Writing on the Walls of Nineveh

Sermon at Parish Mass, 5th Sunday in Ordinary Time, 5th February 2012

2012-02-06T11:31:00.000Z

Job 7:1-4, 6-7
1 Corinthians 9:16-19, 22-23
Mark 1:29-39

I don’t know quite how mother-in-law jokes became such a stock in trade of British humour. Les Dawson was one of the great exponents; they are part of our culture. But perhaps they have them in other cultures as well.

Anyway it shouldn’t be a surprise that there’s a mother-in-law joke that goes with this gospel reading. Simon Peter must really have loved Jesus, if he carried on being his disciple even after he healed his mother-in-law. Ba-boom.

Jokes aside, though, we might on hearing this reading experience another response which also reflects our culture. “The fever left her and she began to wait on them.” We might think, how typical, the men are all standing around being important, and the women are left to do the serving.

But that would be to mis-read the gospel, because service, in fact, is absolutely central to what it means to be a disciple of Jesus. Simon’s mother-in-law, in this passage, is being presented as the model Christian disciple. In fact the word used for her service is “diakonein” – deaconing. The word does simply mean waiting at tables, but by the time Mark’s gospel was written it was also being used of a distinctive category of public Christian ministry, the ordained diaconate. So this does indicate a representative kind of Christian discipleship. And Simon’s mother-in-law is presented as the model disciple in contrast to the men, who haven’t yet understood what Christian discipleship is about.

Look at who is there: James and John. They appear later in the gospel, in the scene in chapter 10 where Jesus says, “anyone who wants to be great among you must be your servant, and anyone who wants to be first among you must be the slave of all. For the Son of Man himself did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

And Jesus said that because James and John wanted to have seats at the right and left hand of Jesus in his glory. They wanted the power and the status. Jesus had to teach them that that wasn’t what it meant to be a disciple of his.

But Simon’s mother-in-law understands this straight away, and that is something to do with her being touched and healed by Jesus. Jesus “helped her up”, in fact he “raised” her in Greek, and the word has connotations of resurrection. Jesus shares his life with his disciples, so that those who follow him start to reflect his life. That life is the power and love of God come into the world.

But the world is run on very different lines from those shown to us by Jesus. The world is run by a power which is based on rivalry, domination, conflict and violence. The love and power of God, come into this world, does not mimic those powers; indeed it cannot, because then it would be just another rival in the same old system.

No; the love and power of God, come into the world, takes the form of service, of becoming a slave, of giving love’s life as a ransom for many.

It’s difficult for us to grasp how revolutionary that is. In the Greek and Roman worlds servants and slaves were a lower form of life, and you aspired to be the person who was served. Humility was regarded as shameful. Or consider that rather gloomy reading from Job we heard this morning. That Old Testament voice sees nothing good in being a slave. The fact that humility and service are now considered praiseworthy, the fact that people are uneasy around arrogance and shows of power, tells us something of how the Christian gospel has worked its way into the mindset of Western European civilisation. It was not so anywhere before the Gospel was preached; it still is not so in cultures untouched by Christian influence – think of China and Japan, for example.

We have seen first hand this last week something of the legacy of Christian teaching in our culture, in the visit of Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall. They are two people who do indeed have power and status, but who have dedicated their lives to serving the community. Many of us were touched and moved to witness the real care and concern that they showed, and the encouragement that they gave us, for the Christian service that our churches offer to those in need and the wider community.

And of course Prince Charles is following the example of his mother, who explicitly understands her position as Queen to be one of Christian discipleship and service. Tomorrow is the 60^th anniversary of the death of King George VI, a man who was thrust into that position of service unexpectedly, at a very dark time just before the outbreak of the war. The film “The King’s Speech” brought home to us how much personal suffering that involved for him. But he did not shrink from it. And neither did his daughter.

This jubilee year is going to be a great opportunity to celebrate the service of our Queen over so many years – a service she shows no sign of relinquishing. But it is also an opportunity to restate what it means to be a Christian disciple, with a celebration of the great public example that the Queen gives. That is an inspiration to us all.

But for us as well as for the Queen, it all comes from Jesus. Like Simon’s mother-in-law, it is the experience of being touched and healed and forgiven by Jesus, that experience of being “raised” by him, which makes us his disciples. Jesus reverses our priorities. We become servant disciples because Jesus serves us, he ministers to us. It is through his grace that we enter his risen life, and it is through living with his life that we become servants too.

This works itself out in practice in our parish in so many ways. The night shelter; our welcome to visitors; our work with the Community Centre, with London Citizens and St Pancras hospital. Just a few examples of many.

The media spotlight has passed from us as the Royal couple go their way to support other initiatives, other forms of service to communities elsewhere. But we continue to bring to bear the light and life of Christ here where we are called to be the servants and disciples of Christ, making known his love in the world.

Sermon at Parish Mass, 4th Sunday of Epiphany 2012

2012-02-06T11:27:00.000Z

Deuteronomy 18:15-20

1 Corinthians 7:32-35

Mark 1:21-28

Which teachers do you most remember from school? There’s one I remember for whom I’m particularly grateful. There was a time when I was falling a bit behind, and that can be a dangerous trap for a child to be caught in. Your feeling of self-esteem and capability can plummet, and then your performance does too, so you feel even worse. It’s a vicious circle. But this teacher noticed. And quietly, without fuss, without showing me up in front of the other boys, he helped me, gave up his time, coached me – in his own subject and others – and helped me get back on track. Good teachers don’t just tell you things you need to know, they change your life.

Teaching is about so much more than imparting information. It’s about growth, development, and transformation. Good teaching is relational, and helps you to grow by opening you to the truth.

The people in today’s Gospel reading are said to be astonished by the teaching of Jesus, it makes a deep impression on them. This is interesting as Mark doesn’t actually tell us what Jesus has taught. All we have is its result, given in a symmetric sequence of the kind that Mark likes: the people are impressed, a man described as possessed by an unclean spirit is delivered, and the people are impressed again.

It is as though the presence of Jesus is in itself his teaching. It is his presence which is transformative, which opens people to the truth. This is because Jesus is not imparting truth as an abstract concept, rather he is the truth in person. To be taught by Jesus is to enter into relationship with him, to be opened to the truth.

The reading we heard from Deuteronomy is important for understanding this. Moses promises the people of Israel that God will send them a prophet like himself who will teach them everything that God commands. The prophet like Moses is not any old prophet. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the others aren’t in the same league. The prophet who will be like Moses is unique, just as Moses uniquely delivered the law to the people on Sinai, so this new prophet will uniquely make known everything that God teaches.

An important thread running through the Gospels is that Jesus is this new prophet, the prophet like Moses who discloses the whole purpose of God. This is why we can see so many parallels between Jesus and Moses – but in all of them Jesus exceeds what Moses did. Moses divided the waters and walked through them, Jesus walks on them. Moses fed the people in the desert with manna that lasted a day, Jesus feeds the five thousand in a desert place and tells the disciples to keep what remains, pointing to the Eucharist, the food which endures to eternal life.

And where Moses delivered the law, the Torah, on Mount Sinai, written on stone tablets, Jesus is presented as the law in person. The Torah of the Messiah is not instructions you have to learn, it is a person with whom you need to be in relationship.

So in today’s Gospel reading we have the teaching of Jesus, which is astonishing, and different from the teaching of the scribes, because it is an encounter with a living person.

At the centre of this encounter, in which the teaching of Jesus is Jesus himself, we have the healing of the man described as possessed by an unclean spirit. This is not talk we are used to, but it is clearly of vital importance in this story.

Now in fact only Matthew, Mark and Luke in the whole Bible talk about people being “possessed’ in this way, and they are saying something important about the powers which hold human beings in bondage. Matthew, Mark and Luke are concerned to show the Kingdom of God breaking in to, and putting right, a human society which is radically disordered by powers which are actively opposed to that Kingdom. There is both a social and a cosmic dimension to these stories of possession. They reveal something about what is wrong beneath the surface of human society.

The two great oppressive social powers at work in first century Judea, as it is portrayed in the gospels, were the occupying Romans and the Temple. The Romans were unclean gentiles who ruled by keeping everyone in their place, often very brutally. The Temple had failed to be a house of prayer for all nations and had become a centre of power and privilege, amassing ever more money, wealth and prestige to feed its insatiable sacrificial cult, crushing the poor and excluding the supposedly imperfect and unclean. So you have these two oppressive forces bearing down on people from different directions.

In an oppressed society, who speaks? Who dares say what is wrong? It is often voices from the edge, and often distorted voices, which nevertheless speak something of the truth. In the Gospels, those who are described as possessed seem to have something of this function. The spirits of possession are described as “unclean”, meaning that they speak from a place of ritual impurity. They speak from a place where people are not allowed to participate in what human society is meant to be. Through being “demonised” these people personify the powers of oppression which harm society as a whole.

So it is very significant that Jesus heals people who are described as possessed, and that this happens as a result of his teaching. Jesus restores human society to what God intends it to be by defeating the cosmic powers of evil. And he does this because he is the truth, the full revelation of God, in person.

Today we don’t tend to talk about people literally being possessed by demons. But we can still be disturbed by voices from the edge, distorted voices perhaps, which nonetheless tell us something of what is wrong under the surface of things.

I was thinking this week of the Occupy Protest outside St Paul’s. Could we perhaps see them as people who have been “possessed”, captivated, fixated, by the way in which the giant corporations seem to have the whole of human life under subjugation?

Or consider the way in which tabloid headlines or lazy statements by politicians can demonise people. This week in relation to the Government’s cap on benefits we heard talk of “scroungers” and the “feckless”. But the rich can be scapegoated as well, as Sir Philip Hampton, the chairman of RBS, now deprived of his bonus, may be reflecting. There is something far more fundamental than individual greed at work here. The desire to exclude, to draw boundaries and say those people over there are not like me, is part of the deep flaw that runs through our natures, that the Church calls sin.

The brokenness of human society needs to be healed and forgiven. And that is what Jesus does, in the world today, in and through his Church. This requires our own healing and forgiveness. Today as in the first Century it is through relationship with Jesus that we are opened to the truth. It is in him that we recognise our complicity with the powers of oppression precisely as we are being freed from them ourselves. Sin is what we are leaving behind.

For us and for the world, today as in the first century, the good news is Jesus. His teaching is himself. He is the truth in person, the truth of the love of God for every person, the truth that he excludes no-one, the truth he wills to be known in the right ordering and flourishing of all human society.

Homily at Mass, Tuesday 17 January 2012

2012-01-20T12:02:00.000Z

Mark 2:23-28

What is the Sabbath about? It is a memorial, in the formal and Biblical sense – that is, it is something which makes God’s action present and effective, just as in the Mass we “make the memorial of Christ your Son our Lord”. The Sabbath is a memorial of three things:

(i) God completing the work of creation, and seeing that it is good, and resting.

(ii) The liberation from Egypt

(iii) The covenant of Sinai, where it is enjoined as a commandment.

What runs through these things is a principle of festivity. The goodness of creation is to be celebrated. God’s work in human history to restore the right ordering of creation – as in the liberation of slaves from Egypt – is also to be celebrated. The commandment to observe the Sabbath day is about festivity – the interruption of normal work so that creation can be enjoyed. So that we can pause and join in God’s act of seeing that creation is good.

So Jesus teaches and heals on the Sabbath, and even permits ordinary activities such as eating corn, because, on the Sabbath, these are acts of festivity. In such moments of festivity we see God completing his work and seeing that it is good. We in fact participate by grace in that one Divine act of completion, and seeing, and goodness. Meister Eckhart once said, “The eye wherein I see God is the same eye wherein God sees me”. Human existence, within God’s creation, is ordered towards the beatific vision, seeing God and seeing as God sees, in which blessedness consists. The purpose of festivity, as part of the rhythm of creation, is to help train our eye to that vision.

But to focus on mere external observance is not to see. So the Pharisees, dramatic characters who crystallise the opposition to the early Church community, object that what Jesus and his disciples do is forbidden. They don’t see what Jesus sees.

And Jesus responds by asking if they have not read the scriptures, and gives them a story about David and his followers entering the temple and eating the loaves of offering.

Now the intriguing thing about this is that the story Jesus tells isn’t in the Bible quite as Jesus tells it. The reference is to 1 Samuel 21 1-6, but in 1 Samuel the name of the priest is different, David is alone and not described as hungry, and although he takes the bread he doesn’t eat it.

In re-telling this story to emphasise the point perhaps Jesus is saying that if the Pharisees had really read the scriptures they would have seen the underlying meaning beyond the outward observance. They would have seen that creation is good and ordered towards human goodness and flourishing, because that is how God sees it.

For us too, because we are part of the same creation, festivity is vital. For Christians the observance of the Sabbath has been subsumed into Sunday, the Lord’s day, the day of resurrection. Beyond the seventh day of rest, when Jesus lay in the tomb, there is the eighth day, the day outside time, the day of eternity, which Jesus entered through the resurrection. In that day all is compassed by the vision of God and all is very good.

Our times of festivity, of pause and interruption, and most especially our celebration of the Sunday Eucharist, make present and effective that vision of God which restores and re-orders the right relationship of all creation. Even with the world as frantic and busy as it is, or maybe especially with the world as frantic and busy as it is, it is very important that the Church does not lose the distinctive character of that festive time, the Lord’s own service on the Lord’s own day.

For more on the Eighth Day, see here

Sermon at Parish Mass, Epiphany 2012

2012-01-08T14:07:00.000Z

Isaiah 60:1-6

Ephesians 3:2-3a, 5-6

Matthew 2:1-12

In my spare time over Christmas I’ve been reading WH Auden’s long poem, “For the Time Being”, subtitled “A Christmas Oratorio”. He wrote it in America in 1942, while the world was at war, filled with anxiety, uncertain of the future; while the powers which seemed to be controlling events were all too certain of the kind of future they wanted.

Against this background Auden explored the stories of the different characters in the Nativity. All of them, in one way or another, are forced to face the challenge that the Christ Child represents to the certainties and securities of the world they know.

Caesar, Herod and the army that massacred the innocents carry on regardless, rejecting any other way of doing things than the settled order. After all, they had a world order which worked, and kept things stable and controlled. Progress was sure. Everyone knew where they were. A God who presumes to intrude into finite, vulnerable space, being born as a human baby, makes everyone vulnerable. We can’t have that.

The Wise Men respond differently. Auden presents them as sophisticated and intelligent, vastly knowledgeable. Today they could be professors presenting television programmes, or pundits on Newsnight. And the Star summons them to follow, in haunting lines which promise only that they will lose their certainty and sense of direction:

Beware. All those who follow me are led
Onto that Glassy Mountain where are no
Footholds for logic, to that Bridge of Dread
Where knowledge but increases vertigo:
Those who pursue me take a twisting lane
To find themselves immediately alone

The first Wise Man is presented as a scientist, who has tormented nature to get ever more precise answers, pinning down ever more facts. But he realises that truth, in spite of all the facts, has eluded him. For him,

To discover how to be truthful now
Is the reason I follow this star.

The second is a philosopher, whose abstract speculations about existence are undermined when he realises that his theories have all been strategies to avoid the present and the real:

With envy, terror, rage, regret,
We anticipate or remember but never are.
To discover how to be living now
Is the reason I follow this star.

The third, a utilitarian philanthropist, has used his intelligence to study, dispassionately, how to improve the general lot of mankind and achieve the greatest possible good for the greatest possible number, but discovers that he had:

Left no time for affection,
Laughter, kisses, squeezing, smiles:
And I learned why the learned are as despised as they are.
To discover how to be loving now
Is the reason I follow this star.

They conclude in chorus:

At least we know for certain that we are three old sinners,
That this journey is much too long, that we want our dinners,
And miss our wives, our books, our dogs,
But have only the vaguest idea why we are what we are.
To discover how to be human now
Is the reason we follow this star.

Truth, life and love have eluded them. The star points the way. But it is a way which is to seem like darkness and horror and loss, for they must leave behind all they have known. Their journey is the journey into faith. For them, and for Mary, Joseph and the Shepherds, as Auden relates their story, the response of faith means leaving behind all certainty and security.

All of Auden’s characters live in the middle of a brave new world of knowledge and control and order, a world which is continually convincing everyone that it is all that anyone needs. It might be mediocre and dull, it might be sustained by fear, but it is safe. Your identity is defined by your place in the system, so don’t upset the system.

