holding their authority from God, and so they also were described as shepherds of the people. They ruled on behalf of God, and had the duty to guide the people in the right ways, to keep them together, and to protect them from aggressors.

But sadly, and often, the people of Israel didn’t have good shepherds. As in this morning’s reading from Jeremiah. The prophet is speaking just before the people of Judah were invaded by Babylon and carried off into exile. The kings of Judah have behaved stupidly and selfishly, they have not listened to the prophets, they have not seen the threat coming and have not responded appropriately. So the people are doomed. They are going to be scattered and driven away like a flock of sheep without a shepherd.

But, Jeremiah says, there is still hope. God has not forgotten his people. In the future he will give his people shepherds who will look after them, and more than that, a mysterious figure, “the Righteous Branch of David”, the Messiah, God’s anointed ruler. And the scattered people of God will once again be gathered together and live in safety.

So when in the Gospels we have references to sheep and shepherds all of that is in the background. Jesus sees the people and has compassion for them because they were like sheep without a shepherd. This is the scattered people of God, at the mercy of predators, not knowing what way to turn, and they are waiting for what Jeremiah promised: the Good Shepherd, the Righteous Branch of David, who will restore God’s people.

And the gospel writer is saying that the Good Shepherd has now come. In Jesus, God is bringing his people back together in unity and guiding and protecting them. Which is why the first thing that Jesus does is to start teaching them. As in the Old Testament, the sheep have wandered off because they haven’t been taught the ways of the Lord, the paths of righteousness and peace. And it is Jesus who announces the Good News of God, to draw his people back together into God’s Kingdom.

The image of Jesus as shepherd runs through the gospel reading this morning. We can see it when the apostles gather round Jesus to tell him about all they’ve been doing. And when he wants them to come away and rest a while we’re reminded of Psalm 23, “The Lord is my shepherd... fresh and green are the pastures where he gives me repose, near restful waters he leads me to revive my drooping spirit”.

Jesus is not like the kings of ancient Israel, who ruled on behalf of God, but mostly not very well. Jesus is enacting Psalm 23 in which the Lord is my shepherd. He is fulfilling Jeremiah who promised that the future shepherd of God’s people will be “The Lord our Righteousness”. So Jesus is not a substitute shepherd, he is the Lord himself restoring his people.

Sheep are pretty helpless, really. So in Jesus, God is taking the initiative to gather his sheep back to himself, to guide them gently into pastures where they can rest, to guide them under God’s rule, into God’s kingdom.

And the sheep that Jesus has come to gather are not only the ancient people of Israel. As our reading from the letter to the Ephesians tells us, in Jesus God has drawn into one both Jew and Gentile. Jesus has broken down all the divisions which keep human beings apart, making one new humanity and creating peace. God’s choice of the people of Israel has never been taken away, his promises to Israel have never been cancelled. But, through Jesus, that choice and those promises have been extended to all people.

This morning we celebrate the sacrament of Baptism, welcoming William as the latest member of God’s people in his church. Baptism is the sign of dying and rising with Christ. It is the sign by which we become part of the one new humanity which Jesus has created, overcoming all divisions.

And it is Jesus himself who does this. It is Jesus who works through the sacraments of his Church. We cannot make ourselves members of God’s people; Jesus the Good Shepherd seeks us out and joins us to his flock. Which is why we baptise children, who aren’t yet old enough to understand, because for all of us what matters is that God has chosen us and made us part of his redeemed people.

Most of us, probably, don’t remember our baptism. But we do know that we are baptised. We know that Christ has claimed us for his own. And he never takes back his choice.

We do not make ourselves members of the people of God. It doesn’t depend on us. And our faith, our relationship with Christ, is not an individual thing or a private hobby. We are members of a people. We, like sheep, are gathered together in unity by Christ our Good Shepherd.

And the promise of God, for us, as well as for William, is that he will guide and protect us and bring us into his Kingdom. That Kingdom is righteousness and peace for all people, in which all divisions and injustice have been overcome. It is the new humanity, made one in the body of Christ. Through Baptism and the Eucharist that new humanity becomes real in us, in our lives, and in the world. This is what Christ does for us, for William, and for all his people. And in Christ we have a sure and certain hope.

This is why we study his teachings, not just as individuals but when we come together to celebrate the Eucharist. Christ teaches us as a people, guiding us through the scriptures into the ways of God’s kingdom of justice and peace. Jesus is the good shepherd who teaches his people the good news of God. And because there is one flock of Christ, one new humanity, we need also to reflect on the insights of our brothers and sisters elsewhere in the world. For example, Christians praying alongside other faith communities in India, or struggling against injustice in the Philippines, have their own insights to share into how Christ is leading all his people.

And we make those teachings real in our lives, and carry them into the world, spreading the good news of God’s kingdom. Now we don’t follow the teachings of Christ to try and earn God’s favour. We are not trying to make the grade as the people of God. God in Jesus has already chosen us and made us part of his people. That is his free act of grace, and he will not take back his choice. So we can truly say, with William and all God’s people, that the Lord is our shepherd, and that he guides us along the right pathways for his name’s sake.

Sermon at Evensong, St Pancras New Church, Trinity 6 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Matthew Duckett) — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 16:28:00 +0000

Job 4:1; 5:6-end

Romans 15:14-29

All the ladies fell for Rudolph Valentino,
he had a beano back in those balmy days.
He knew every time you meet an icy creature,
you got to teach her hot-blooded latin ways.
But even Rudy would have felt the strain,
of making smooth advances in the rain.