What Auden does is to uncover this as idolatry. Certainty, security, being safe in the system, are attempts to seek the truth of who we are where it is not to be found. It is easy to accept the off-the-peg, ready made false “self” that the world system offers, easier by far than to admit that we do not create ourselves and cannot control our destinies, that our existence is a mystery even to ourselves.

To come to faith is to acknowledge that we are created, and that is scary because it means that our entire existence depends on the will of someone else, the one who has called us into being. But to come to faith is also to come to love.

The revelation of God in the Christ Child shows us that God is love. Perhaps up till now humanity had feared that the First Cause which causes us to be was some terrifying vast cosmic principle, unseeing and unfeeling, or, worse, capricious, anarchic, unjust. Who would venture to draw too close to what might prove to be ultimately horrific? Better not to know. And so the First Cause came to us, came among us, finally touched our world and our lives, in the entirely contingent, and vulnerable, and lovable. In a baby. A baby come to live and die, to show what love is.

When Herod heard that the Child had come, the Gospel tells us, he was perturbed, and all Jerusalem with him. This Child, even before he can speak, disturbs the established order. Love has slipped in under the radar, destabilising the thrones of all the idols that tell us we create ourselves and determine our existence. Love whispers to us that we are loved, that we can let go of our fear and our control and our little mediocre safety zone. Love invites us to love.

But Herod demands that the wise men “find out all about the Child, and when you have found him let me know”. Knowledge is power, isn’t it? Perhaps this so threatening love can be controlled, brought into subjection, sacrificed to the idols of the status quo. Perhaps we can be kept safe from love, if we know enough about it to pin it down.

But love cannot be pinned down, even when love allows himself to be nailed to a cross, allows himself to become the sacrifice the idols demand. For love is both the creator and the redeemer. The resurrection is love triumphant over all our attempts to avoid the truth of our creation.

The idols of control and self determination are as powerful today as they were in the days of Herod. This week in the news we had a group of people called experts saying that terminally ill people should be allowed to ask their doctors to kill them with lethal drugs. And we had Stephen Hawking on the Today Programme insisting that the human race must colonise other planets against the time when this one will become uninhabitable. What are these but denials of the basic truth of our humanity, attempts to flee in terror from the possibility that we are not created in love?

But faith tells us that we are. The journey into faith is the journey in which we leave behind our certainties and securities and all our vain attempts at self creation and self control. But it is the journey in which we discover love. It is the journey in which we discover our true selves in God who loves us. It is the journey in which we discover, finally, how to be human.

Letter, the Church Times, 6 January 2012

2012-01-06T13:56:00.000Z

Sir,

Hugh Rayment-Pickard’s criticism of John Milbank’s ecclesiology is insightful. A belief that the Church is the site of the ideal society because it is a group which models the ideal teaching can lead some to think of it a moralistic exclusive club, if the Church is viewed simply as a human construct.

Nevertheless, I wonder whether Dr Rayment-Pickard’s counter-argument does not rely on a false dichotomy between the Kingdom and the Church. It is true that Jesus said a great deal about the Kingdom and not much about the Church. He also did not write any books, or tell anyone else to. But all we know of his teaching comes from the books that were, in fact, written; and all of them were written in, and for, church communities. The New Testament texts, including the Gospels, are unavoidably ecclesial; the teaching of the Kingdom cannot be separated from the Church.

Jesus founded a community of disciples to be both the bearer of the Kingdom message and the place where it starts to manifest in concrete human society. And although Jesus himself did not say much about the Church, the Pauline and pseudo-Pauline epistles have a great deal to say. The imagery of the Body of Christ, a living organism in which Christ recapitulates a renewed humanity, is repeated too often to be ignored. Indeed the Kingdom is God’s initiative in Christ; and the Church is the movement of human society into that Kingdom. Not perhaps the “site” of the ideal society, as Professor Milbank would have it, but at least where that society is beginning to become real. And not only human society. Salvation, as texts such as Colossians 1:15-20 make clear, is both ecclesial and cosmic. The Orthodox Theologian Vladimir Lossky once said, ““the entire universe is called to enter within the Church… that it may be transformed into the eternal Kingdom of God”[1].

None of this requires that the Church be seen as an exclusive club. Indeed, quite the reverse: an orthodox ecclesiology must be inclusive and generous. The redemption wrought by Christ is, in God’s will, universal, limited only by the extent to which creatures may refuse to participate. We may and should say that the movement into the Kingdom is happening in the visible community of the Church, but we cannot say where it is not happening. The ultimate boundary of the Church, “outside of which there is no salvation”, is stretched as far as the love and generosity of God revealed in Jesus will go. And I believe that is a very long way indeed.

Yours sincerely,

The Revd Matthew Duckett

[1] V Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, (Fellowship of Ss Alban & Sergius, translators), James Clarke & Co Ltd., 1957, p 113

Sermon, 1 January 2012, St Michael's Camden Town

2012-01-06T13:54:00.000Z

Numbers 6:22-27

Galatians 4:4-7

Luke 2:16-21

Who can tell me what the following names have in common? Tom Sayers, Father Willis, William Daniell, Joe Slovo, Dylan Thomas, Humphrey Jennings.

They are all commemorated on Blue Plaques in Camden, the plaques which are displayed on certain buildings to record the fact that some notable person was born, or lived, or died there. Now in fact as we walk round Camden we pass many old houses in which, over the years, very many people have been born, or lived, or died. But most of them don’t have Blue Plaques, because most of them aren’t widely known. To get a Blue Plaque, the story of your life has to have some significance in the public memory. The fact that someone was born at a particular place and time is only remembered because of what happened in their lives afterwards.

It’s the same when we read the stories of the birth and infancy of Jesus in Matthew and Luke. These stories are the Blue Plaques of the gospels. They are only there because of what happened afterwards, and we need to remember that when we read them. The baby born in Bethlehem will go on to preach the Kingdom of God, to heal the sick, he will be betrayed and crucified and will be raised from the dead. The meaning of his birth is found in what comes after.

It is important to remember this, because the naming and circumcision of Jesus, which we commemorate today, eight days after Christmas, are in themselves quite ordinary events. All Jewish boys of course were circumcised as a mark of belonging to the people of God’s covenant. And quite a lot of Jewish boys were named “Jesus” or “Yeshua” – Joshua, which becomes Jesus by way of the Greek of the New Testament.

Now the name Jesus, or Yeshua, means “Yahweh saves”. God is a saviour. So the naming of a boy as Jesus expresses the pious hope of Israel that God will save his people. But the naming of this particular child, the Son of Mary, has a greater meaning, because we know from what comes after that this particular child is, himself, the Saviour. This Jesus is not just a pious hope, but is God come to save his people in person.

He is the saviour who will preach the Kingdom of God. He is the saviour, because he will take away the sins of the world. He is the saviour, because he will share our death in order to raise us with him to new and eternal life. He is the Saviour, because he enters the mess of human history and sin and violence, to bring, not condemnation, but forgiveness and the grace to begin again.

As the Queen so splendidly said in her Christmas speech,

God sent into the world a unique person – neither a philosopher nor a general (important though they are) – but a Saviour, with the power to forgive.

Forgiveness lies at the heart of the Christian faith. It can heal broken families, it can restore friendships and it can reconcile divided communities. It is in forgiveness that we feel the power of God’s love.

If we have ever paused to examine ourselves, to look into our hearts, we will know that we need to be forgiven. As part of our common humanity we all have the tendency to prefer ourselves to the other, to turn in on ourselves, to turn away from love. Even if we sincerely strive to be good we know that we are continually wounding ourselves and others in the process. And we are sinned against, too, and the wrongs we suffer can so easily lead to bitterness and resentment and the desire for revenge.

Forgiveness undoes all that. Forgiveness breaks the chains of the past and sets us free. Forgiveness is God’s love breaking in to our unloveliness. And it is God’s gift. God in Jesus frees us from sin by both forgiving us and enabling us to forgive.

Jesus is the saviour. He is God with us; God for us; God on our side. He is the expression of God’s love, which is entirely for us and not against us. He is God showing that he actually wants to be with us in all the mess we’ve made.

The Church, meditating on this, realised very early on that, if Jesus is the Saviour, he must be both fully human and fully Divine. He must be human, because only one who is truly human can really be with us, really identify with us, really make that connection which can save us. But he must also be God, because only God the creator has the power to forgive sin, to set us free and give us a new beginning. So the Saviour must be one indivisible person, who is both human and Divine.

And this gave the Church the other title for today’s feast: Mary, the Mother of God. The Council of Ephesus in 431 decreed that Mary was Theotokos – “God-Bearer”, or “Mother of God”. This was as much a statement about Jesus as it was about Mary. Jesus is one indivisible person, both God and man, and Mary is his mother; therefore Mary is Mother of God. That is to say, she is the Mother of the Saviour, the Mother of the one who has come into the world, and who can and will save us.

And that is why we read these Christmas stories from the Gospels. They are full of meaning, and hope, and promise, because the Saviour has been born for us. He is Jesus, “Yahweh who saves”. He is our brother, human like us; and he is our God, God with us, God on our side, God come not to condemn, but to forgive.

How appropriate it is that the Church on this day, the first of a new civil year, calls us to meditate on the name of Jesus, the name of God who saves.

New year is a time for resolutions, for new beginnings. But the new beginning that matters most of all is the one that Jesus offers us: forgiveness of all that is past, newness of life, freedom from sin and death.

If you make no other resolution this year, let it be to believe and trust in Jesus the Saviour. Maybe for the first time, or maybe to renew the belief and trust of a lifetime. It matters not. He is born for me, and for you. He is born to save. He is the risen Lord, with us now. He can, and will, change lives, remake us, transform us into his image, that we might live with his life.

May you know the joy of Jesus, God who saves, in your life, this new year and always.

Sermon at Christmas Midnight Mass, St Pancras Old Church, 2011

2011-12-31T14:01:00.000Z

Isaiah 9:2-7

Titus 2:11-14

Luke 2:1-14

Christmas pudding. Panettone. Mince pies. Turkey. Chocolate. Vegetarian nut roasts. Brussels sprouts. Smoked salmon. Pigs in blankets. Roast potatoes. Intriguing twists on old favourites devised by Jamie or Nigella. It’s quite likely, this Christmas, that most of us will end up consuming rather more protein and carbohydrate than usual. And why not – it is a feast day, and there is nothing wrong with enjoying the good things of creation, in moderation, of course.

In Biblical times, there wasn’t such a variety of delicious things on the menu. No turkeys, potatoes or chocolate, for instance, those all came over from America much later. The everyday staple of most people was bread, day in, day out. So bread was very important both in itself and symbolically. It is referred to a great deal in the Bible, and Jesus calls himself the Bread of Life.

But the first mention of bread in Luke’s Gospel is actually tonight, in a place name. Bethlehem means “House of Bread”. Probably because in ancient times the area was rich in grain. But it is also very fitting that Jesus, the bread come down from heaven, the one we need for our eternal nourishment, is born in a cave and laid in a manger in the House of Bread.

I had the great joy of visiting Bethlehem for the first time last year, and the place shown as the traditional site of the birth of Jesus is a cave. Bethlehem is built on a limestone ridge and there are many shallow caves just under the surface. In the first century, and even in some places today, dwellings in that part of the world were very simple: a structure above ground, for daytime and summer, and beneath, a cave, where the animals were kept and where the family slept in winter to keep warm.

Luke tells us that the new born Jesus was laid in a manger – a feeding trough – so this probably means that Joseph and Mary were staying with some relatives in a simple family home like that. As you go into that cave today in Bethlehem, there on the ground under the altar is a silver star, which according to tradition marks the exact place where Jesus was born.

Now that may seem a little naïve – how can we know that this was the precise place, and not, say, the cave next door?

But actually it is very important that there was a place, a little spot where God first touched the earth in Jesus. It is very important that a particular place is commemorated. There and not somewhere else, that time and not some other.

When God comes into the world in Jesus he becomes particular, limited in time and place, just as we are. He becomes inculturated, formed by the particular culture of first century Judaism into which he was born. He was bound in strips of cloth, which were used to straighten the legs of infants in days before people knew that rickets was a vitamin deficiency. But he was bound as well by culture, race, class, the particular circumstances of politics and foreign occupation.

This is the importance of Luke being so particular about the census and when it took place and who was in power, rather like the traditional chant I sang at the beginning of Mass. Not all the details are historically correct but that’s not the point, and Luke could not have known all the details first hand anyway. God come into our world enters particular circumstances and grows in a particular way. In entering the world, coming to us to save us, God must confine himself to a particular place, a particular time. But he does so in order to redeem all places, all times.

God become human redeems human nature, saves us from the legacy of violence, rivalry and sin which has been the way that human beings have tended to live throughout history. God become human makes possible a new way of being human, founded on self-emptying love. God shows us that new way of being human in Jesus. But he enables us to live that way, too, because Jesus is born to be the new Adam, the new human nature in which we can share.

We too, as St John will tell us tomorrow, have power to become children of God. If we turn to Jesus in repentance, believe in him as our Saviour and Lord, the he gives us his new life. We become one with him in his new humanity, the humanity based on love and not fear.

We may think we are not worthy to share the life of Jesus. Perhaps we will just admire him from a distance. A great spiritual figure, a profound teacher, perhaps. But I don’t want him to turn my life around. But no, he is born for me, and for you, he is born precisely to turn our lives around. He is born so that we can be born, reborn in him, and turn away from sin and darkness, to love and light and life.

Or perhaps we think our lives are too busy, too hectic, too anxious, no room. But the little space of our hearts is always enough for Jesus, just as was the “heaven and earth in little space” in Mary’s womb. The cave of the Nativity is found in our hearts too if we will let Jesus be born there.

And because this involves me and you, the new humanity that Jesus brings is not an individualistic thing. It is a community, a people, which we call the Church. The Church is the Body of Christ, the human nature which he has redeemed, living in the world and in the saints in heaven. And we enter the Body of Christ through baptism and are sustained and become more fully what that means through the sacrament of the Body of Christ, the Eucharist.

Christ the living bread gives himself to us under the form of bread, that we might become what he is. God was made flesh in an ordinary human baby in the obscurity of Bethlehem, and in the Eucharist he comes to us hidden in the ordinary, necessary stuff of daily life, in bread and wine, another “little space” in which his fullness dwells.

The Church, the community of the Eucharist, is itself a “house of bread”. The Church is a perpetual Bethlehem where Jesus is always being born, always touching earth in particular times and places wherever the Mass is celebrated. Here, tonight, for instance, and everywhere else in the world where Christians gather for this meal which both gives us and makes us the Body of Christ.

Jesus comes to us in love, to make us new. Whatever our lives have been up to now, whatever sin or mess or failure we may be conscious of, Jesus comes to make us new. A new beginning, a new humanity. This is his gift, we have only to open our hearts to him to receive it. The little space of our hearts and our lives is where he wants to dwell in the fullness of his divinity and love. Like that little star on the floor at Bethlehem, Christ will make of our lives a “touching place” where his love becomes real for us and for the world around us.

Sermon at Parish Mass, St Pancras Old Church, Advent Sunday 2011

2011-11-27T18:54:00.001Z

Isaiah 63:16-17, 64:1. 3-8

1 Corinthians 1:3-9

Mark 13:33-37

Sunday can be an exciting day. Living in East London, and having to negotiate the changing pattern of weekend engineering works, my journey into Church is hardly ever the same two weeks running.

So every Saturday night I log on to the Transport for London Journey Planner and check what my options are. This morning, it was the 7.58 District Line from East Ham, changing at Mile End for the 8.12 Central Line, and again at Bank for the 8.28 Northern Line to Kings Cross. And it all worked. Hurrah! Well done, TFL.

Now this is partly practical and common sense. But it’s also to enable me to sleep on Saturday night. Because I have to admit I’m a bit of a control freak. If I know that the next day is planned and under control, then I can relax.

But imagine if I were to look up a train timetable and instead of that useful information all I got was, “be on your guard, stay awake, because you never know when the train will come”.

Well, today Jesus says to the disciples, “you never know when the time will come”. And this is because just before this they have asked him, “when will these things happen?” They want to know the timetable. But what “things”, what timetable, are they talking about?

Today, with a new church year, we begin the Year of Mark. Mark’s gospel is the one we will be reading through on most Sundays during this year. We don’t however start at the beginning, but quite near the end, and what we have heard is the last teaching that Jesus gives before the story moves into the plot to kill him, the anointing at Bethany which Jesus says is “for his burial”, the Last Supper, and his betrayal and death.