Oh, this year I’m off to sunny Spain, eviva España,
I’m taking the Costa Brava plane, eviva España.
If you’d like to chat a matador, in some cool cabaña,
and meet señoritas by the score, España por favor.

Back in 1974, when that song was on Top of the Pops, package holidays and Franco’s impending demise had opened up the Spanish Costas to millions of Britons for the first time. And most of them, unused to the sunshine, came back boiled red like lobsters.

For many of us I expect the idea of a holiday in Spain might be quite attractive at the moment. Certainly when I was writing this sermon, looking out of my window at the pouring rain, it did cross my mind.

But that’s not St Paul’s idea. When he says towards the end of his letter to the Romans that he’s off to Spain, he’s not thinking of a holiday. In fact his route takes him from Macedonia to Jerusalem and then to Spain via Rome - the whole length of the Mediterranean. A long and hazardous journey with many dangers and uncertain prospects at the end. And this was by no means unusual. In 2 Corinthians Paul gives us a brief account of his travels as follows:

Three times I was shipwrecked; for a night and a day I was adrift at sea; on frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from bandits, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brothers and sisters; in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, hungry and thirsty, often without food, cold and naked.

Now that’s not the kind of recommendation you’re likely to read in a Thomas Cook brochure. So you have to ask, why did Paul bother? What drove him to undertake all these lengthy and hazardous journeys to out of the way places like Spain?

And the answer is what he has been telling us throughout his letter to the Romans. The answer is the good news of God in Jesus Christ. And that good news was the reversal of everything that Paul had thought about God.

That Good News, as Paul tells it in Romans, is that our justification, our new life in Christ, is God’s gift. It is not something we construct for ourselves, not something we earn. And Paul came to that good news through his conversion, that is, by the discovery that he was wrong.

Paul, of course, had been a violent fundamentalist, who really hated the annoying new sect called the Christians, and pursued them from city to city, trying to kill or imprison as many as possible.

Until he met Jesus. Jesus, who had been killed by religious zealots just like Paul, met him on the road to Damascus, and turned his life around. When Paul met the risen Christ his old self collapsed. Paul had been living inside a myth that he was perfect, but when he met the one he was persecuting he found instead that he was loved. All of him. His sins, his flaws, his failures. The dark depths that he hardly even guessed at. Everything about him was known, and forgiven, and embraced in a love so strong that it had raised Jesus from the dead. And this love came to him as a completely unearned, unmerited free gift.

Throughout Paul’s life, up to his conversion, he had been trying to justify himself. He was trapped inside the idea that his life was something he put together himself, that his self was his own construction. That his worth, his fundamental true and eternal value, lay in his own achievements.

And the whole of the letter to the Romans, in one way or another, is telling us how that is completely wrong. Paul is telling us how his entire world view, his entire conception of himself, collapsed and was overturned when he met Jesus.

So, for Paul, new life in Christ means a completely new beginning. It means both discovering that you have got it all wrong, and discovering that God has been waiting for you all along in the place of your wrongness, just waiting for you to let go. Waiting for you to let go of the false self you thought you could construct so you can receive the free gift of your true self, the Self which is hidden in Christ in God. The Self whose existence is founded not on anything we have done but in the truth that we are loved.

The risen Christ who met Paul on the road to Damascus shattered his illusions and broke through the shell of his ego. It was really a death; the death of what Paul calls the “old Adam”, our fallen human nature turned in on itself and its illusions. And it was a rebirth, birth into the new life of the Resurrection, the deathless and utterly loving life of God. So complete was this transformation that Paul could afterwards say, “it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me”.

And it was Christ living in Paul who drove him on, carrying him through trials and dangers and persecutions for the rest of his life. Paul was so captivated by Christ that he could not but proclaim the good news of God in as many places as possible. The good news that we are loved. Anyway. In spite of everything in our nature that wants to fight against being loved. In spite of everything in us that wants to reject God’s gift of life. In spite of our deep-seated desire to construct our own death-dealing ego-centred imitation life instead.

Paul of course eventually had his head cut off by the Emperor Nero, a man who was the very embodiment of death-dealing ego-centred imitation life. But Nero did not understand, and could not touch, the true secret of Paul’s life, which was hidden with Christ in God. Because of Christ, crucified and risen, Paul’s death became a sharing in Christ’s triumph. It became his personal final victory over sin and death and all the illusory world of the false self.

And Paul’s gospel, the good news of God in Jesus, still shouts and sings from the pages of his letters, and in the life of the Church which he spread and planted in so many places, through so many dangers.

And the good news of God in Jesus is our good news, too. The good news that we are loved. Anyway. Loved even in the midst of our wrongness. Loved even in the midst of all the ways we try to resist being loved. Loved where we are, in the place where God is waiting for us. Loved, in fact, in ways we could not have discovered so gloriously had we not been so wrong. Loved, and loved, and loved, until we can finally let go of our death-dealing ego-centred false self. Loved until we can receive God’s abundant free gift which is both God’s own life and our deepest and truest Self, Christ living in us.

This is the mystery that captivated Paul, and in which we too are caught up. His gospel is our gospel. Good news in this place, and in every place. The good news of God in Christ Jesus, to whom be glory, honour and praise, now and for ever.

Sermon at Parish Mass Trinity 4 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Matthew Duckett) — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 16:24:00 +0000

Wisdom 1:13-15; 2:23-24

2 Corinthians 8:7, 9, 13-15

Mark 5:21-43

Don’t do that. Don’t touch that. It’s dirty. I wonder how old we were when we first heard those words, or something like them. As children we quickly learn that things called “dirty” are forbidden, taboo. And most of the time of course we hope that grown-ups are trying to teach children sensible habits of hygiene.

But “dirty” is a powerful word. It can come to be associated with other forbidden things that have nothing to do with physical cleanliness. In particular sex and foreignness. That behaviour is dirty. Those people are dirty. Subconsciously “dirty” becomes attached to anything and anyone we don’t like. It draws a boundary to separate us from people we imagine are different from us. And deep down it perhaps names parts of ourselves that we deny, because to acknowledge them would make us the same as those other people we don’t want to be like.

That visceral sense of someone being “dirty” is probably the nearest that most of us can get to something that lies behind today’s gospel story. It is set in a world governed by ritual law defining what is clean and unclean. In that world those who are unclean are excluded from society.

And uncleanness was contagious, transmitted by touch. You only had to touch someone or something who was unclean and you became unclean yourself. This is why people who were unclean were segregated.

So when Jesus asked “who touched me?” he was asking a question fraught with anxiety. Particularly in a crowd, with people you don’t know. Might some unclean person have found their way in?

And in this case, that is exactly what has happened. The woman who is suffering from haemorrhages had a menstrual disorder causing excessive bleeding. This was a disaster for her, not only because it made her ill through blood loss, but because it made her permanently unclean. She was a permanent outcast from society because of her bleeding.

So for her to force her way into a crowd was a scandalous offence. For her to touch a rabbi, a holy man, was even more shocking. And she knows the magnitude of what she has done because in fear and trembling she falls down before Jesus and confesses all.

You can imagine the revulsion of the crowd. This dirty woman has pushed her way among them, rubbing against them, and has touched the rabbi. And what does Jesus say to her?

“Daughter.” Daughter. He addresses her as someone who belongs, who is part of his family. His first word to her says “there is no barrier separating you and me”. He welcomes her back into the society that had shut her out.

But more than that she is healed of her disease. Power flows from Jesus, reversing the contagion of uncleanness. Jesus seems instead to have a contagion of life and healing which is more powerful than that of dirtiness and exclusion.

And although it is the power of Jesus which has healed her, it is the woman herself who has taken the initiative. Her faith has led her to push her way through the crowd, to break the religious taboo, to touch Jesus. But it is Jesus who says she is healed and made whole.

All this takes place while Jesus is on his way to the house of Jairus, the leader of the synagogue. He is an important person, very much part of the community; yet he too has fallen at Jesus’ feet to ask for the healing of his daughter. But, while they are on the way, his daughter has died. And the people say, “don’t bother the rabbi any more”. Why would they say this? Perhaps their faith isn’t enough to imagine that Jesus could raise the dead. But perhaps also because the girl is now a dead body, and corpses were also ritually unclean. You wouldn’t ask a revered rabbi to enter a house where there was a dead body. The daughter of Jairus is now the other side of a ritual boundary of exclusion.

But this does not matter to Jesus. He goes in and touches the dead girl, taking her by the hand. And once again the contagion of uncleanness is reversed: instead of Jesus being contaminated by the corpse, life and healing flow from him. The girl is raised to life.

We’re told that she is twelve years old. That was the age at which girls were deemed to be legally adults. The law of Moses, including all the ritual purity rules, applied from that age. It’s surely significant that it was just as this girl became subject to the purity laws, that she died. Just as the woman with the haemorrhage had been suffering the social death of an outcast for twelve years, because of the purity laws.

The symbolism here is that these rules of inclusion and exclusion bring death. They stop people living and flourishing in the community of God’s people. And Jesus overcomes all that. Jesus crosses the boundaries that he shouldn’t cross, he touches and is touched by the excluded people. And they are made clean and whole and restored to society.

Jesus overcomes the contagion of uncleanness with his own, more powerful, contagion of life and love. He draws people to him, cutting across the boundaries which were supposed to keep them away.

We need to ask where those boundaries are in our own day. Where are the barriers in our society that keep people from flourishing? We live in a prosperous city, by world standards, but there are many people on the margins. People like Joanne, a homeless woman I know who often sits on the streets around Euston. As the Olympics approach, her experience is that she and other homeless people are increasingly being stopped by police, arrested, moved on, driven out of the centre of the city. For some it seems that “cleaning up the streets” means more than scrubbing off graffiti and weeding the flower beds.

This matters, because the Gospel is about the Kingdom of God in which all human beings are called to dwell together. It matters because Jesus still today crosses the boundaries that are meant to keep people out.

We value this church building as a place of welcome, and many people indeed find it to be so, a place of prayer and sanctuary as well as a meeting space which is used by the wider community. But most of the people who live in the area are not with us for Mass today. Of course we don’t want to force people in against their will. But we do need to make sure that there are no invisible barriers keeping out people who want to come in.

What we do in church is culturally quite strange for most people today. Making responses, singing hymns, bowing and genuflecting, do not come naturally. And add to that all the subliminal expectations about how people are supposed to dress or behave when they come to church. We think these things are traditional but actually most of them are quite recent. I fear that many people don’t come because they simply assume that they wouldn’t belong.