Mark 13, part of which we have heard today, is an apocalypse, a particular kind of writing that we find in parts of the Bible; Revelation and Daniel are other examples. “Apocalypse” in everyday speech usually means some kind of great disaster, like a nuclear war or the lurid scenes of global destruction painted by John Martin that were shown at the Tate Britain recently. There’s a whole movie genre devoted to that kind of thing.

But this is not what apocalypse means in the Bible. At root it means revelation, seeing, and is about final fulfilment, not final destruction. It is about seeing the hidden truth behind the universe, that ultimately God is in charge. It is about entering the Kingdom of God by seeing what the Kingdom is. The Kingdom is God’s reign of love, peace and justice, becoming real in the world.

But as Father Bruce said to us last week, the Kingdom of God is a very elusive concept. It’s not quite like anything we might expect; it’s more like a happening than a place, and when we think we’ve got it pinned down, it slips away from us.

The parable Jesus tells today has that slippery elusiveness of the Kingdom which is a characteristic of all the parables. Always when you read a parable, think, “what’s wrong with this picture?”. Today, it’s the curious travelling habits of the master. The times at which it is said he might arrive – between dusk and dawn – are simply not times that any traveller would arrive in the ancient world. There was no street lighting, no headlights on your donkey, settlements were small and the roads between them nothing more than dirt tracks in lonely and dangerous places. People simply did not travel at night. So the parable is about people staying awake at a time when no-one would have been expecting them to.

All of which reinforces Jesus’ point that we do not know when the Kingdom is happening. Which is also to say that we don’t control it. He doesn’t tell us that we will know, he does not instruct us to find out. He simply says, you don’t know. It’s God’s doing. Our part is not to know, but to stay alert, to be watchful. To be attentive, so that we can see.

Not knowing things is part of our limitation as created beings. We are not God. The first step to entering the Kingdom is to accept our created being as God’s free gift, and to accept with it all the contingency, limitation and transience that comes with that. We are not in control. Our being rests entirely on God’s will and gift, which is entirely an expression of his love.

This is the first good news of Advent: we are not in control, and God is. That can be difficult good news, because we like to be in control, and we don’t like to be the victim of circumstances and things going wrong. But it is truly good news because God has created us in love to share his life forever in heaven, and the fulfilment of that does not depend on us.

Just as well. In the news last week were reports of the trials of Khmer Rouge leaders for genocide and crimes against humanity in Cambodia. There was one man who murdered a couple because they fell in love without permission from the Party. A horrific reminder of what can happen when human beings think they control the fulfilment of human destiny.

Just after Jesus gave this teaching about the Kingdom, he himself fell victim to just such an attempt to control human destiny. In his betrayal and death he assumed the place of the outsider. He became the victim of those who thought they knew what the Kingdom was and could impose it by force.

But the words of Jesus hover over the scene of his passion and death: “Stay awake!”. Be attentive. Look. It is in and through the death and resurrection of Jesus that the Kingdom is happening. It is in the death of the innocent victim, and his being raised to the glory of the Father, that God is acting to put right what is wrong. Like the master returning when no-one would expect, the Kingdom is happening in the last place you would think of looking.

This is the second good news of Advent; but this, too, can be difficult good news. The Kingdom of God is happening amid betrayal and loss and death. The Kingdom is happening where human beings lose control and become victims. Apocalypse in the Bible has been called the “literature of the dispossessed” because one of the things it always does it to reveal the truth of where God is acting. And that is on the margins, among the outsiders and the victims – not in the centres of authority and the power structures of this world. Resurrection happens where death seems to have triumphed.

As Christians we live our lives suspended between two deaths: the ritual, sacramental death of baptism; and the biological death of our bodies. And each of those deaths is also a resurrection. In baptism we are buried with Christ in the waters of the font and rise with him to new and eternal life. Because of that, the death of the body is also a participation in the saving work of Jesus, in the Kingdom becoming real. Death becomes definitively the way to the glory of the Father.

The principle of dying and rising is imprinted on our lives, and is the mark of God’s Kingdom. Not just in baptism and our final dying, but in all the circumstances of life in every moment. Falling, failing, losing control, finding ourselves on the margins and not in the centre, all are where the Kingdom is becoming real. We don’t like to face the difficult times of life: illness, bereavement, the loss of a job, troubled relationships. But by the grace of God it is through those times of loss that we can discover that we are utterly safe in God’s hands because he has created us in love and will not let us go. We are not in control, and God is.

We do not know the day or the hour. But in every present moment, whatever it brings, Jesus calls us stay awake, to be attentive, for the Kingdom of God is very near.

Sermon at Parish Mass, St Mary's Somers Town, Thirty-Second Sunday of Ordinary Time 2011

2011-11-07T10:43:00.000Z

Wisdom 6:12-16

1 Thessalonians 4:13-18

Matthew 25:1-13

On the face of it, the Gospel story we’ve read today appears to be about being ready for future events, planning ahead, being prepared, just like the scouts. But, it’s a parable. Parables are stories which are meant to lead us beyond their surface to a deeper meaning. There’s always something odd about them, something that doesn’t quite fit, for example in today’s story there are ten bridesmaids – but no bride. What is that about? Parables interrogate our consciousness and ask us if we are understanding things right.

This parable is told at a very particular point in Jesus’ ministry. As Matthew’s Gospel tells the story, it is Tuesday in Holy Week. Jesus has entered Jerusalem and in two days he will celebrate the last supper with his disciples, and then be betrayed and crucified and raised from the dead. And just before these tremendous events happen he concludes his teaching ministry with three parables, a “triptych” of stories like three related panels on an altarpiece, the altar indeed of Christ’s final sacrifice.

The first of these stories is the parable of the wise and foolish bridesmaids that we heard today. The other two we will hear over the next two weeks: the parable of the talents, and the parable of the sheep and goats.

What these stories have in common is a theme of being caught out and exposed by the arrival of a figure of authority. In this case it is the bridegroom.

The image of bride and groom is a very important one in Israel’s history. The Old Testament prophets spoke of Israel as God’s “bride”, the one whom God had chosen for himself and married, so God is the “bridegroom” of his people. But his people, like an unfaithful wife, had constantly gone off after other gods, and not kept God’s covenant. And the result had been exile and other calamities.

But the prophets always insisted that God would not abandon his people. The bridegroom would bring his bride back again, make her his own once more. In other words, God was not going to forget his people, no matter what they did. God would once again “marry” his people and restore them to a right relationship with him.

So the image of the bridegroom is that of God returning to claim his people as his own once more. And it’s an image which elsewhere Jesus applies to himself. The message of the gospels is that Jesus is God returning to restore his people Israel, and in fact all people, to a right relationship with him.

What the Gospel is saying is that the arrival of the bridegroom, God reconciling his people to himself, was something happening right there and then. It was through the death and resurrection of Jesus that God’s self-giving love was about to be revealed, God’s reconciliation enacted. So this is not a story about a second coming of Christ in some remote future. It’s much more urgent than that: this is happening now, watch, stay awake.

What then does the parable mean when it says that some of the bridesmaids had oil and could light their lamps, and others couldn’t? Well, the most important function of a lamp is to shed light, so you can see what’s going on. It’s about perception. The message of the parable is, make sure your lamps are lit so you can see what’s happening.

But most people didn’t see. They had a different perception, a different mindset. They thought that God would return in power in a great final catastrophe, to punish the wicked and reward the good. And the wicked, of course, were always other people – Romans, the ritually unclean, the mentally ill, women – always the marginalised and the outsider, who were finally going to be thrust outside for ever, whilst only the pure and good, “people like us”, would be allowed in God’s kingdom.

What people were not expecting was that God was coming to die on a cross. God was coming to take the place of the marginalised and outsider, the place that the religious people allotted to the wicked. God, in fact, was coming to be the victim of the catastrophe, instead of inflicting it on others.

In order to see that, you need God’s light to switch on in your mind, so you can perceive things differently. You need a changed mind. The teaching of Jesus in the Gospels was constantly about repentance, metanoia in Greek, which literally means, change your mind. Not in the sense of deciding to have a jammy dodger instead of a custard cream with your tea, but in the sense of taking out your old mind and putting in a new one. St Paul says, in Romans, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds”. If our minds are transformed by Jesus Christ, the crucified and risen Lord, then we will see truly. We will see that God is in the place of the victim and not the victimiser. The lamp of our consciousness will be lit, we will be awake.

When we read this parable, then, we are not hearing a warning about something that will happen in a distant future that we don’t need to worry about yet. We are hearing that the crucified and risen Lord, Jesus Christ, is the principle of transformation in the world and in our lives right here and now. Christ is present, if only we have eyes to see. The coming of Christ is not about an absence that Jesus is going to fill, but about our minds being transformed, our lamps lit, so that we can see him present now.

Father Basil Jellicoe was one who saw, whose lamp was lit. When he was the parish priest here he saw the slums that were here then, and the terrible degrading poverty in which people had to live. And he saw Christ. Christ in the place of the marginalised and the outsider, Christ in the victims of social injustice. And because he saw truly he was transformed himself and became an instrument of transformation to the world around him. He campaigned tirelessly and successfully to demolish the slums and rehouse the people of his parish in a setting worthy of their human dignity, worthy of the Christ whose image they bore.

In our own day, housing is once again an issue and many people are suffering through inadequate housing, and the threats of changes to rent and benefits which may see many people driven out of the city centres to places on the edge where they will struggle to commute to low paid jobs. And that is on top of people who are actually homeless on our streets.

And the Church responds, through initiatives such as London Citizens and the winter night shelter. We respond because by God’s grace we see Christ in those on the margins of society. We respond because we are being transformed by the renewing of our minds.

The Lord who is present in the Mass we are celebrating together, who is present day and night in the tabernacle here, is one and the same Lord who is present in the asylum seeker, the single mother struggling to make ends meet, the drug addict, the man sleeping rough because he hears voices telling him his home is evil.

The great words of Bishop Frank Weston are as true and as urgent today as they were when he spoke them at the Anglo-Catholic Congress in 1923, when the slums still stood round here:

If you are prepared to fight for the right of adoring Jesus in his Blessed Sacrament, then you have got to come out from before your Tabernacle and walk, with Christ mystically present in you, out into the streets of this country, and find the same Jesus in the people of your cities and your villages. You cannot claim to worship Jesus in the Tabernacle, if you do not pity Jesus in the slum.

Let us then, before Jesus in this tabernacle, with Jesus in this Mass, turn to him once more for the renewing of our minds, that we may see him and serve him in all who are in need, in our parish, our city and our world.

Sermon at Evensong, St Pancras Euston Road, Trinity 15 2011

2011-10-08T10:40:00.000+01:00

Proverbs 2:1-11

1 John 2:1-17

The reading from the first letter of John that we heard earlier seems to be saying something contradictory:

Beloved, I am writing you no new commandment, but an old commandment that you have had from the beginning; the old commandment is the word that you have heard. Yet I am writing you a new commandment that is true in him and in you, because the darkness is passing away and the true light is already shining.

This new commandment which is somehow also old is the great commandment of Jesus at the last supper, the command which the letters of John repeat so often, to love one another. And that command is not to construct our own little loves, as though we were unconnected islands, but to find ourselves and one another in the Love of God made known in Jesus.

There is a sense in that reading from John of seeking something that we already have. We are on a quest which is itself the discovery that we seek.

There’s something of that also in the reading we heard from Proverbs. It is the figure of Divine Wisdom herself who addresses us in this reading and urges us to seek wisdom and insight, the wisdom that comes from the Lord.

The Divine Wisdom is a personification – a feminine personification – of the creative power of God. She is God at work in creation, both the rational principle of why things are, and God’s delight in them. So our very existence, and the call to seek wisdom, are themselves acts of Divine Wisdom.

In both readings, it seems that we come from that which we are called to seek. Wisdom, love, and light are our origin and our goal. And Wisdom, Love and Light, of course, are God, God made known in creation.

This mystery of seeking what we, deep down, already have, appears in most religious traditions as something fundamental to humanity’s spiritual journey. We come from God, and return to God, but somehow we need to travel by long and winding paths to discover this truth. Our journeying snares us in illusion. We imagine ourselves to be autonomous. The ego reigns supreme, and we imagine we can construct ourselves, make of ourselves what we will. We forget where we have come from, forget that we are created. We become, as 1 John puts it, trapped in darkness. But once we begin to rediscover the deep truth that we are loved into being, the giftedness of our existence, then at that same moment we find that “the darkness is passing away and the true light is already shining”.

That call to find ourselves, to return home by remembering where we have come from, is written deeply into our nature. Wordsworth puts it very memorably in his poem Intimations of Immortality:

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God, who is our home:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

Shades of the prison-house begin to close

Upon the growing Boy,

But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,

He sees it in his joy;

In the gospels, it is Jesus himself who is, pre-eminently, the one who comes from God and returns to God. In the prologue of John’s gospel we read that the Word, who was with God in the beginning, through whom all things were made, was made flesh and dwelt among us. And having come among us, into exile so to speak, he gave us power to become children of God. Power to enter into the deep truth of our being that we come from God and are called to return to God.

I think this is part of what is meant when Jesus in John’s Gospel says, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” Jesus is the way, the journey. He is the one who is from God and returns to God. He is the pattern of exile and return in which all creation is called to find its true identity. A pattern which has a resonance in the depths of our being, if we can but hear its distant echo.

And yet, the spiritual path in which we seek the truth we already have can seem to be rather humdrum and mundane. The epistle of John is full of practical advice to children, young people, parents. Advice to persevere in love and avoid the unsound teaching that was unsettling their little community.

But this is exactly what we should expect. The gateway to eternity is the present moment. We aren’t anywhere other than here and now, and it is in the here and now, in the ordinary circumstances which each moment presents, that we are called to discover the truth that we are from God and returning to God.

Every moment has within itself the possibility of complete realisation, the potential to enter into the luminous truth that my existence is rooted and founded in God, that there is no other “I am” to my being than the I Am which God himself pronounces. Every moment is like that hazelnut kernel that Mother Julian held in her hand, and wondered what it was until she saw that it was everything that is.

Now, a proper spiritual discipline is needed, not to produce this “experience”, but to dispose ourselves to see this truth that is in fact always present to us. In the Christian tradition the liturgy and worship of the Church are of vital importance in realising this discipline. The liturgy is not something we devise ourselves but something we receive. By that very fact it helps us break down the illusory fortress of the ego and hear the call from beyond ourselves which is at the same time the call to find our true selves.

In the ancient wisdom of the Christian tradition we continue, as the book of Acts puts it, “in the Apostles’ teaching and fellowship, the breaking of bread and the prayers”. That tried and tested way is the discipline, the training, that can open our eyes to the truth within.

The breaking of bread and the prayers are not things we construct ourselves. The Eucharist is something given to us to do, for all time, “do this in memory of me”, and it is both the daily bread of our exile and, as the hymn puts it, the “dear home of every heart, where restless yearnings cease, and sorrows all depart”.

The Divine Office of morning and evening prayer consists almost entirely of passages of scripture, in the psalms, canticles and readings, the versicles and responses. By nourishing our prayer life with these words which come from beyond us we can hear more clearly the call from home, to home, the call deep within our being to find our true selves in God.

By meditating on the psalms and scriptures we do indeed find ourselves “singing the songs of Zion in a strange land”, as Psalm 137 puts it. Until the darkness passes away and the true light shines, and we find that the “strange land” is in fact Zion, our true home, after all.

Sermon at Parish Mass Trinity 14 2011

2011-09-25T17:05:00.000+01:00

Ezekiel 18:1-4, 25-end

Philippians 2:1-13

Matthew 21:23-32

Well it’s a funny kind of September. After a rather chilly and damp August we seem to be having shorts bursts of summer and autumn mixed together. I never know what to wear in the morning or how many blankets to put on the bed at night. And to make matters all the more confusing, today is – Palm Sunday!

Well, of course it isn’t really. But today’s Gospel reading is set on Palm Sunday, the day when Jesus entered Jerusalem in triumph, greeted by the crowds as the Messiah, God’s anointed leader. The same crowds who in five days will turn on him and demand his crucifixion.

The first thing Jesus did when he entered Jerusalem that day was to go to the temple. Now the temple was meant to be a sign that God dwelt in the midst of his people, and was always accessible to them. It was meant to be a “house of prayer for all nations”. It was meant to be the place where God’s love for all people would be made known.

Instead, by the time of Jesus, it had become an oppressive and authoritarian institution. It swallowed up the last meagre savings of the poor to feed its insatiable sacrificial cult and to keep the priests and religious elite in the style to which they were accustomed. It stood as a reminder, not of God’s presence, but of human authority. An authority which was all about power and control and keeping the status quo.