But the mission of Jesus is to draw everyone into God’s kingdom, and the church is the bearer of that mission. There is nobody who is “dirty”, unclean, outside, nobody who doesn’t belong. So we do need to take a critical look at what we do, both as a community in this city and as the community of the Church. We do need to ask whether what is comfortable for us is not a barrier for others.

We who were once far off have been welcomed by Jesus into the new life of his kingdom. And we cannot but welcome others, too.

Sermon, Trinity 2 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Matthew Duckett) — Sun, 17 Jun 2012 17:19:00 +0000

Ezekiel 17:22-24

2 Corinthians 5:6-10

Mark 4:26-34

I don’t know if you watch Gardener’s World. On Friday Monty Don was talking about potting up seedlings, which reminded me that was a job that I needed to do. His yarrow seedlings were just right – the roots had reached the bottom of the plug, but no more. Alas, his basil seedlings had become plug bound – he had left it a little late, and too much root had grown. He said you have to wait until the seedlings are just ready to pot up, and then waste no time – get on with it!

I imagine, however, that if we watched Gardener’s World and Monty told us that this was the week for sowing dandelions in our lawn, or nettles in our lettuce bed, we might wonder if he’d caught a touch of the sun. Except there hasn’t been any sun…

It would be a strange thing to tell us to plant weeds in our carefully cultivated gardens or window boxes. But that is the story that Jesus tells us today. Someone sows a mustard seed. And you have to ask why. The mustard plants that grow in the Holy Land are invasive weeds. True, their seeds are used for flavouring, but you don’t need much, and there’s always some growing out by the roadside, disregarded most of the time. But you want to keep it out of your garden or your field, because it would quickly take over. It’s not something that anyone would grow on purpose.

And yet, in the parable, someone sows a mustard seed. Stranger still, it grows into the biggest shrub of all and all the birds of the air shelter under its branches. Well, mustard isn’t that big, really. It’s a thin straggly plant about six feet high, and wouldn’t provide much shade for anything.

So we enter the mysterious parallel universe of the parables. Much of the teaching of Jesus in the first three gospels takes the form of parables, and they are more than just metaphorical stories. They describe reality differently from what we are used to. They challenge our perception and our priorities. They invite us to enter a deepened awareness, a new consciousness, of something that Jesus is holding out to us but that we can’t grasp in terms of life as we know it. The parables are windows into a new and different reality.

What reality is that? It is the reality that led the first Christians to record these teachings of Jesus in the first place. The reality of the risen Lord, the living presence in their midst. The reality of the life that had burst victorious from the tomb, from the place of apparent final defeat. The reality of their own lives being transformed by the deathless, utterly loving life of God.

It is that reality which undergirds the whole gospel. The resurrection, the life of God breaking in to the world in the place of rejection and defeat, is the key to understanding everything in the gospels and indeed everything in the Bible.

Which is I think why a number of the parables are about sowing seed, with its resonances of death, burial and resurrection. Jesus himself makes this link in John’s Gospel, where speaking about his death he says, “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” St Paul in 1 Corinthians uses the same imagery to speak of the resurrection, “What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable.”

So it’s significant that in this parable of the mustard seed it is a weed that is sown. The disregarded, roadside plant that you wouldn’t want in your garden becomes an image of Jesus who was despised and rejected. The rubbish seed that no-one wants is thrown into the ground. And, miraculously, it rises, and becomes a great tree, giving shelter to all creatures. Just as Jesus, raised from the dead, becomes the one in whom all will find their true life and true home.

The resurrection reveals the Kingdom of God and opens the Kingdom to all believers. “What can we say the Kingdom of God is like?” asks Jesus. The Kingdom is God’s rule, God’s justice, God’s life, enacted in the world. The Kingdom is everything as God intends it to be. In the Kingdom all that has been wrong is put right, and there is no death, because it is the world fully alive in God and there is no death in God.

In his teaching Jesus talks about the Kingdom both as something that is to come, and as something already present, for those who have eyes to see. In the Jewish tradition of the temple the Kingdom was the hidden reality at the heart of creation, always present but concealed, waiting to be manifested like a seed hidden in the earth, biding its time.

In Jesus God’s kingdom has become real in the world. In his human life God’s rule, God’s life, entered the world. In his resurrection the Kingdom has triumphed in the place of rejection and defeat. The discarded seed has become the Kingdom of God. The stone which the builders rejected has become the corner stone. As St Paul says in Romans, Colossians and Ephesians, this is the mystery which was hidden for past ages and has now been revealed in Jesus.

That reality has always been present, whether people have been waking or sleeping, aware or unaware. But now Jesus has risen, the green blade has burst from the earth, and the harvest has come. The Kingdom is revealed, and all people may enter in.

And the harvest of God’s Kingdom always begins on the edges, at the margins, in the place of rejection and defeat. Because that is where the Kingdom has entered the world in Jesus.

In our own lives, where is God at work? Where is God’s Kingdom becoming real, for us? Is it when we are comfortable, at ease, unchallenged, satisfied with ourselves, when we think our life is what we make it? I don’t think so. Is it not rather in the times of loss and sorrow, the times of emptiness and failure and disorientation, the times when we know we come with empty hands to receive our true life from God?

So too with those we welcome and serve in the Church. It is no accident that the attention of the Church – if it is being true to its calling – is so often on the margins of society, the rejected, the excluded, the misfits. This is not just because we feel sorry for people. It is because that actually is the priority of God’s Kingdom. It is where God is bringing about his rule and his new life. And if the rich and the comfortable and the at-ease get into the Kingdom it will be hanging on to the ragged coat tails of the poor, the despised, and the rejected of the earth.

So when we pray, as Jesus taught us, “Thy Kingdom come”, we are praying for that reality of God’s rule and God’s life to take root and fill the land. We are praying for it to become real in our own lives, and in those around us, so that the world can be transformed by the risen Christ. And we are praying for a new awareness, to be enlightened so we can see God’s Kingdom, the mystery hidden through past ages and now revealed in Jesus Christ.

Sermon, Trinity Sunday 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Matthew Duckett) — Sun, 17 Jun 2012 17:15:00 +0000

Isaiah 6:1-8

Romans 8:12-17

John 3:1-17

Yesterday was a joyful day in the lives of two members of the congregation I serve at St Pancras Old Church. And it was a day of great joy for me as well, as I had the privilege of presiding at their marriage and celebrating their wedding Mass.

The marriage rite concluded, as it does, with the exchange of rings. And the words that are used at that moment are:

I give you this ring as a sign of our marriage. With my body I honour you, all that I am I give to you, and all that I have I share with you, within the love of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Some astounding things happen in church. Sinners become saints, bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ. And those words that people say to each other at their marriage are also astounding.

At a marriage we name the mystery we celebrate today, God in three Persons, the Holy Trinity, incomprehensible, beyond all names and forms; and we locate our pledge of human love within that mystery.

Is this just mystification, spoiling a happy human occasion with obscure theological jargon? I don’t think so. Because the Trinity is about love. It is about the revelation that God is love, and that God calls human beings to enter in and share in that love.

Most people believe in God, of course, apart from a few eccentrics. That belief is expressed in many religions, but mostly in our own so-called secular culture by vague inklings and longings. “I think there is something more than this”; “I believe in someone watching over me”.

But we as Christians find that we have to believe in God, and that we have to talk about God as Trinity, because we are in a living relationship with Jesus of Nazareth. And it is that relationship that enables us to say that God is love, love come to us, love embracing us and enfolding us and carrying us home.

Because we are in that relationship with the risen Lord we are able to say something about God, and in essence it is this: God is whoever it is who loved Jesus and raised him from the dead. And all the formulations of doctrine through church history, the Trinity and the Incarnation, flow from that. God is whoever it is who loved Jesus and raised him from the dead.

The background to the God of Jesus, of course, is Israel. The God of Israel was not like the gods of the other nations that could be described, understood, depicted as statues. In the holy of holies in the Temple at Jerusalem there was no image of God, just empty space, a door into abyssal silence and infinite depth, the void beyond all things from which all things have their being.

And yet that depth, that incomprehensible mystery, called to Israel. That experience of God calling took many forms. It could be the rage against injustice and exploitation that rose unbidden in the heart of the Prophet Amos. It could be the “the sound of utter silence”, at which Elijah covered his face and was afraid. Or it could be a terrifying theophany, such as the vision in Isaiah today.

And then Jesus came among us, a human being who called God “Father” and said that the Father loved him. A human being who, moreover, said that he was the Father’s message of love, in person, sent into the world, as he says this morning in today’s Gospel.

Now for a human being to say that God the Creator loves him is to say something which seems to be impossible. Love, real love, can only happen between equals, in freedom, in a relationship of mutual self-giving.

We use the word “love” quite loosely of course. We might say that we love our cat, or the view from Fiesole at sunset, or a nice bottle of claret. But we are not in a relationship of mutual self-giving with those things. Even a cat cannot give back to us as we give to her, in equality and freedom.

Love, in the proper sense, is only possible between equals. So when Jesus the man says that God the Creator is his Father, and loves him, he is saying something astounding. He is saying that he and the Father are equals. He is saying that they give themselves to each other in mutual surrender and freedom. Jesus the human being is saying that he and the Father are both God.

So Jesus, the human being, is God come among us. And the reason why he has come among us is so that all human beings can come to call God “Father”. So that all human beings can enter into the love that the Father shares with the Son. So that human beings, in Jesus, can be partakers of the divine nature. And to enable this to happen he has sent his Spirit into the hearts of believers. Now this Spirit is sent from the heart of God, and therefore is also God, because everything in God is God, pure and simple.

Now as the church grew and spread, people thought and debated about what exactly this all meant, and how best to express it.

Some Christians argued that Jesus was not really God, only similar to God. But the problem is that this makes Jesus’ mission impossible. If he is not truly God, then the Father cannot love him – or us. He can be kind, merciful, compassionate, yes, but not loving, because he can only love his equal, in freedom and mutual self giving.

Some other Christians argued that Jesus wasn’t really human, just God in the appearance of a human, a vision or illusion. But if Jesus isn’t human, then we humans can’t be joined with him in the relationship of love he shares with his Father.

All of which led over the course of time to the Church saying that there is one God in three persons, and that the Son truly became human and is “of one substance with the Father”, as we say in the creed. And so the Church arrived at the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation.

Language of course can be tricky, and words change their meaning. When the theologians centuries ago said “three persons” they didn’t mean what today we might mean, three individuals or three people. They meant that there are three relations in God, so that the heart of Divine life, the inside of God as it were, is infinite mutual self-giving love. God is not literally a father, or a son, or a breath of wind. These are metaphors which connect with things we do understand, and point to relations in God which are real and true, but surpass our understanding.