Just before the scene we read this morning Jesus turned over the tables of the money changers and declared that the temple, instead of being a house of prayer for all nations, had become a robbers’ den. And then, we are told, the blind and the lame had come to him in the temple and he healed them. Now according to the purity laws the blind and the lame weren’t allowed in the temple, but Jesus is showing what the temple really should be about, the place where God is present and accessible for all people to heal and restore them.

It was after Jesus had done this, in the temple, that the Pharisees came up to him and asked, where does your authority come from. Now the Pharisees in Matthew serve a dramatic function, they illustrate what Jesus is about by contrast, by always opposing him and failing to understand him. So when they ask Jesus about his authority they mean the kind of authority they understand, all about power and control.

But Jesus’ authority is completely different. St Paul in the reading from Philippians this morning tells us what authority that comes from God looks like:

Christ Jesus, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death — even death on a cross.

The authority of God is not self-asserting but self-emptying. It does not impose itself but suffers what is imposed on it. God makes himself known in Jesus by, so to speak, falling into the tragedy of the human condition.

But the temple, as the Pharisees understand it, has no place for tragedy. The imperfect, the unclean, life’s failures, are not allowed in. It demands perfection and purity. Ordinary people really aren’t good enough. The temple cult is constantly demanding more and more – money, livestock, livelihoods, all must be subservient to the demands of an authority which imposes itself as a crushing burden. The Pharisees cannot imagine that God’s authority might be found instead in failure, in tragedy, in suffering and rejection. This, I think, is why Jesus does not answer their question. They are incapable of understanding.

Jesus, instead, tells them a parable. The parable of the two sons – one says to his father, “yes, I will work for you”, and then doesn’t; the other says “no” but then does. And it is the one who fails and repents who does the father’s will. To repent is to change your mind, to change your understanding. The discovery of what God’s authority is really like changes our understanding, leads us to repent. And we happen on that discovery by failing.

In the gospels almost nobody says “yes” to God and simply does what they’ve said. Only Jesus and Mary can be seen to do so, and even Mary at the annunciation says “yes” to the unfolding of a tragedy she cannot at the time imagine. For most people the pattern is to fail and repent. Peter, who denied Jesus; Paul, who persecuted the Church; Matthew the extortionate tax collector. There is something fundamental to the Gospel here. It is those who fail and fall who are able to discover what God is really like, and by that discovery can change their understanding and repent.

Somehow it is necessary for us to fall, in order to be caught in the movement of God’s falling, the God who empties himself to meet us where we are. It is necessary to own our fallenness, our part in the human tragedy, because that is where God is. The cross is not, as some Christians would have it, God venting his righteous anger on Jesus because we’re not good enough. When we look at the cross we see God suffering the inherent tragedy of being human, in a world where all the time we are falling, failing, and needing to be forgiven. The cross is God with us and for us, not God against us.

In this scene this morning in the temple, the Pharisees and the temple structure represent something very deep and oppressive in our consciousness that we need to be liberated from. A terrible idol enthroned in our ego, which is always demanding more, always whispering that we’re not good enough, always running in fear from the possibility of failure. And so turning away from the very place where God is really waiting to meet us.

The Franciscan Richard Rohr writes this:

In the divine economy of grace, sin and failure become the base metal and raw material for the redemptive experience itself. Much of organized religion, however, tends to be peopled by folks who have a mania for some ideal order, which is never true, so they are seldom happy or content...

Sin and salvation are correlative terms. Salvation is not sin perfectly avoided, as the ego would prefer; but in fact, salvation is sin turned on its head and used in our favour. That is how transformative divine love is.

So often we try to avoid the inherent tragedy of life, to pretend to perfection in ourselves and demand it of ourselves and others. So many people hate themselves because they’re not perfect, not successful, not good enough. This is to set up a interior “temple”, a structure of sacred violence, an oppressive authority, an idol that demands that there be victims. The gospel tells us otherwise: God is found in the midst of our constantly failing and being forgiven and learning to forgive.

Repentance means first of all owning the truth about ourselves. By that means alone can we dethrone the idols of success and perfection. By that means we are caught into the movement of God’s falling into our abyss of tragedy and death. Only there can we find resurrection, because Christ humbled himself even to death on a cross and therefore God has highly exalted him.

At the great liturgy of the Easter vigil the deacon sings, “O happy fault, O necessary sin of Adam, that won for us so great a redemption”. The Church has hit on something profoundly true in rejoicing that we are sinners, in singing triumphantly the joy of being wrong. The demand of the ego for perfection in the end leads only to death. It is in the discovery that we are just the same as the prostitutes and tax collectors that we find we are entering the kingdom of heaven.

Sermon at Parish Mass Trinity 12 (September 11) 2011

2011-09-25T16:54:00.000+01:00

Genesis 50:15-21

Romans 14:1-12

Matthew 18:21-35

How often should I forgive? That question has a particular sharpness today, when we remember the terrorist attacks that took place ten years ago. Some of us may have known personally people caught up in the attacks, and no-one who saw the events unfold on television can fail to have been affected by the horror of those images, the trauma of mass murder enacted in such an audacious and public way.

And then there was what followed, what we are told is a “war on terror”. The Big Issue magazine this week published some facts and figures on the post 9/11 conflicts: so far, 225,000 dead, 7.8 million refugees, and a cost in money of 4,400 billion dollars. Meanwhile, there is famine in Africa…

Today is rightly a day of memories, of grief, of commitment to a better future. So to ask today, “how often should I forgive?”, may seem to be out of place and insensitive to memories still so deeply wounded. And yet it is precisely the scale and the horror of the violence that has engulfed our world that makes the question all the more urgent.

Peter comes to Jesus with what he thinks is quite a small question. “If my brother [that is, in the context of Matthew, a fellow church member] sins against me, how often should I forgive? As often as seven times?” Jesus, in his answer, goes beyond the question. He expands Peter’s upper limit of generosity beyond anything he could have imagined, “not seven times but seventy-seven!” and he applies the principle of forgiveness, not just to people you know in the church, but to the whole human race.

The problem goes right back to the start of the Bible. The myths of the book of Genesis, like all great stories, tell us the deep truth about ourselves. In symbolic and heroic narratives they hold up a mirror to the human condition and show us what we are.

The story of Cain and Abel is about how our desires lead us into rivalry and violence and revenge. Cain and Abel were the first brothers born outside paradise, that is, born into the humanity we know with all its flaws and tendency to go wrong which we call original sin. Cain and Abel were the first rivals, and Cain the first murderer when he killed his brother out of envy. Cain was cursed by his own action to wander as a fugitive, and when he feared that he would be killed in his turn, Yahweh said “whoever kills Cain will suffer a sevenfold vengeance”. That is not Yahweh’s doing, it is simply that Yahweh foresees that this is how it is going to be from now on, this is the path that humanity has chosen.

Vengeance, once unleashed, has a life of its own. Four generations on from Cain we meet Lamech, a violent-tempered man who swears, “I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for striking me. If Cain is avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy-sevenfold.”

So when Jesus repeats those numbers, ‘not seven times, I tell you, but seventy-seven times’, he is going right to the heart of the problem, and changing that ancient escalation of vengeance into an escalation of forgiveness. Jesus is pointing the way out of the cycle of violence that has engulfed humanity from the beginning.

We sometimes hear people say that revenge is “getting your own back”, a pernicious lie if ever there was one, as it’s the guaranteed way of everyone losing. But the parable that Jesus then tells to reinforce his point is precisely about getting your own back – or choosing not to.

The servant in the parable has a ridiculously large debt – billions of pounds in today’s money. And yet when he pleads for time to pay – as if he ever could have time to pay back that much – the king cancels the entire debt. It’s an act, a sudden revelation, of astonishing generosity.

Now the servant could have chosen to imitate his master’s generosity and forgiveness. Something so amazing and overwhelming should surely have brought about a change of heart, given him a new insight into the debts of others, made him a different person. Alas, no. The servant, unmoved and unchanged by his master’s forgiveness, refuses to forgive a trifling debt owed him by another servant. He demands his own back. And in strict justice, of course, he’s right. He is owed a hundred denarii, he has the right to demand them back.

But by doing so, he shows that he is still living in that old way of being human, the way of Cain and Lamech, the way of vengeance and getting your own back, the way of ever escalating desires and retaliation. He has seen the new way of forgiveness and love shown him by his master, but he has failed to enter it. And in consequence the King orders him to be handed over to the torturers.

The King in this parable seems to be very quixotic, at one moment loving and generous, at the next fiercely angry. Is the parable meant to be telling us that this is what God is like?

Well, we need to remember that parables are stories which operate on many levels; they can’t be read as simple allegories. Someone has said that it’s not so much that we read parables, as that parables read us, probing our consciousness and understanding.

God, of course, is always loving and forgiving, and does not change. It is our perception that changes. We can choose to live according to God’s revelation of love and forgiveness, or not. If we do not, we remain living in those old cycles of violence and vengeance, and everything will be a torment for us.

Not only will our vengeance sooner or later rebound on our own heads, but we will be continually fighting against our own created nature, what we are meant to be. God has created us in love to live in love.

In Jesus Christ, that becomes possible at last. His death and resurrection wipe out our own debt of sin and enable us to live in his risen life. And that means to live according to God’s love and forgiveness. It is to live in the new way of being human that Jesus has shown to us, that he taught and enacted in his life even to his death on the cross, and that he gives to us, gloriously free from death, in his resurrection.

So when we pray the Lord’s prayer, we pray to be forgiven our sins as we forgive those who sin against us. It’s not that God is bargaining with us, but that receiving and giving forgiveness are two inseparable aspects of the new life God gives us in Jesus.

Of course, that’s easy to say. On this anniversary we must recognise that to speak of forgiveness, for some people, will be an enormous challenge. Those who have been deeply wounded by sin sometimes say they can’t bring themselves to forgive. But the Holy Spirit helps us in our weakness. If we can’t yet say, “I forgive”, can we say, “Lord, I want to forgive”? Even that intention turns us round, begins to point us out of the snare of vengeance in which we are trapped, begins to free us into the new life which God offers. For forgiveness, in the end, is God’s work, because it is what God is like. If we will let him, he will make us like him, transform us into his image.

This is not an easy solution to the violence of the world, not a trite answer to the sufferings of 9/11 and all other acts of violence. In fact, in the world as it is, the path of forgiveness is inevitably the way of the cross. Jesus himself lived that forgiveness all the way to his death, the apparent last desperate failure of his mission and teaching. “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do.” But we do believe in resurrection. We do believe that God can and will bring new life beyond the uttermost limits of all human failure. Ultimately, the last word on the universe, as the first, is love. And we can begin to live in that love, if we will, here and now.

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

2011-08-11T14:05:00.000+01:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sermon at Parish Mass Trinity 7 2011

2011-08-11T11:07:00.000+01:00

1 Kings 19:9, 11-13

Romans 9:1-5

Matthew 14:22-33

At the British Museum at the moment there’s an exhibition called “Treasures of Heaven”, saints, relics and devotion in mediaeval Europe. It’s an exhibition mainly of reliquaries, containers for relics, and many of them are superb examples. Gilded and jewelled shrines made to contain saint’s bones or objects associated with Jesus and Mary and so on.

A few weeks ago I gave a talk to another parish in our area about the cult of relics, as a preparation for their visit to the exhibition. What struck me was their response. Quite a lot of people wanted to know how you could be sure that a relic really was what it was said to be. How do you know that a particular bone really does come from St Hubert, or a particular splinter of wood from the Cross on which Jesus was crucified?

To ask that is to ask a very modern question of a pre-modern object. Living in the 21^st Century we are, whether we like it or not, children of the enlightenment, heirs of the scientific revolution, thoroughly modern in our outlook and the questions we ask. Our approach to knowledge is based on evidence and proof, because it seems that that’s how most kinds of knowledge are handled in our world.

When mediaeval people approached a relic it was not proof, but belief, that invested the object with meaning. It was belief that made it a bridge between their own world and the heavenly world of Christ and the saints. This wasn’t pretence, but a different way of approaching reality than the one we are used to. Some of those mediaeval relics would indeed have met modern standards of proof, but some of them would not. But to judge them by modern standards as “fakes” is really to misread them, to misunderstand what the object was for.

A similar consideration applies when we read Bible stories. We need to remember that we are, unavoidably, modern people reading pre-modern texts. Stories of the miraculous can seem particularly problematic, such as the story we read today, of Jesus walking on the water, or the story we read last week of the feeding of the five thousand. How are we to interpret these stories?

For some, the first approach is to ask, what are the facts? Some Bible scholars in the 20^th Century took a rather sceptical approach to stories like this. Commentaries were published suggesting that, when Jesus had fed the five thousand, what really happened was that the moral force of his teaching persuaded the people to take out and share the hidden stashes of food they’d brought along with them. Likewise when Jesus walked on water he was really walking on a hidden sandbank.

The problem with explanations like that is that they tend to rob the story of any significance. We’re no longer inhabiting the story and listening to what it’s got to say to us. We’ve become focussed on what the story is not focussed on: skepticism, evidence, proof.

Now, for what it’s worth, much contemporary Biblical scholarship is rather more robust and recognises the weakness of trying to explain away the miraculous. The stories of the feeding of the five thousand and Jesus walking on water are told in all four Gospels. These represent four different early Christian communities – and one of them, Mark, is very early. It is almost inconceivable that there were not some extraordinary events behind these stories, events which were remembered and told in those communities, the first generation of disciples.

But equally we need to recognise that it is the telling of the stories in the community which gives them meaning. These stories are not meant to be simply a reporting of facts from the past. As with last week’s story of the feeding of the five thousand, the story of Jesus walking on the lake is told in a symbolic way. There are references to the Old Testament and to the situation of the early Christian community which wrote this story in its gospel. All of them are references full of meaning, uncovering hidden depths.

First, Jesus descends from on high and walks on the water in the dark. It is night. And this recalls the first creation story in Genesis, where we are told that in the darkness of primordial chaos the Spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters, bringing creation and life into being.

The crossing of the sea of Galilee also recall the story of the Exodus and the crossing of the red sea, and some of the psalms and the prophets in fact speak of God walking on the sea ahead of the Children of Israel, parting the waves for them.

Both of these Old Testament allusions say that it is God who walks on the sea, and the meaning is clear: Jesus is doing what God does. This meaning is brought out more clearly in the greeting Jesus gives to his disciples. Our translation this morning says, “Courage! It is I!”, but in the Greek he actually says “Do not be afraid! I am!”. Jesus uses the Divine name, the name of Yahweh, I Am Who I Am, to greet his disciples.

As with the feeding of the five thousand last week, the meaning is that God is in Jesus, feeding his people in the wilderness, walking on the sea, bringing about a new exodus, a new liberation for God’s people.

But the people in this week’s story are not the vast multitude fed with the loaves and fishes. They are the small, harried group of disciples, desperately trying to row to shore in their little insecure boat, battling through the night against wind and waves and seeming to make no progress.

Sometimes being a Christian can feel wonderfully comforting and reassuring. Like the multitude fed by Jesus in the wilderness, we are conscious of the great family of the Church throughout the world, that great communion and fellowship, celebrating the one Eucharist, knowing that we are fed by Jesus and have more than enough. At other times we may feel more like that little group in the boat. Alone, battling in the dark, making no headway against the storms.

The community in which Matthew’s Gospel was written may well have felt like that much of the time. There are a lot of references to persecution in Matthew, which suggests that this may have been something that community was familiar with. And perhaps it wasn’t a very big community. If so, this story of the little embattled group in the boat would have had a particular resonance for them. As it may, indeed, for us.

In the West we are unlikely to face real persecution for our faith. The worst we can expect is probably just to be ignored and marginalised as irrelevant, unlike our brothers and sisters in some parts of the world.

But we all from time to time know what it is like to feel that we’re struggling on in the dark and making no progress. We all know, like Peter, what it is like to feel that the waves are rising up around us.

The storms and waves that surround us might be those of anxiety or illness, grief or weariness. It matters not. However dark the night, however far out from shore we may seem to be, Jesus is with us. As with his people of old, he is God, our liberator, mighty to save. In whatever situation we are in, he says to us, “Do not be afraid! I am!”. His hand reaches out to save us. If, in faith, we keep our eyes on him, we will not sink beneath the waves.

The meaning of this story spans the years. Jesus is not past and gone, but living now; he is not trapped in expressions and understandings of the past; he is at work today and speaks to us today, in our modern world. We meet him, risen from the dead, in word and sacrament. This story is as meaningful and relevant to us as it was to our brothers and sisters who first heard it nearly two thousand years ago. As it must be, for it is a story of Jesus Christ, who is our God and our saviour, the same, yesterday, today, and for ever.

The Church teaches that the Bible is inspired by God. That doesn’t mean that it’s an infallible text dictated from on high, but it does mean that the Holy Spirit lives and breathes – inspires – through these texts. It does mean that there is something in the Bible that has the power to open us up to a living relationship with the risen Christ. So we can read a story like today’s, from a very different time and outlook, and find it still fresh, still new, speaking to us in our own context and turning our gaze to Jesus, who hand is stretched out to save whatever the storms of life may be for us.

Weekday Mass, Tuesday 2nd August

2011-08-11T10:49:00.000+01:00

Matthew 15:1-2, 10-14

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sermon at Parish Mass Trinity 6 2011

2011-08-11T10:44:00.000+01:00

Isaiah 55:1-5

Romans 9:1-5

Matthew 14:13-21

One version of the story goes like this:

Wilfred the Hairy, who was Count of Barcelona, Urgell and Besalú at the end of the 9^th Century, had fought for the independence of his territories, which were later to be known as Catalunya. As he lay mortally wounded on a battlefield in Southern Spain, he asked his ally, the King of France, to give him a flag, a badge of honour he could leave to his descendants. The King dipped four fingers in Wilfred’s blood and drew them across his golden shield, thus creating the Catalan flag: yellow with four red stripes.

I’ve been spending part of my summer holiday visiting Barcelona, which is the regional capital of Catalunya. After years of repression under Franco, the Catalan identity has bounced back stronger than ever. Catalan is the first language spoken, the Catalan flag is everywhere, and the story of Wilfred the Hairy is still told.

History and legend are not simply facts recalled from the past with no power in the present. The story of Count Wilfred is part of the identity of the Catalan people; in telling the story they remember who they are now, it evokes a sense of belonging and shared destiny. Re-membering, in this sense, means rediscovering membership, entering anew into an identity with a community which is not just something in the past but a present reality.

It’s useful to remember, when we read the Bible, that the stories we read there have much the same kind of function. When we read the Old Testament we are reading the story of the Jewish People, the story of God’s providence and care which formed the destiny of that particular people, the people who were rescued from slavery in Egypt and received God’s revelation through the law and the prophets.

The telling of those stories in the Jewish community was and is a part of what establishes that sense of identity. The scriptures were not written to be books for private study, but to be read aloud in the assembly of the people. That wasn’t simply for instruction about righteous living and good behaviour, although that was part of it of course. Gathering together and telling the stories anew were an act of collective re-membering, re-establishing their identity as the people God chose for his own.

The early Christians continued telling those stories in their own gatherings, discovering new meanings in the light of Jesus. They also added their own stories, memories of the life of Jesus and his teachings, and the teaching of those who were closest to him in his earthly life. After a few decades these were codified and written down, forming the material we now call the Gospels. And the Gospels, like the earlier Jewish scriptures, were meant to be read aloud in the assembly of the people.

The Christian assembly, from the very beginning, was the Eucharist, the gathering for the breaking of bread. On the first day of every week, the day that Jesus rose from the dead, his followers gathered to do what he had commanded, telling the story of the last supper, sharing bread and drinking wine, his Body and his Blood, the memorial of his death until he comes again.

The Gospels were written to be read aloud at the Eucharist, to be part of our re-membering, our belonging in the people of God whom Jesus has called and established. It’s therefore very significant that all four Gospels contain the story of the feeding of the five thousand. It is an identity story of the people of God.

Firstly, it recalls the exodus from Egypt, God’s deliverance of the Jewish people from slavery. They left Egypt, you’ll recall, and were led by Moses into the desert, the wilderness of Sinai. Today’s Gospel reading says literally in Greek that Jesus went out into a desert, followed by the crowd. Now in fact the area round the Sea of Galilee is not a desert, it is a fertile area with lots of small towns dotted around. But Matthew wants us to get the meaning that Jesus is like Moses, leading God’s people out into the desert.

Then, Jesus feeds the people miraculously in the desert, just as Moses had called on God in the desert and God had sent the manna from heaven to feed the children of Israel.

But this story of the feeding of the five thousand also refers to the Eucharist – and remember that this is a story meant to be told at the Eucharist. In the desert, Jesus took bread, blessed it, broke it, and gave it to the disciples – exactly the same words as are used at the last supper.

The earliest Eucharistic liturgies we know about, from the early second century, use a peculiar Greek word to describe the portion of the bread given in Holy Communion and reserved for the sick – klasmaton. And this is exactly the same word that the Gospels use for the fragments of bread gathered up at the end of the feeding of the five thousand. This story of miraculous feeding, and the Eucharistic liturgy, use the same language. So, in the feeding of the five thousand, we have both the Exodus, and the Eucharist.

The ancient Israelites were freed by the Exodus from slavery in Egypt. What are Jesus’ disciples freed from?

Immediately before this passage, Matthew tells the story of the death of John the Baptist. On Herod’s birthday, he gave a banquet for his friends. A banquet of debauched entertainment, poisoned with envy, hatred, and malice, desire spiralling out of control and culminating in murder.

By placing Herod’s banquet immediately before the banquet which Jesus provides, Matthew makes the contrast clear. Herod’s banquet represents the old order of sin and death. Jesus gives the banquet of compassion, love and life, a banquet in which there is no rivalry or envy because there is always more than enough for everyone.

And this is precisely what is told, and enacted, and becomes real, when we gather to celebrate the Eucharist. The Last Supper, when Jesus instituted the Eucharist, was of course a Passover, a meal enacting and re-telling the Exodus, making real in the present God’s saving acts for his people of old.

So, too, the Eucharist enacts, re-tells, makes real, God’s saving acts in Jesus. His death and resurrection are our liberation from sin and death, and our entry into new life. The Eucharist is our re-membering as the people of God, in which we become what we receive, the Body of Christ.

Now, how many people were fed by Jesus with the loaves and fishes? Five thousand men, not counting the women and children, because, of course, in those days they didn’t count women and children. So, very many more than five thousand, then. It was a huge multitude.

Well, here we are, celebrating the Eucharist, entering once more into the identity that Jesus gives us as the people of God. But there aren’t five thousand of us here.

In the parish of Old Saint Pancras, there are about 26,000 people, more or less. And most of them aren’t with us here in Church. But we will be with them, as our neighbours, friends, work colleagues, the people we meet as we go about our daily lives this week.

Today we re-hear the story of our identity, the story of God’s saving work in Jesus, and we re-member our place in the people he has claimed for his own.

But that crowd in the desert wasn’t a select few. It was an enormous multitude, everyone and anyone, all sorts and conditions. Everyone has a place in the story of salvation which we tell. Everyone can find, if they will, that they too are called out of the old order of sin and death to new life in Christ.

Our challenge is to live the story we tell in a way that makes a difference not just to us but to those around us. It is to live the story in a way which rekindles the imagination of a society which, perhaps, has forgotten that there might be any other way of living than that old order of sin and death. Our challenge is to live the story that makes love real in a world where love has grown cold.

Does that seem too much of a task for our meagre resources? Fear not. For the story is the story of Jesus, who brings abundance out of our poverty. Five loaves and two fishes were enough to feed the multitude; our own poor love, if we will offer it to him, he will transform. And it will be enough, and more besides.

Sermon at Parish Mass Trinity 1 2011

2011-06-26T17:23:00.000+01:00

Jeremiah 28:5-9

Romans 6:12-end

Matthew 10:40-end

In the news this week was the story that many people in Greece are so worried about the future of their county’s economy, and even the survival of the Euro, that they have been converting all their savings into gold coins, to provide – they hope – some security in case their economy collapses.

Economic systems are the structures in which payment and reward can happen, the transactions of everyday life. The Gospel reading we’ve just heard, and the extract from Paul’s letter to the Romans before that, both talk about payment and reward. Both those readings are in fact the conclusions of much longer passages. Matthew talks about how the disciples of Jesus will be persecuted by human beings but rewarded by God. And Paul compares the result of living according to sin with the free gift of life which God offers.

What both Matthew and Paul do in these passages is to compare two different economic systems: not the Euro and the Pound, but something much more fundamental and different: the human economy, and God’s economy.

The human economy is founded in limited resources. There’s only so much to go round. Payment and wages are transactions carefully measured out and checked, for labour or goods of equivalent value. And the natural human thing is to try and get the best value for what you’ve got, and to hang on to as much as possible for yourself.

In the human economy, even life itself is a limited resource, not something you want to squander or give away recklessly, but something to eke out little by little. You’ve only got so much, and then death puts an end to the little you have. This economy, this imagination of the way things are, leads to rivalry and violence. The human economy, governed by the fear of death, ends up being ruled by death.

God’s economy is completely different. God does not deal in measured out payment and reward, or in limited resources. God gives, and gives in unmeasured generosity, poured out and overflowing. Generosity, in fact, is God’s very nature, a generosity which is love, continually pouring itself out without being diminished. God’s economy gives life without limit. Our very being flows from God who is the continual loving act of creating and giving.

So Paul concludes his argument in Romans with the famous verse, “the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

In other words, what I think Paul is saying is that you can choose to stay trapped in the human economy, bounded by death and ruled by rivalry and violence. Or you can choose to receive the free gift of life from God made known in Jesus. God’s gift is to live according to God’s economy of generosity and love that knows no limit. And this is not something we earn, because if you begin to live according to God’s economy, then you are leaving behind the old way of bargaining with death, of trading off the little you’ve got to try and get something in return.

The whole Christian life consists of living from God’s generosity, from his free gift, revealed to the world in Jesus, who is both the model of God’s generosity and that generosity itself, God incarnate, giving himself that we might live.

At this time of year we celebrate Corpus Christi, God’s gift of the Eucharist, the Mass and Holy Communion which Christians celebrate every Sunday.

The Mass was of course instituted by Jesus at the last supper, with the words and actions which the priest repeats in the Eucharistic Prayer. Because the Eucharist is a gift of God’s generosity, it overflows with meaning and depth, with grace and life which are inexhaustible.

Firstly, under the signs of bread and wine, Jesus gave his body and blood to his disciples, to be, for ever, the sacrament which makes present and effective his saving death on the cross. The Passover meal commemorated God’s saving actions in the past, when the Children of Israel were liberated from slavery in Egypt, but it wasn’t just calling to mind stuff that happened long ago, like watching a history programme. Rather, the Passover really made those events of the past present and effective for Jewish worshippers in their own time and place.

Jesus, by instituting the Eucharist in the context of the Passover, was establishing a new Passover, a new making present and effective of God’s saving work, this time the saving work of Jesus Christ for all people in his death and resurrection.

Secondly, the Eucharist establishes a new people, the holy people of God, who by living with Christ’s life actually become his body in the world. "Whoever receives you receives me, and whoever receives me receives the one who sent me." We become what we receive, the body of Christ. We are, through the Eucharist, members of Christ, joined to him as our head. Jesus remakes the human race, freeing us from the old economy of sin and death and enabling us to live with God’s life and love and limitless generosity. We are, together, made into a new human nature, a “new Adam” in Christ.

Thirdly, Jesus truly gives himself in this sacrament. He who is the truth, who cannot deceive, took bread and wine and said, “this is my body… this is my blood”. And the faith of Christians has always received those words as meaning what they say. At the consecration in the Eucharist the body and blood of Christ become truly present under the outward signs of bread and wine, together with his soul and Divinity. Jesus our risen Lord is truly present in the Blessed Sacrament. Not indeed in a way perceptible to the senses, but faith believes nor questions how.

From the very first Christians reserved a portion of the consecrated Bread to give holy communion to those who could not be present at the celebration of Mass, such as the sick or those in prison. Just as we do here in the tabernacle in the corner.

But Jesus is truly present in the Blessed Sacrament all the time, not just when It is being received in communion. So reservation of the Sacrament gave rise to devotion and worship of that special sacramental presence of Christ, even apart from the celebration of Mass.

It’s important to remember that Jesus did not institute the Eucharist so he could sit in a tabernacle being worshipped, he instituted it so that people could receive him and be transformed into his body and live with his life. But nevertheless, the generosity of God overflows all boundaries. Devotion to that sacramental presence is not an essential part of the Eucharist, but belongs to the overflow of God’s generosity and love. God does not give just enough, but more than we can ask or imagine.

The gift of the Real Presence is one that has inspired love and devotion down the ages. Most days when I come into this church there is someone here praying in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament. Whether people realise it or not, Jesus is here in his love, his presence warming cold hearts, converting sinners, comforting the troubled, setting the hearts of secret saints ablaze. And always drawing us to himself, drawing us to that most intimate and necessary union with him in Holy Communion.

So we will celebrate that gift today, God’s generous love in the Eucharist which overflows and spends itself without ever being diminished, his presence and his very self, and essence all Divine.

Homily, Wednesday 8 June 2011

2011-06-11T12:53:00.000+01:00

John 17:11-19

We are getting near to the end of the long Last Supper scene in John’s Gospel. We have had three chapters of profound teaching about the need to abide in Jesus as he abides in the Father, teaching about the gift of the Holy Spirit who will abide in our hearts.

And now at the end Jesus prays for his disciples, not only those in the upper room but all his disciples throughout time, the church in every age, which includes us.

This is called the “priestly prayer of Christ”: Jesus prays as the High Priest whom God has consecrated and sent into the world, and it is a prayer of consecration. Jesus consecrates himself, as both priest and sacrificial victim. He is the one who reveals God as priest, and who does so in the midst of the world’s violence and envy, as victim. And this is the expression of the mission Jesus has received from the Father, which is to make the Father known.

But Jesus also consecrates his disciples, his disciples in every age. Through that consecration Jesus shares his priesthood and his mission with the Church. The Church is to be the visible sign of that mission in the world until the end of time, the Church, like Jesus, is to make the Father known.

By the consecration which Jesus imparts to the Church we are sanctified, set apart for the work of God, and made into a holy priesthood. The gift of the Holy Spirit in our hearts through baptism stamps that mark and character on us for ever. We are to be God’s holy people to make the world holy.

The gift of the Holy Spirit also is the gift of unity. Jesus prays that his disciples may be one in the same way as he and the Father are one. This unity is the discovery that our true life, our identity and our very being, are found in God. And this is what the mission of Christ in the world is about, the mission we now share: to make God known, to make known to the world that its true life is found in God and not elsewhere.

The world is caught in the grip of a destructive illusion that life is something we create for ourselves. The autonomous ego, the self-made person, promise life where life cannot be found. The gift of God is true life, life in the Holy Spirit which is the life of God himself.

And we are sent as Christ was, set in this world although we are not of the world because our true life is found in God. Our mission is to make God known, to bring others into that true life which is God’s gift.

Christ’s priestly prayer of consecration is a prayer for his Church for all time. That act of consecration is made real and present for us in every Eucharist. Here Christ himself, through the ministry of the priests he has called and sent, makes himself present, the consecrated priest and victim. Ordinary stuff, bread and wine, is changed by the power of that consecration into his body and blood. Ordinary people, you and me, are changed into Christ’s body, his Church, the holy priesthood he has consecrated and sent into the world.

Here we discover again the true source of our life, the Holy Spirit who is the Father’s gift, the Spirit who makes us one in Jesus and in the Father. Here we are consecrated and sent, God’s holy people to make the world holy, to make known God’s name.

Sermon at Parish Mass Easter 6 2011

2011-06-11T12:50:00.000+01:00

Acts 17:22-31

1 Peter 3:13-end

John 14:15-21

In the Autumn of 1831 a Russian pilgrim, called Nicholas Motovilov, made his way deep into the Siberian forests, to a remote monastery, to see a famous monk called Father Seraphim, later known to the world as Saint Seraphim of Sarov.

Seraphim had lived as a hermit in the forest for many years and had a reputation as a spiritual guide. Nicholas wanted to see if the saint by his prayers could cure him of a spreading paralysis. Which indeed he did. But Nicholas kept going back again and again to see Saint Seraphim. The love, joy, and peace that radiated from the person of the humble monk kept drawing him back.

On one occasion the saint spoke to Nicholas of the true aim of the Christian life. Nicholas had asked many people about this, and from them got the impression that the life of a Christian was primarily about going to church, doing good, or following the example and teaching of Christ. No, said Saint Seraphim.

The real aim of the Christian life is the acquisition of the Holy Spirit. The third person of the Holy Trinity, the Spirit of God, taking up his dwelling in us, and uniting us with God. That is the real aim of the Christian life. Everything else, prayer, fasting, the sacraments, works of charity, are means to this end.