And in case you’re wondering if the language of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is all a bit masculine for a metaphor, you might like to consider that the word “Trinity”, in Greek and in Latin, is feminine.

But whether the metaphor is masculine or feminine, the message, the good news, remains the same. God is whoever it is who loved Jesus and raised him from the dead. This same God has created us to enter into the relationship of self-giving love that we call the Trinity, and in union with Jesus, who is fully human and fully divine, has made that possible.

Love is the reason for our creation, and the goal of our existence. When that love came among us, and was rejected by being nailed to a cross, God refused to take that rejection as our final answer, and raised Jesus from the dead.

We are joined with the risen Jesus in faith. In our baptism we partake of his nature and are born again as children of God. In the Eucharist and through the scriptures he feeds us with his divine life.

The love of God which surpasses all human knowledge draws us, in Jesus, into God’s very life. The risen life of Jesus opens the life and love of God to all people. In Jesus we have received the Spirit of adoption by which we, too, call God “Father”.

And it is that Spirit, in the risen Jesus, who enables us to believe and confess and love one God, Father Son and Holy Spirit.

Sermon Easter 2 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Matthew Duckett) — Sun, 17 Jun 2012 17:05:00 +0000

Acts 4:32-35

1 John 5:1-6

John 20:19-31

North Korea, that eccentric and isolated state, caused alarm again last week by its plans to send up a rocket to put a satellite into orbit. Those plans were regarded by many as a cover for testing an intercontinental missile. Missiles are scary things, particularly when the people building them have atom bombs and are fixated by an ideology that most of the world regards as deranged.

In the event, however, the North Korean test failed, so perhaps its neighbours are now a little less agitated than they were.

This may seem a curious introduction to today’s Gospel, but there is a connection. The word “missile” is part of a family of words which share the same root. Others include mission, Mass, and missal, and all derive from the Latin for “to send”.

Sending is mission. And today the risen Lord appears to the disciples in the upper room, and sends them. But unlike the sending of a missile with its threat of hostility and violence, this is a mission of peace.

“Peace be with you. As the Father sent me, so I am sending you.”

As we have been seeing during Easter week, in John’s Gospel the resurrection is really the beginning of the story of the disciples. Mary Magdalene, Peter, John and today Thomas are brought into a new relationship when they meet the risen Lord. The meeting completes their journey into faith, liberating them from the various ways in which they have been in captivity to sin and death.

Meeting with the risen Lord enables them to believe and so enter into the life which Jesus shares with the Father in the Holy Spirit. The resurrection means coming to live in God in whom there is no death.

Today Jesus spells out more of what that means. The life of God is not something static and self-contained, but is super-abundant, inexhaustible, continually pouring itself out in the work of creation. God’s utterly vivacious loving alive-ness bursts out in all directions.

Jesus has been sent into the world, the Son of the Father, the eternal Word, to complete the work of creation, to bring all to perfection and to enable the creation to share the life of God. And the risen Lord has opened the way to the Father, so that we can enter in and live with his life. That means we also share in the movement of that life into creation. The resurrection draws us into the sending of the Son and enables us to become its continuation in the world. Those who believe in Jesus become part of God’s movement into creation to redeem creation.

That is what the church’s mission is. It arises from the heart of God and pours itself out into the world. It is a Divine movement that we receive and participate in. We are sent. The mission of the church is not something we devise ourselves. Just as Baptism and the Eucharist are things we receive and participate in, because they are part of that same sending, part of that same movement of God into the world. Baptism and Eucharist constitute the Body of Christ, his presence and his mission in the world. This is why one of the words for the Eucharist is the Mass, the “sending”. This derives from the dismissal at the end, “ite missa est”, go, you are sent, go in the peace of Christ. The Mass reconstitutes us as the sending, the mission, of God, bearing his peace into the world.

The mission that Christ gives us is peace, forgiveness, and witness to the risen Lord. Its purpose is to bring people into that relationship of faith in which we can say “my Lord and my God”, in which we receive and participate in the very life of God.

All churches are now supposed to have mission statements, a description of the work that we believe God is calling us to do in our particular context. That’s an important thing. For too long the idea of mission was synonymous with foreign mission, that is sending people to far flung corners of the world to preach the gospel to those who had never heard it. That is an important aspect of mission. But we must not forget that the church is God’s mission in the world, everywhere. Home and abroad. We are sent as the Church, here. We have a mission, here.

But mission statements must be how we interpret and live the mission we have received, not something we construct ourselves. Peace, forgiveness, witness to the risen Lord, and bringing people to faith, are the core. Without those elements whatever we do is simply not the mission of the Church. Social activism by itself, however good, is not what Christ was sent to do and not what we are sent to do.

There is a social gospel, but only because there is a gospel. Care for the marginalised and needy necessarily follows from the fact that there is Good News. The truth that God in Jesus has freed us from the old order of sin and death spills over into every aspect of life that is still under the sway of sin and death. The Gospel, necessarily, is about liberation for all. But it begins with the Good News of Jesus.

Sometimes I think we as the church need to recover confidence in the mission we have received, the movement of God into creation in which we are caught up. Occasionally, exceptionally, I come across churches or clergy who seem to be very busy doing all kinds of good things in the community, but who seem to lack confidence in the basic beliefs that ought to be motivating all this activism.