This was a surprising answer for the time as most of the Church, east and west, was very much focussed on external activity and had rather forgotten about the depths within the human heart. The depths where God must dwell if we are to do the works of God. Indeed in those days it was possible to talk about the Holy Spirit as the “forgotten person of the Trinity”.

But this is what Jesus is talking about in today’s Gospel. The gift of the Holy Spirit, the Advocate, is promised to those who love Jesus. He is the Spirit of Truth, and he will abide in us. That’s one of John’s favourite words, abide. It means a real, rooted, eternal presence, the place where you truly live. Jesus abides in the Father. And we will abide in Jesus. How? By the Holy Spirit abiding in us.

Now God is infinite life and love, and gives himself without limit. If that is the case, and God gives his Spirit to us to dwell in our hearts, should we not all be made saints straight away?

Well, in a sense, we are. The New Testament talks about all believers as “saints”, and our bodies as the temples of the Holy Spirit. We are made objectively holy by the fact of God dwelling in our hearts. There's a lovely story about Mother Teresa, when a journalist at some public occasion, wanting a story, thrust a microphone into her face and asked, “Mother Teresa, are you a saint?” She looked at him and smiled. “Yes”, she said, “and so are you.”

But alongside that we have to admit that God’s holiness manifests itself to a greater or lesser degree in the lives of Christians. When we stop and examine our consciences, we know that we are very far from perfect, and at every Mass we confess our sins. How can this be, if the Spirit of God dwells within us?

It is true that God gives himself infinitely, and holds nothing back. What limits us is our own capacity to receive that gift. The work of the Holy Spirit in our hearts is a slow, patient transformation. The slow undoing of our sinful desires, which close us in on ourselves. The slow expansion of our hearts to God’s Spirit. So by degrees the Holy Spirit transforms us more and more into his dwelling place.

This does not happen to us automatically, or without our co-operation. We have to align our wills to the will of God so we can allow the Holy Spirit to transform us. How then can we allow God to enlarge our hearts and fill us with his presence?

There is no new or sensational answer to this. Pray, receive the sacraments, live according to the teaching of Christ. Do this, and God will dwell in you in all his fullness, uniting you with him, transforming you into himself.

This requires, of course, a certain amount of discipline. In fact it needs that old fashioned and off-putting word, asceticism. But asceticism just means “training”. Like athletic training. If you want to get fit, you go to the gym or you go for a run, frequently and regularly. Whether you feel like it or not. Whether it’s sunny or raining. You need a dedicated, disciplined commitment to make progress.

And so it is in the Christian life. The Eucharist which we participate in Sunday by Sunday, if not more frequently, renews our abiding in Christ and his in us. Renews his divine life, the gift of his Spirit, in our hearts.

Our study of the scriptures, and particularly of the teaching of Christ in the gospels, is a constant means by which we are inspired and corrected and align our wills to the will of God, leading us from sin into holiness.

And prayer. Perhaps this is where most attention is needed in the Church today, certainly in the West. The culture that surrounds us, in which we are caught up whether we like it or not, is so busy and distracted, so frantic.

The gift of the Holy Spirit is given in our hearts, deep within ourselves. And we need to dwell in ourselves if we are to receive that gift. Our prayer life needs to be disciplined, committed, and above all to be built around a core of silence and stillness in which we are centred and learn to abide within ourselves, for that is where God abides, too.

The ancient practice of Christian meditation has undergone a remarkable renewal in the Church in recent times, and many people have found it very helpful. It simply is sitting in stillness and silence, and repeating a prayer word or phrase over and over again, focussing on the prayer word in the middle of the noisy distractions that our minds throw up all the time.

It’s simple but is hard work nonetheless. One Indian sage said that we all have a tree full of chattering monkeys in our heads, and when you try to be silent and still for even a short time you become aware of that.

The point of meditation is not to make the monkeys be quiet, because they won’t be, but to focus on a stillness and a silence that is deeper than all the noise and distraction. It is not about falling asleep, but about an interior waking up, about developing an alert, focussed awareness of God who dwells in those silent depths.

Those who have practiced this for a long time begin to show in their outward lives the presence of God who is in their hearts. As St Paul says in Galatians, “the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.” When someone is full of the Holy Spirit these fruits become evident to all they meet, spreading the grace and work of the Spirit among others. Saint Seraphim, who was himself an example of someone transformed by the Holy Spirit, said, “find peace in your heart, and thousands will be saved around you”. That was true for him, and by God’s grace it can be true for us too.

Sermon at Parish Mass Easter 5 2011

2011-05-25T10:18:00.000+01:00

Acts 7:55-end

1 Peter 2:2-10

John 14:1-14

I know that I’m not the only person here who’s a fan of Agatha Christie, whether in her original novels or in the television adaptations of the stories of Hércule Poirot and Miss Marple.

They are classics of the detective novel, the murder mystery. What makes them so gripping is trying to work out who dunnit. And I have to admit I’m not very good at that. There are of course lots of clues scattered through the story, but many of them are misleading and there are lots of distracting leads and red herrings. But by the time I get to the end of a story I usually find out that the person who dunnit is the one person I never suspected. At the end of the story all kinds of things come into the light, hidden relationships, secret motives, concealed identities. All of them explain who dunnit, and why. And they were there all along in the story, but I didn’t see them for what they were, I didn’t understand what they meant, because I didn’t know what the end of the story was.

If you re-read an Agatha Christie knowing what the end is, suddenly everything becomes clear. It’s almost as though you’re reading a different story. The end of the story changes everything that happened before, as well.

Well, as with Agatha Christie, so with the Bible. The end of the story changes the whole story, and nothing will make complete sense unless you read it in the light of the end.

What is the end of the Bible story? Stephen tells us in Acts today, when he knows he is about to be murdered by the Sanhedrin, and he cries out “I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God!”

The end of the story is heaven opened. It is seeing God as God really is. This is why the book of Revelation, which is all about seeing heaven opened, is at the end of the Bible. And equally heaven opened is at the end of Stephen’s story, at the end of his life. And seeing heaven opened means seeing Jesus in the place where God is. “At the right hand of God” doesn’t just mean that Jesus is God’s best friend. It means he is one with him, ruling with him, sharing his power. So also in Revelation we see the Lamb upon the throne – Jesus on God’s throne.

This is utterly shocking. It means seeing the man who was rejected, cast out, crucified, a blasphemer, under God’s curse – it means seeing that man raised on high in the place where God is.

If you don’t know the end of the story, this is incomprehensible. The story of Stephen in Acts draws many parallels between his death and that of Jesus. Both are judged by a council of religious leaders who really believe that what they are doing is God’s will. Both are convicted of blasphemy, both thrust out of the city and murdered. Stephen repeats in his death the rejection and murder of Jesus, the innocent victim. And Stephen, like Jesus, forgives his murderers and prays for them.

Stephen endures this because he knows that the whole way the religious leaders judge things is wrong, and he trusts completely that God will save him. For him, heaven is open. He sees the end of the story. His murderers don’t. Or they don’t yet. Among them is Saul, later called Paul, who would later become the greatest ever preacher of the crucified Messiah.

The Bible contains many stories of sacred violence like that of the death of Stephen. Particularly in parts of the Old Testament people are cursed, cast out, killed, for what seem to be religious or ritual reasons. Maybe they’re foreigners, they worship the wrong gods, they are unclean, or they have fallen foul of some kind of ritual taboo. These are like the misleading clues in an Agatha Christie story. The people in these tales of ritual violence think that this is what God is like, what God expects. They invite us to draw the same conclusions.

But at the same time, other Old Testament texts give us different clues. They talk about a God who does not want violence or sacrifice and has no interest in ritual religion. What God wants is righteous living, justice, peace – and for all people to come to his light, to come to know the God who is being revealed in Israel’s history. All people, Jews and foreigners, men and women, without any distinction based on ritual boundaries.

It is Jesus who makes this strand of Jewish teaching absolutely explicit. Jesus was constantly touching the unclean, going to meet the outcasts and restoring them to the fellowship of Israel’s society.

When Jesus, like Stephen, became the victim of sacred violence it seemed as though all that has gone wrong. Jesus had ended up on the wrong side of the sacred curses and died as an outcast, a blasphemer. It seemed as though the misleading clues were right all along – God really was a God of violence, he drew clear lines you must not cross and you will be punished if you do. And, incidentally, the religious people knew they were alright because they were on the inside of the sacred boundary, projecting their violence onto the person outside.

But the resurrection is the twist in the tale that changes the whole story. Jesus is raised from the dead. Heaven is opened, and the victim of sacred violence is seen in the place where God is.

The whole story changes. The structures of violence that have been running the world since the beginning turn out to be not where God is. In fact, God has come among us in Jesus to liberate us from them.

This requires a total reversal in humanity’s perception of God. The victim is where God is. This is what is meant in today’s reading from 1 Peter which quotes Psalm 118:

The stone that the builders rejected has become the very head of the corner.

That is, the rejected stone is turns out to be the one essential stone that holds the structure together. That is the most frequently quoted verse of the Old Testament in the New Testament. It’s as though the New Testament writers are taking this verse and saying, this is the clue you mustn’t miss, this is the key that unlocks everything. This huge reversal - the Victim ends up where God is – is the end of the story that changes the whole of the story.

This is why Jesus, in today’s Gospel passage from John, tells his disciples that he is going to prepare a place for them in the Father’s house, and he will come back to them so that they can be where he is. The return of Jesus from the death of the cross is absolutely necessary. The resurrection opens heaven because it shows that the Victim is where God is and so makes possible a new understanding of God. A God without violence. A God who opens to us and to everyone his overflowing deathless life out of sheer love and generosity.

The end of the story changes the whole of the story. Like Stephen, whose story could be seen as a foolish waste of a life, recklessly thrown away in rebellion against the sacred structures of the world. Until you see heaven opened, and the Son of Man at the right hand of God. Then Stephen’s story becomes that of a life lived from the abundant deathless generosity of God, a glorious witness to the true and inexhaustible life which no stones or violence can touch.

And so it is with us. Heaven opened, and the Victim in the place where God is, changes everything. It changes, for a start, the people we want to victimise and cast out. We can’t do that any more, because that place of the outcast is where Jesus is!

But it changes too all the stuff that’s gone wrong in our own lives, the history of sin and failure, wrong turnings, wasted opportunities, regrets. Now, those aren’t the story any more. The risen Victim is the story. He has gone before us to prepare a place for us, and has come back to us to open the way. The way to the Father who is utterly different from anything we had imagined, whose love draws us into his own overflowing deathless life. The end of the story changes the whole story, for each one of us, here and now, as it has for believers down the ages, and will do to the end of time.

Dionysus versus the Crucified

2011-04-22T19:05:00.000+01:00

Sermon at the Solemn Liturgy, Good Friday 2011

Isaiah 52:13-53:12

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

The Passion according to John

First, some words which are not from the Bible:

“This [Christian] universal love of men is in practice the preference for the suffering, underprivileged, degenerate: it has in fact lowered and weakened the strength, the responsibility, the lofty duty to sacrifice men.

“The species requires that the ill-constituted, weak, degenerate, perish: but it was precisely to them that Christianity turned as a conserving force; … this pseudo humaneness called Christianity wants it established that no one should be sacrificed.

“When lesser men begin to doubt whether higher men exist, then the danger is great! And one ends by discovering that there is virtue also among the lowly and subjugated, the poor in spirit, and that before God men are equal – which has so far been the [greatest] nonsense on earth!

“When Nero and Caracalla sat up there, the paradox arose: ‘the lowest man is worth more than the man up there!’ And the way was prepared for an image of God that was as remote as possible from the image of the most powerful – the god on the cross!”

Those are the words of Friedrich Nietzsche, from his final book The Will to Power. Nietzsche was unquestionably a great genius, perhaps the most influential philosopher of the 19^th Century. He was the first thinker to set out systematically the idea that human beings construct themselves, that there is no higher law or morality to which we must make reference than our own wills. This does mean, as Nietzsche clearly saw, that the strong must triumph over the weak, and that care for the vulnerable and downtrodden is an obstacle to our own self-construction, to the exaltation of the ego.

Nietzsche saw, very clearly, that the Christian gospel was opposed to all that, and he despised it. Our modern militant atheists want us to accept a kind of bland general human niceness, a humanist morality which makes no reference to God. Nietzsche saw that this was impossible. Human beings, left to their own devices, freed (as he would have said) from the restraints of morality and the Christian Gospel, do not behave like that. No, the strong triumph, the weak must be eliminated, and we must embrace this. It is our human destiny!

Nietzsche’s perception was indeed profound. He observed very accurately how human beings behave, and affirmed that as the standard and norm to which we must aspire – or perish.

Of course, this is as old as time, and the Bible described it very well before Nietzsche did. It all began in the Garden of Eden, in that mythological time-before-time whose symbols speak to us of the deep origin and tragedy of our human identity.

Adam and Eve were at peace, in harmony and love, until the serpent came slithering between them. A tree became the object in a gambit of imitation and desire, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The serpent whispered, suggesting that the tree was desirable, and that God was a rival wanting to keep it for himself.

That desire became Eve’s, and Adam’s. They took and ate. But the knowledge of good and evil that the tree conferred was a slippery, deceitful thing. It was a knowledge that differentiated, which apportioned blame. It was a knowledge in which what I know is that I am good and the other person is evil. And the other person knows the same about me, in reverse.

So Adam blamed Eve, and Eve blamed the serpent. But their desire was identical, copied from one another. The imitation of desire sparked off rivalry, conflict, suspicion, and the illusion of difference between rivals whose desire is, in fact, the same.

The whirlwind of desire that was touched off in Eden rapidly escalated. In one generation, it gave rise to the murderous rivalry of Cain and Abel. Four generations later, it was out of control, devastating the whole human race. In Genesis 4 we meet Lamech, the first man who thought he needed to have two wives. Lamech vows, “I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for striking me. If Cain is avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy-sevenfold!”. Now we have very well established Nietzsche’s theory that there are great men, who command their own destiny, and lesser men, who can be eliminated.

In the vivid language of myth this tells us the whole human tragedy. The imitation of desire is a necessary fact if we are to enter into human consciousness and attain true maturity. But it is also our undoing. It leads to rivalry and conflict. A group or society which becomes locked in imitating its own desires can be consumed with mutual rivalry to the point of self destruction. Then a scapegoat, an outsider, can be blamed and expelled by the group in order to restore their own unity and peace. It leads to human sacrifice, literal and metaphorical. And always that deceitful knowledge of good and evil tells us that the outsider is different from us, evil, cursed, deserving death. A “lesser” human being.

Does not the High Priest Caiaphas say this exactly? “It is better to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed.” And the crowd with one voice, with one desire, shouted, “Crucify him!”

But the Garden of Eden was only the start of the story. Before it all went wrong, deeper than our tragic human flaw, everything that God created was very good. The murderous storm of rivalry sparked off in Eden does not alter the fact that God created the universe, and created it with a purpose, created in love, created that it might all find its fulfilment in him.

God could not permit that the purpose of his love should be unfulfilled. And love contrived a redemption greater than the fall.

God entered into the midst of our human condition, into that long history littered with human sacrifices, into a whole world conditioned by the false knowledge that the murderers, that is we, are good and our victims are evil. Love brought God to us, love brought God to empty himself and take the form of a slave. In the upper room he knelt before his disciples, teaching them the law of love. On the cross, we see what Divine love looks like when it meets the violence and sin it has come to defeat. On the cross, God shows his love for the human race by becoming our victim.

And this turns our whole way of being human upside-down. Because if we see that the man on the cross is actually God, then it is no longer possible to think of the victim as an evil outsider who deserved what he got. It is no longer possible to think that the strong and powerful who put him there are good and in the right. Our self-constructed goodness is overturned. And God, the God on the cross, is suddenly revealed in all the victims there have ever been. Christianity really does wish to establish that no-one should be sacrificed. It does indeed seek to overcome the illusion that the scapegoat, the outsider, is different from us, is a “lesser man”.

So the cross is both our judgement and our salvation. It is judgement, because it reveals to us what we have been. It reveals the violence and falsehood of the whole way of being human by which we have been running the world. The way that Nietzsche called “the will to power” and that the Church has always called sin.

And the cross is salvation, because ultimately it is a revelation of love. The love of God for the poor, the weak and the despised. The love in which God seeks us out, undoes our violence, and invites us to find ourselves at last.

The office hymn for Matins in Passiontide expresses this in rich theological poetry:

God in pity saw man fallen,
Shamed and sunk in misery,
When he fell on death, by tasting
Fruit of the forbidden tree :
Then another Tree was chosen
Which the world from death should free.

Thus the scheme of our salvation
Was of old in order laid ;
That the manifold deceiver's
Art, by art might be outweighed ;
And the lure the foe put forward
Into means of healing made.

The tree of the cross brings us full circle. It is planted beside a garden. It stands just outside that gate of Eden which closed on us long ago in our deep origin as human beings.

The tree of knowledge of good and evil, that slippery knowledge that deceives, is no more. It has been replaced by the tree of the cross, the tree that finally tells us the truth about ourselves, and that tells us, even more, that we are loved.

Love is the way back into paradise. Love is creation restored and completed by the creator who has come to us for this. We know this, because the scapegoat, the outsider, the “lesser man”, has been raised from the dead. He reigns in triumph, from the tree of the cross, from his throne in heaven. In him, all the victims there have ever been are vindicated by God.

His name is Jesus. He is the Lamb once slain, the Divine Victim who dies no more, the true High Priest and King. And he lives, and loves, and saves, for ever and ever. Amen.

Sermon Maundy Thursday 2011

2011-04-22T18:51:00.000+01:00

Exodus 12: 1-4 [5-10] 11-14
1 Corinthians 11:23-26
John 13:1-17, 31b-35

This week’s Church Times had an article in which the writer complained that the Church in our own day concentrates too much on worship and so has too vague an idea of the jobs the Church is supposed to be doing. The writer listed these jobs: the Church is to make disciples of all nations; to preach the Gospel; to call people to repentance; to continue Jesus’ work of teaching, feeding and healing. And so on.

Now this is quite true as far as it goes. The Church should indeed be doing these things. But it worries me that there is so much focus on doing things in the Church today. The emphasis is all on human activity. It is as though we think the Church exists simply as an agency to promote moral improvement, or as a branch of social services. Current talk about the “Big Society” will only encourage this trend.

Today’s Gospel reading tells us something far deeper than this. The Church, the community of Christ’s disciples, is not first of all about doing anything. It is, rather, about being. And about being in love. Everything that the Church does flows from that.

John’s Gospel begins with the magnificent Prologue we read on Christmas day, “In the beginning was the Word”. That is an announcement of the supreme revelation of God in Jesus. The Word is God’s creative principle bringing everything into being, and the Word has become flesh as Jesus and lived among us. God has come to us in Jesus to make himself known.

That revelation, great as it is, is not complete in John Chapter 1. It continues to unfold through John’s Gospel, adding more detail and more depth. How does God make himself known? What does it mean to say that God is in Jesus? Tonight, in the intimacy of the upper room, Jesus with his disciples enters upon the last stage of that revelation, the revelation of Divine love. What has brought God into the world is not power but love. Jesus has come from the Father to share the Father’s love with humankind.

So Jesus, the eternal Word made flesh, takes off his robe and puts on a towel to wash his disciples’ feet. He is taking the role of a slave, the most menial servant. This is God “emptying himself” as St Paul says in Philippians. This is how God wants to be known. This is how God’s love manifests itself.

The washing of feet has been called by some of the ancient Fathers “the Sacrament of Christ”. Not that it is a particular sacrament of the Church, but rather that it is in the older meaning the sacramentum, the mystery of Christ, the sign which shows what the mission of Christ is all about. God has come into the world to serve, to share his love, and to make us clean or pure.

Jesus says to his disciples that they are “clean”. Jesus does not mean outward cleanliness, of which the foot washing is only a sign. Nor does he mean that the disciples can make themselves clean by some kind of moral self-improvement. No; to be clean or pure is to be in a spiritually purified state, free from sin. And this is God’s gift. Only God can make us clean. This is the meaning of the foot washing: we have to allow Jesus to do it for us. God humbles himself before us so that we can be humble enough to allow him to make us clean.

Our pride gets in the way of course, as it did with Peter. We don’t want God to be a slave, and we don’t want to submit ourselves to his slavery. We protest that we can manage by ourselves! And then what a sorry mess we make when we try. God has found that the only way to overcome our pride is to make himself as humble as possible before us.

Now we reach the heart of the mystery of the person and work of Christ. God makes us clean and pure so that we can share his life. And that life is love. Jesus gives us a new commandment, “Love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.”

We miss the full meaning of this if we think that Jesus is simply telling us to imitate what he has done. Jesus has loved us with the love of God who empties himself and takes the place of a slave. We are to love one another with that same love. We cannot imitate God from our own resources. Rather, we are to love one another with the love with which God loves us.

We can only do this by finding our true selves, our true identity, in God. Our being is God’s gift, not something we construct for ourselves. Our love is God’s gift too, God’s own love in which we find ourselves.

Before Jesus gives his command to follow his example and to love as he loves, he first explains the foot washing to Peter: “Unless I wash you, you have no share with me.” In other words, you have no part in me. You will not find yourself in me, unless I make you clean.

Jesus cleanses us from sin so that we can enter into the mystery of God revealed in him. When we discover ourselves in God’s love, then we are able to love as God does. We love with the love in which God has found us. It is by living in Christ, living the new life that he gives, that we come to ourselves in love. It is only then that Jesus says to the disciples, and to us, do as I have shown you.

At the Last Supper Jesus established his church in the essential form that it will have until the end of time. Every particular church community celebrating the Eucharist stands in succession from that first community of the Apostles to whom the Lord gave his command to do this in memory of him. The Apostles’ teaching and fellowship has continued in every generation in the work of mission and evangelism. Christians down the ages have sought out and served those in need.

But none of this comes from ourselves. It all flows from the love of God made known to us in Jesus. It is Jesus himself who continues his work in his Church. Jesus has purified us from sin so that we can find ourselves in the life and love he shares with the Father. It is that love, communicated to us by the Holy Spirit, which works itself out in our lives and in the life of the Church in the world. It is by being in God’s love that we are able to do God’s work in the world.

The first priority for the Church in this age as in any other is not to be worried about what we should do. Our priority is to remain abiding in Jesus, to continually discover him in us and ourselves in him. As St Paul says in Galatians, “it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me”. The work of the Church is not the effort of a human group, but something that rises from the secret and inexhaustible depths of divine life which is God’s gift to us, the love in which God has found us, and in which we find our true selves.

Sermon at St Mary Magdalene’s East Ham, Lent 3 2011

2011-03-28T12:27:00.000+01:00

The Samaritan Woman at the Well

Exodus 17:1-7
Romans 5:1-11
John 4:5-42

Last June I had the great blessing of going on my first ever pilgrimage to the Holy Land, in company with some of my fellow clergy from the Edmonton area. The Holy Land in June is hot. The sun stands almost overhead at noon, and there is very little shade.

However, we were assured when we arrived that we would have an air conditioned coach with all mod cons to carry us around, and the driver had a great ice box at the front of the coach which would be full of bottles of water that we could buy on board. So the first day we piled on to the coach and set off into the furnace-like heat of the day.

When we’d gone a little way it transpired that something in the Middle Eastern supply chain hadn’t quite joined up. There was no water on the coach. Those few clergy who had been wise virgins and brought along their own supplies looked a little smug, while the rest of us started to experience mild symptoms of panic. You realise what thirst really means when you are in an intensely hot dry climate and you don’t know when you’ll next be able to have a drink. You realise that what you want is not a nice cup of tea, not even a gin and tonic, but water, pure clear refreshing water. In the event our crisis didn’t last long, and the first time we saw a kiosk laden with bottled water everyone descended on it like a flock of gulls.

Having felt the heat of the Judean summer I can really appreciate the force of today’s story from John’s Gospel. “Give me a drink” is not a request made simply for the purpose of illustrating a moral message. It is about real need and desire. But what Jesus wants to explore is the deepest desire of human beings, what we most fundamentally need. What we most deeply need is not the water that will leave us thirsty again, but the water that wells up to eternal life.

The life that God gives, which we call eternal life, is completely different from the biological life of the body. It is of the Spirit. It comes from beyond us, as God’s gift. We must be “born from above” as Jesus said to Nicodemus in last week’s gospel.

Today’s story follows the journey of the Samaritan woman, and indeed that of all her village, into belief, into the life that God gives. That life is not like water that will leave us thirsting again, because it is inexhaustible. God pours himself out for us without ever being diminished.

Water, of course, is necessary for the life of the body, our biological life. But that will not last for ever; it is a life which is limited and conditioned by death. And water itself is a limited resource, when you use up what you’ve got, it’s gone. And because it’s limited it can be a cause of rivalry and conflict, as it was in the reading from Exodus. As it may be, perhaps, in the future in some parts of the world as climate change causes more deserts to appear.

So the water the body needs, in this story, stands for the desires which cannot ultimately satisfy us. Those desires which are limited and bounded by death and so are the cause of rivalry and conflict.

The death-bound nature of this kind of desire appears in other ways in this story. The woman whom Jesus talks to turns out to have had five husbands, and the man she is with now isn’t her husband. Her complicated relationship history seems to have made her something of a social outcast, shown by the fact that she goes to the well in the heat of the day, alone, rather than early in the morning with the other women of the village.

Now we might think therefore that this woman has been living a loose life, that it’s her fault. But in a patriarchal society such as this, women had little say over what happened to them. It was men who decided who women would marry and men who decided to divorce their wives when it suited them. It’s much more likely that this woman was the victim of the rivalrous desire of a number of different men. She is now a social outcast because of the conflict that their desire has created.

Jesus’ perception of her history leads to the exposure of a deeper rivalry. The woman says, “Our ancestors worshipped on this mountain, but you (plural) say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.”

Here is the age-old conflict between the Samaritans and the Jews cast in terms of a rivalry about God. And Jesus’ answer shows how this talk about God is really just a disguise for another desire bound up with death, a desire for something limited which cannot satisfy. God is not like that, says Jesus. God is spirit, breath. God is the life from beyond us which is without limit. All those who worship God worship in spirit and in truth. How foolish it is to be in rivalry over God. As if there might not be enough to go round.

So Jesus delivers us from our rivalrous death-bound desires, the desires which can never satisfy, by giving us the life which God lives. The life which gushes up like a spring of water to eternal life. The life which is not diminished in giving itself.

Which I think is what St Paul is talking about in today’s passage from Romans where he says that we will be saved through Christ from “the wrath”. Paul in the Greek doesn’t actually say “the wrath of God”, just “the wrath”; the words “of God” were added by the translator who for some reason thought they should be there. (The King James Bible, in this instance, gets it right.)

“Wrath” in Greek is orge. “Orgy” comes from the same word. It speaks of desire which is never satisfied, desire out of control, desire collapsing in on itself in a spiral of self-destruction. Wrath is, if you like, the flip side of our death-bound desires, what those desires do to us if we are not saved from them. Our desires are fixed on what will never satisfy us, and so we experience wrath, rage, frustration. Because we are seeking life, true life, eternal life, where it can never be found.

But Jesus is saving us from “the wrath”. His gift is eternal life, the life God lives, which we receive as his gift because we cannot construct it for ourselves. We must allow him to liberate us from our death-bound desires so that we can be born from above and live according to God’s deathless desire, God’s desire which will satisfy us eternally because it is entirely without limit and without rivalry.

Towards the end of today’s Gospel Jesus introduces another image of the life that he gives, the food that his disciples know nothing about. Jesus will enlarge on that later in John’s Gospel in his teaching about the Eucharist: Jesus himself is the bread come down from heaven; the bread that he will give is his flesh for the life of the world.

In this Eucharist we feed on the deathless life of God, given in Jesus, who liberates us from our death-bound desires. That life is poured out for us without ever being diminished. By living from that source of life we too are enabled to live eucharistically. We can live in thankfulness rather than rivalry, because we receive our life as a gift rather than grasping it as a possession. We too can pour ourselves out for others without fear of being diminished because we know that the true source of our life is not in ourselves but is God’s gift.

Jesus said, “The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” Lord Jesus, give us this water, so that we may never thirst. Amen.

Sermon at Parish Mass Lent 2 2011

2011-03-24T14:53:00.000Z

Genesis 12:1-4a
Romans 4:1-5, 13-17
John 3:1-17

Last week in the Lent Group we were looking at two pictures, one of which was Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus, which hangs in the National Gallery. Caravaggio uses the technique of chiaroscuro, light and shadow, to enliven the scene and draw us in. Last week at St Paul’s I mistakenly said that chiaroscuro meant “darkness and shadow”, but of course that wouldn’t work at all, it would result in something very dreary and indistinct. But use light and shadow and the whole composition comes alive. The picture becomes very vivid, we can imagine ourselves as part of the scene. And the light brings out what is true, the deeper meaning of what is being presented.

So too in John’s Gospel. Nicodemus came to Jesus by night. John’s gospel sets this whole scene at night, in darkness, a device which John uses more than once to illustrate the contrast between the light of God, which has come into the world in Jesus, and the darkness which endures where humanity refuses to receive him, or has yet to come into the light.

Nicodemus is hesitant. Has he come on his own account, or has he come as a representative of the Pharisees, to make discreet unattributable enquiries under cover of darkness? His position is one of partial faith, symbolised by the darkness in which he meets Jesus – he recognises that God is in some way at work in Jesus, because he has seen the “signs” that he has given, the miracles he has worked. But so far that is all that Nicodemus has seen, and Jesus wants him to see beyond external appearances. So Jesus says, “no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above”. We have this image of Nicodemus sitting in the dark, and Jesus saying to him, you don’t yet see.

There’s a pun in the Greek in what Jesus says, the phrase translated “born from above” can also mean “born again”. And Nicodemus only gets the second meaning, being “born again”, and he doesn’t understand how that can happen. “Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?”

Now, in terms of the life of the flesh, biological life, this is incomprehensible. But the “birth from above” that Jesus is talking about is the birth of the spirit, a new kind of life altogether.

John’s Gospel uses two different words which are both translated into English as “life”: psyche, which means biological life, the life which is inevitably limited, contained and conditioned by death; and zoe, which means the life that God lives. It’s always zoe which is meant when we see the translation “eternal life”. The life that Jesus offers is the life that God lives. And it is the birth into that life that he is talking about when he says, “you must be born from above” and “born of the Spirit”.

So the life that God lives, eternal life, which is what Jesus promises us, is not the same as biological life stretched out for ever. It is quite different, the life born of the Spirit, from above, which only those who are born of the Spirit know.

Nicodemus should have known this, because it is promised in the Jewish scriptures which he taught as a leader and teacher in Israel. But as yet his mind is closed. He is still in the “night” of not yet understanding and receiving the life from above. But don’t worry, we will meet him again in John’s Gospel, in the Passion reading on Good Friday, and then it will be during the day, by which time he is definitely a believer.

The life from above which Jesus gives us is the light of God shining into the darkness of this world. And that light has come because God loves us. We’ve heard today what is arguably the most famous verse in all the Bible, “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.”

One of the themes that linked the two paintings we looked at last week was that of God giving his life to us in Jesus. Giving his life in the midst of our human mendacity, fear, violence and betrayal. All those things which somehow are bound up with our biological life in what the Church calls “original sin”. It was just the same at the last supper. It was in the same night that he was betrayed that Jesus took bread and said, take eat, this is my body which is given for you.

The light shining in the darkness reveals the truth: God’s love breaking in to our sinfulness. God shows his love by offering us his life. And that life is something that we must receive as his gift. It is not ours by nature and we cannot create it ourselves. It comes to us from outside, from above, drawing us out of ourselves and into the life and love of God.

That life is offered to all. God longs for all people to receive it. But we can reject it if we wish. We can stay with the life we construct for ourselves, the life of fear, violence and betrayal, the life bounded by death. And our choice is its own judgement. Our gospel passage today goes on to say, “And this is the judgement, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.”

God so loved the world that he gave his only Son. But because love has to be free in order to be love, the world cannot be forced to accept that love. The possibility of refusal remains. But the light shining into the darkness always reveals what is true. Whether we come to the light or reject it, we will see in that light what our choice has made of us. And that judgement is in itself a call to repentance.

But we are gathered here as those who know the birth from above. In our baptism we have been born of water and the Spirit. God has infused his life into us. That life is sustained and grows deeper as we live the life of grace in the Church. We are fed by God’s life in Jesus in the Eucharist. Our sins after baptism are forgiven through the sacrament of reconciliation, or by the acts of contrition and love that we make on a daily basis. In our life of prayer and reading the scriptures we breathe God’s breath, God’s Spirit.