St Francis is supposed to have said, “preach the gospel and, if necessary, use words”. There is a place for that but it is perhaps a little over quoted. It can be too ready an excuse for those who are embarrassed about making up-front claims for faith. Faith does actually need words. Now we are not all speech makers, we are not all teachers, not all apologists for Christian doctrine. But as the first letter of St Peter says, “always be prepared to give an account of the hope that is within you, but do it with gentleness and respect.”

In one way or another, the answer to the question, “why do we care?”, comes back to the hope that is within us because Christ is risen.

We have met the risen Lord and been called by him, sent by him. He has drawn us into God’s mission, which is his own mission, to bring peace and forgiveness to the world. We are sent as witnesses of his risen life, to bring the world into the relationship into which he has drawn us, the relationship of love, peace, and forgiveness. The relationship in which we share the very life of God.

Because Christ is risen, because he has called us, he has sent us to bring all the world into the embrace of that relationship with him in which we say “my Lord and my God”.

Sermon at Parish Mass Easter Day 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Matthew Duckett) — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 13:39:00 +0000

Acts 10:34, 37-43

Colossians 3:1-4

John 20:1-9

I’d like to invite you to close your eyes for a moment and imagine all the colours of the rainbow. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. Now try to imagine a colour you’ve never seen, an eighth colour. A colour that isn’t in the spectrum you know.

Difficult, isn’t it? Similarly, could we imagine a perfume we’ve never smelt, or music, if we’d never heard it? Can you imagine life outside the womb, until you are born?

Today, the disciples run to the tomb, and they start to experience something they have never experienced or imagined before. Something they were not even capable of imagining, until they actually experienced it.

“He saw and believed. Till this moment they had failed to understand the teaching of scripture, that he must rise from the dead.”

Everything we have read in the Gospel, up to now, was written because of what we read today. It is the resurrection which enables the story to be told. Throughout the gospels the disciples fail to understand Jesus until the resurrection enables them to imagine something they had never experienced before.

It was impossible to imagine a crucified Messiah, until the Messiah had risen from the dead. It was impossible to understand how the whole world was in slavery to sin and death, until the God in whom there is no sin or death bursts in upon that world. It was impossible for the disciples to know how much they were governed by the fear of death, until they experienced a reality in which death simply does not exist. It was impossible for the disciples to know their own complicity in violence, denial, betrayal, until the man they had denied came back to them from death breathing love and forgiveness.

As we heard on Friday, Jesus on the cross cried out, “It is accomplished!”. Jesus has finished the work the Father sent him to do. This is the work of creation, the work to restore and complete all things as the Father wills them to be. And the culmination of the work of creation is union with God. Jesus confers on those who believe “the power to become children of God”, as John announces in the prologue to his Gospel.

In a sense, in John’s Gospel, on the cross the story of Jesus is complete. He has done what he came to do. With the resurrection, the story of the disciples begins. The story of Mary Magdalene, Peter, the Beloved Disciple, Thomas. All of them, in different ways, come to faith. All of them have been imprisoned in an imagination bounded by death, and all of them are called by the risen Lord from out of that prison. They come to believe. They come to be children of God in whom there is no death.

Before the resurrection, in John, Jesus talks about his relationship with the Father as something that only he participates in. He speaks of “the Father” or “my Father”, addressing the disciples as people who are, for the time being, outside that relationship. There is no Lord’s Prayer in John, he does not teach them to pray “our Father”.

But Jesus does promise that the disciples will come to share that relationship. “In my Father’s house”, says Jesus, “there are many dwelling-places… If I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also.”

In his High Priestly Prayer at the Last Supper he has prayed that his disciples might be one, not in a functional sense of being part of the same organisation, but in the way that Jesus and his Father are one: “may they all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.”

When Jesus says, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me”, he is saying that he is the way by which his disciples, too, will come to call God “Father”. He is the way by which they will be included in the life that he shares with his Father, the life in which there is no death.

So, when the Risen Lord meets Mary Magdalene outside the tomb, he says, “Go to my brothers and say to them, “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God”. For the first time in John’s Gospel, Jesus’ Father is our Father, too, his God is our God, too. We are no longer servants, or even friends, but brothers and sisters.

Jesus through his death has gone to the Father, and now lives the limitless, unconditioned, deathless life of the Resurrection. By the power of his resurrection, we too can become children of God, we too can call God “Father”.

The old imagination of a life conditioned by violence and fear and bounded by death has gone. Christ is risen, and that changes everything. Christ is risen, and that makes it possible to believe. Christ is risen, and that makes it possible to imagine what we could never have imagined before: that in the Father there is no death, no violence, no darkness at all. The Father is utterly vivacious, deathless self-giving love. And the Father calls us through Jesus to share in his life.

With the first disciples, the resurrection enables us to believe. To believe in Jesus, God’s Son. To believe in God the Father who raised him from the dead. To believe in the Spirit, who is God’s life, bringing creation into being, breathing in our hearts. Belief is belief in, not about. Belief is relationship. In a while we shall say the Creed together as we prepare to renew our baptismal promises. The Creed is not a tick chart of statements that we have to agree to. It is a description of the relationship we are in. The relationship of the Church, God’s people redeemed by the resurrection, with and in God who is Trinity.

And then like the first disciples, we shall meet the Risen Lord. He is risen to the unconditioned, boundless life of the Father, and makes himself known in bread and wine, the endless inexhaustible extension of his risen presence in all the world until the end of time.

We have met him, and we believe. We have met him, risen from the dead. He feeds us with his life, the life he shares with the Father, in whom there is no death. He is the way, the truth and the life. Through him we come home to the Father’s house, our Father’s house. In him we are freed from the old order of sin and death.

Jesus has completed the work he came to do, the work of our creation. After the seventh day, when God rested from his work, the eighth day has dawned, the day of resurrection, the day of new creation, the day that will never end.

God has burst into our lives from the empty tomb, to give us what we could never have imagined or foreseen: the deathless, vivacious, utterly loving life of God our Father. Now, and for ever. Alleluia, Amen.

Sermon at the Solemn Liturgy Good Friday 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Matthew Duckett) — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 13:34:00 +0000

Isaiah 52:13-53:12

Hebrews 4:14-16; 5:7-9

The Passion according to John

“It is finished.”

So says Jesus, the last word he speaks from the cross in John’s Gospel. What does this mean? Is Jesus simply saying that it’s all over, is he relieved that death, finally, is at hand to end his sufferings? Sometimes, after the death of someone who has suffered much, we find comfort in the thought that their suffering is over. That is not wrong.

But is that all there is to what John is saying here? John, of all the gospel writers, is the most rich in symbolism, in hidden depths of meaning. What is finished is the task that the Father has sent Jesus to do, and we know this because Jesus has already many times spoken of its completion.

When Jesus met the Samaritan woman at the well, after he told her that he would give living water, he said, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work.”

Later, he said to those who criticised him for healing on the Sabbath, “The works that the Father has given me to complete, the very works that I am doing, testify on my behalf that the Father has sent me.”

Then, at the Last Supper, in the high priestly prayer, he prays to his Father, “I glorified you on earth by finishing the work that you gave me to do. So now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had in your presence before the world existed.”

What is finished is the Father’s work, the work of the creator, which Jesus has come to complete. This work consists of bringing everything into being, giving life, and glorifying the Father.

It may seem strange to think that the work of creation might not be complete. But only if we think of creation as an event in the past, something like the “big bang” setting everything into motion. But that is not the scriptural idea of creation at all.

Creation is the principle by which everything exists moment by moment. It is the dependence of everything on the will of God.

In the biblical vision, creation is something continually coming into being, striving in its own birth-pangs to come to the completion willed by the Father.

What is that completion? It is union with God. It is entering into the life that God lives, which we call eternal life.

This takes us right back to Christmas morning, and the prologue of John’s Gospel, in which the mission of Jesus is announced: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being… He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God.”

Jesus, the Word of the Father, has come into the world to complete the work of creation, to put right all that is wrong, to heal the sick, to raise up the fallen, to give life, to give power to become children of God. Jesus has come from the Father so that we, too, can call God Father.

So the cry of Jesus on the cross, “it is finished”, is not a statement of final relief, still less of despair. It is a cry of triumph and exaltation. It recalls the words of God over creation at the beginning and the end of the Bible.

In Genesis, we are told, God finished the work of creation, and blessed it, and rested from his work. And at the end of the book of Revelation there is that glorious vision when the new heaven and the new earth have appeared and the new Jerusalem has come down from heaven to be home for all peoples. And Jesus says, “It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give water as a gift from the spring of the water of life. Those who conquer will inherit these things, and I will be their God and they will be my children.”

But how is it that the work of creation can be completed on the cross, in what seems like a shameful act of violent destruction?

For the author of John’s Gospel, what is truly taking place on the cross is not defeat, but victory; not shame but glory. Many times Jesus has spoken of his death as his glorification. Why? Because it is his return to the Father.

What is taking place is the spiritual reality foreshadowed by the Rite of Atonement in the temple. This is referred to in the reading from Hebrews that we heard this morning, which tells us that Jesus is “the supreme high priest who has gone through to the highest heaven”.

In Rite of Atonement, which took place once a year, the High Priest offered a sacrifice for the sins of Israel and then went into the Holy of Holies, the place where God symbolically dwelt, to intercede for the people.

So Jesus, returning to the Father, has offered once for all his self-giving sacrifice for sin, and entered the heavenly sanctuary where God dwells, to make intercession for us and for all of creation.

So this is indeed the completion of his work, his return to the Father. The death of Jesus is his glorification, his exaltation.

The Rite of Atonement in the temple was at its heart a symbolic enactment of God restoring his creation. Jesus has in his person achieved what the Rite of Atonement pointed to. As the Letter to the Hebrews tells us, he has passed into the true heavenly sanctuary, through his sacrifice of self giving love, and in so doing has achieved the eternal perfection of all he is sanctifying.

But of course that is not the end. We could not realistically believe that creation had been restored by the death of Jesus if his body had stayed in defeat in the tomb.

The glorification of Jesus is not a nice idea, floating somewhere in the heavens above but not connecting with us down here. It would mean nothing if the rest of the human race remained in slavery to sin and death. But that glory cannot be contained, and will come bursting from the tomb.

The Church lives in the light and power of that victory. Every day, including today. We only celebrate “Good” Friday because of the resurrection. But in the cycle of the liturgy, for the time being, we wait. Hidden from our sight, our High Priest has passed to the Father and completed the work of our redemption. But it is his resurrection that enables us to share in his victory. In but a little while, we shall acclaim him with shouts of Easter joy. Today, we wait at the cross, outside the tomb. Christ has won his victory, and the victor’s triumphant return will not be long.