Even in the life we live here and now, we are already beginning to share in the life of God. Some of the texts in our service books say this, for example “The Body of Christ keep you in eternal life” which is one of the alternative forms for distributing Holy Communion. We are already in eternal life, what remains is to grow deeper, to live ever more fully in the life of God.

That life is the light that breaks through into our darkness, both exposing our sinfulness and bringing us forgiveness. It is the life that brings us the new birth from above, transforming us with God’s love so that we too can bring his life and love to others.

The Sign of Jonah

2011-03-17T11:48:00.000Z

Homily for Wednesday in the first week of Lent

(And, finally, an explanation for the name of this blog...)

Luke 11:29-32

“Just as Jonah became a sign to the people of Nineveh, so the Son of Man will be to this generation.”

What kind of sign is the “Sign of Jonah”? When Matthew’s gospel reports this saying of Jesus it provides an explanation, because Matthew doesn’t like loose ends and does like using Old Testament texts to shed light on Jesus. So Matthew says, “For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the sea monster, so for three days and three nights the Son of Man will be in the heart of the earth.” So the Sign of Jonah becomes the sign of the Resurrection.

Certainly that’s an aspect of the Sign of Jonah, but Luke leaves it more open than Matthew. In fact the Sign of Jonah has many meanings. As we heard in the reading from the Book of Jonah itself, the main Sign that Jonah gave to the city of Nineveh was that he preached, “Forty more days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” And the people of Nineveh believed, and repented, and the city was not overthrown, after all.

So the Sign of Jonah is in the first place the sign of preaching, and believing, and repentance. And this is in fact exactly how Jesus begins his own mission.

There is another way in which Jonah was a sign. Jonah’s story begins with him running away from the call of God, and in an extraordinary scene he’s on board a ship which gets caught in a violent storm, and the crew draw lots to see who is to blame, who has offended the gods. And they discover it is Jonah, and throw him overboard, whereupon Jonah is swallowed by the fish, and the storm ceases.

So Jonah is also the sign of the scapegoat, the one whose apparent death restores peace and order to the little community of the boat once they have decided he was to blame and thrust him out. Which is if you like a type of what happened to Jesus on Good Friday, when he was thrust out of the city and killed by people who thought he was a blasphemer, under God’s curse, and a threat to their own society.

So the Sign of Jonah is the Sign of preaching, of repentance, of the scapegoat, and of the resurrection. In all of these ways, Jesus will fulfil that sign. And although this Sign has these four different aspects, it is still one sign. What Jesus preaches is the Kingdom of God becoming real in the world through his death and resurrection.

The gospel is preached to us and we are called to repent, because the death and resurrection of Jesus has exposed how complicit we are in the way the world makes victims and scapegoats. But much more than that, it has revealed the generosity and love of God who longs to lead us from the old way of sin and death to new life in Christ.

In these days of Lent we seek to live more deeply the call to repentance we heard on Ash Wednesday,

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.
Turn away from sin and be faithful to the Gospel.

Through that repentance we join ourselves to the Sign of Jonah, the Sign of Jesus, the dying and rising of Christ, through which we, and we pray this great city in which we live, will be saved.

Bible Study on 2 Corinthians 5:20-6:10

2011-03-17T11:37:00.001Z

Bible Study for the Kings Cross Ecumenical Fellowship, 16 March 2011

2 Corinthians 5:20-6:10

So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

As we work together with him, we urge you also not to accept the grace of God in vain. For he says,
‘At an acceptable time I have listened to you,
and on a day of salvation I have helped you.’
See, now is the acceptable time; see, now is the day of salvation! We are putting no obstacle in anyone’s way, so that no fault may be found with our ministry, but as servants of God we have commended ourselves in every way: through great endurance, in afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labours, sleepless nights, hunger; by purity, knowledge, patience, kindness, holiness of spirit, genuine love, truthful speech, and the power of God; with the weapons of righteousness for the right hand and for the left; in honour and dishonour, in ill repute and good repute. We are treated as impostors, and yet are true; as unknown, and yet are well known; as dying, and see—we are alive; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything.

(Notes to introduce discussion)

The title for this week’s session on the CTBI website is “Order and Disorder”. There is a lot of material there, and we’re only looking at one of the suggested readings. But one of the things that the resource material says is that “order turns to disorder in an imperfect world”. Actually, what I’d like to suggest, considering St Paul and this reading, is not that the fallen world is disordered so much as differently ordered. It has its own kind of order which Paul is here exposing and undermining.

We don’t know if Paul was familiar with the Beatitudes, but there is a parallel between what he says in this passage (2 Cor 6:6-10) and what Jesus has to say in Matthew 5:1-12:

‘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 those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

‘Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.

‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

‘Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.

‘Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

‘Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

The Beatitudes are a proclamation of the Kingdom of Heaven, and specifically of how the Kingdom is ordered. And the Kingdom of course is not an abstraction or something located in a future we have yet to reach; it is God’s reign becoming real in Jesus, God in Jesus acting in history in the world. All of the Beatitudes describe God’s reign as it is being revealed in Jesus. Jesus is pre-eminently the one who is poor in spirit, who mourns, who is meek, who is persecuted, and so on.

And all of the Beatitudes reveal the priority of the victim and the outsider. It is in these that the order of the Kingdom is found. And the point of the Beatitudes is that this is radically different from the way in which the world orders itself.

You may have heard of the Catholic anthropologist René Girard. According to Girard, human society is ordered according to the imitation of desire (“mimesis”). I desire what Fred desires. And this can lead me and Fred into rivalry. Rivalry can lead into violence, which is itself a desire which gets imitated. Rivalrous desire can spread through and threaten the whole of a society. A society which is in conflict regains its unity by focussing outwards on a scapegoat. It protects itself from its own violence by finding a substitute victim. An outsider who can be conveniently blamed becomes the focus of the Society’s violence, so that the violence gets displaced outside a boundary of exclusion. According to Girard, this is the mechanism of violence which has controlled human society from the beginning. And because sacrifice and scapegoating get disguised in religious imagery, people think that this is what God is like, that this is what God wants.

Girard is one of those people who has had one big idea. That one idea doesn’t of course tell us everything, but his theory has caught the attention of many Bible scholars. Once you are aware of the sequence:

Mimesis > Rivalry > Conflict > Scapegoating > Restoration of unity

You start to see it all over the place in the Scriptures.

And Jesus overturns this way of ordering the world by becoming its victim. He becomes the outsider, the excluded one, hanged on a tree and so, according to the law, under the curse of God. Which I think is what Paul means when he says that God “made him to be sin who knew no sin”. But Jesus is, in fact, the reign of God becoming real in the world, and that reign is made known on the outside of the boundary of exclusion that human society constructs to protect itself from its own violence.

The truth of this becomes apparent in the Resurrection. Jesus can preach the priority of the victim in the Sermon on the Mount, because God will vindicate the victim in the Resurrection. The Resurrection is the definitive breaking through of the order of God’s Kingdom into the order of this world.

Which brings us back to St Paul. All of Paul’s teaching needs to be understood from the perspective of the Resurrection, which was the breakthrough of the vindicated victim into his life. Paul had been perfect according to the law, had persecuted the Church of Jesus Christ and made any number of victims. He had very much lived according to the order of this world, the human society which protects itself from its own violence by scapegoating the outsider and interpreting this as the will of God. And then Paul met Jesus on the road to Damascus and was completely turned around. His whole world was shattered and he had to begin again, learning what God is like in Jesus, the risen victim. His conversion was so radical that Paul’s whole life became a testimony to the way God orders things in Jesus and overcomes the order of this world, as Paul puts it, “the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus [sets us] free from the law of sin and of death” (Romans 8:2).

Which is I think why St Paul says that the afflictions he is suffering are the way in which he is an ambassador for Christ, the way in which he makes the appeal to be reconciled to God. They are not incidental things which happen to him while he is proclaiming his message, rather they are absolutely integral to what that message is. Paul is identifying himself with Jesus, the outsider, the excluded one, the victim, the risen one. We go to Jesus “outside the gate” (Hebrews 13:12-13) because paradoxically that place of rejection is the place of reconciliation, because that is what God’s kingdom, God’s order, looks like when it meets the order of this world.

Lent Group for Lent 1 2011 – “The Sacrifice of the Mass”

2011-03-17T11:07:00.003Z

Notes for the Lent Group (the presentation was followed by discussion)

At every Mass the celebrant says,

“Pray, my brothers and sisters, that this our sacrifice may be acceptable to God the Almighty Father.”

To which everyone replies,

“May the Lord accept the sacrifice at your hands, for the praise and glory of his name, for our good and the good of all his Church.”

What I’d like to explore in this session is what on earth we might be talking about when we say these things. We’ll be looking at two paintings which in different ways explore what happens when violence and the Eucharist come up against each other.

The last supper was a scene of betrayal. Jesus was about to be given up to death, and the supper was the set-up for a lynching. Judas had already given away the location of Jesus, and the route he would take to the garden after supper, where the temple guard would be waiting for him. At every Mass the celebrant, re-enacting the words and actions of Jesus, begins, “in the same night that he was betrayed”. The Eucharist was instituted as Jesus’ last act before the oncoming darkness of violence and murder.

It was at that moment that Jesus made his greatest act of love. He gave us himself. A few hours after the supper, he would no longer be free, and would no longer be in control of what happened to him. At the supper, he was still free, he could still just about have escaped and gone off to live quietly in obscurity for the rest of his days. But he chose to stay and give his life, freely, as an act of love. Before they were taken from him by force, he gave his body and blood. This is my body which is given for you.

The Jesuit theologian Maurice de la Taille argued that the essence of Christ’s sacrifice was found in the institution of the Eucharist. The supper was Christ’s oblation, that is his offering of himself, made while he was still free to do so. It was as it were the contract by which he bound himself to the death of the cross where the sacrifice was completed.

To whom did Jesus give himself up? To whom was the oblation offered? Jesus said, “This is my body which is given for you. This is my blood which is shed for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins.”

I’d like to suggest that the sacrifice of the Mass has nothing to do with a victim offered to placate an angry God. In his life and teaching Jesus consistently rejected any such idea. He quoted the psalms and the prophets who said that God wanted mercy, not sacrifice, the knowledge of God, not burnt offerings. He overturned the tables in the temple, not because he objected to trade, but because they were an essential part of the sacrificial system. He did so saying that the temple was to be a house of prayer for all nations. God did not want, did not require, the wholesale slaughter of animals that went on there.

According to the catholic anthropologist René Girard, ancient cults of sacrifice have their origin in violence, rivalry and fear. They are a way in which society protects itself from its own violence by finding substitute victims. A society which is in conflict regains its unity by focussing outwards on a scapegoat. According to Girard, this is the mechanism of violence which has controlled human society from the beginning. And because sacrifice and scapegoating get disguised in religious imagery, people think that this is what God is like, that this is what God wants.

Jesus undermined that idea, and consciously placed himself in the position of our scapegoat. He subverted the murder that was coming his way by giving his life freely and forgiving his murderers. He was raised from the dead, not to exact revenge, but to bring forgiveness and new life to all. His death and resurrection is God’s life and light breaking through into our darkness and violence. It is humanity meeting God’s utterly generous, vivacious alive-ness, and being transformed. It is the life of Jesus given for us, not to propitiate an angry deity. And this is expressed, lived out, in a unique way through the Eucharist.

Every Eucharist takes place in this world, in some way or another amid the gathering clouds of human betrayal, violence and murder. And every Eucharist is the breaking in to that of God’s utterly vivacious alive-ness, the generosity that is completely free of rivalry and violence. The sacrifice of the Mass is God giving himself to us in Jesus, subverting and overturning the way in which human beings demand sacrifices and victims.

Last year in his homily for the feast of Corpus Christi, Pope Benedict said that the priesthood of Jesus was not the same as that of the priests in the temple. In fact, his sacrifice was “completely the opposite” of theirs. He concluded:

“It is divine power, the same power that created the incarnation of the Word, that transforms extreme violence and extreme injustice into a supreme act of love and justice. This is the work of the priesthood of Christ, which the Church has inherited and extends through history, in the dual form of the common priesthood of the baptised and the ordained priesthood of ministers, so as to transform the world with the love of God.”

http://visnews-en.blogspot.com/2010/06/prophetic-priesthood-of-christ-and.html

It is that possibility of the transformation of the world from violence to love which we will explore in these two paintings.

Ramon Casas i Carbó (1866-1932)

Corpus Christi Procession leaving Santa Maria del Mar, Barcelona 1896-98. Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya.

(Image source: Wikipedia)

Barcelona in 1896 was part of a Spain in which a repressive government protected vested interests, one of which was the Church. Revolutionary groups had carried out a number of bombings and assassinations in Barcelona, culminating in the attack on this Corpus Christi procession. 12 people were killed. No-one knows who was to blame, but anyone suspected of being an anarchist or revolutionary was rounded up and confessions extracted under torture. Several died under torture, five were executed, and 61 people who were acquitted were nonetheless sent to a penal colony. The so-called "Montjuic Trials" caused outrage around the world. Protest in Barcelona itself had to be subtle, but Casas, by the mere fact of painting and exhibiting this picture after the trials, was making a powerful statement.

So this is no mere street scene, but an image fraught with tension and impending violence and revenge. The dresses of the first communion girls look as though they are dissolving, about to be blown away. The group of men in the middle ground holding torches for the procession look as though they could be lighting fuses on bombs. And you have in the front and all around the Guardia Civil on horseback, figures of state authority and repression. They appear again in another painting by Casas, The Charge, which shows mounted Guardia mowing down an unarmed demonstration. As has often been the case in the polarised history of Spanish politics, the Church and its clergy with some noble exceptions tended to side with the forces of repression, and indeed were complicit in the scenes of torture and "confession" which were a reaction to the equally outrageous and unjust acts of terrorism.

And yet this is a Corpus Christi procession, the Body of Christ about to be caught up in this storm of murder and revenge, the very scapegoating from which Jesus seeks to free us. That Body still given, freely, divinely, even into a situation where it is about to be betrayed once more. We are perhaps too used to images of Judas at the last supper, the first treacherous priest about to betray Jesus. He fails to shock us any more. This image of the Body of Christ caught up in violence in which some of his priests, too, will be complicit, brings home the darkness of that first betrayal into which Jesus, nevertheless, gave himself, the light of the world that the darkness cannot overcome.

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610)

The Supper at Emmaus, 1601. The National Gallery, London.

(Image source: The National Gallery)

Caravaggio had a troubled life. He was passionate, jealous and violent. He’d killed someone in a brawl, been imprisoned, escaped and was on the run from a death sentence when he caught a fever and died. Some of his paintings show the dark and troubled side of his character. Beheadings which are all too vivid, perhaps from his reflecting on the possible fate that lay in store for him while he was in prison. Sexual desire bound up with death, sensual bodies already tinged with the green of decay.

And yet he painted this. In fact he painted this scene twice, and this is the earlier version which is in the National Gallery. He uses chiaroscuro to make the scene come alive and draw us in. It is the risen Jesus making himself known in the breaking of bread, after the disciples on the road had failed to recognize him while he explained the scriptures to them. Jesus does not look like conventional portrayals of him. Caravaggio used rough working men as models which scandalized some, but which helps to bring out the enigma of Jesus’ appearance here.

To me this is a hopeful picture. Caravaggio, for all his violence and sin, draws us into this scene and I can only think that he does so by seeing himself there too. It is a scene of recognition, of the possibility of redemption, the meeting with the Divine victim, risen from the death we inflicted, and offering us freely the life we thought we had to take. It says to me that violence and sin need not be the final word on Caravaggio’s life. Or on ours.

Homily at Mass, Ash Wednesday, 9 March 2011

2011-03-12T16:14:00.000Z

In a short moment, we will have the imposition of ashes, which is accompanied by the words:

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.
Turn away from sin and be faithful to the Gospel.

These words are not accidental, and were not made up recently by the people who write services. They consist of two quotations from scripture. The first is from Genesis 3:19. After the disobedience of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, God says to Adam:

By the sweat of your face

you shall eat bread

until you return to the ground,

for out of it you were taken;

you are dust,

and to dust you shall return.

The second, slightly paraphrased, quotation is from Mark 1:14-15:

Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.’

In the simple words and action of the imposition of ash are contained the tragedy and the hope of the whole human story.

First, remember you are dust and to dust you shall return. That is of course a reminder of death, a memento mori, that we should always live with eternity in mind, knowing that this life is transient. But those words also speak to us of our creation. God has created us out of the dust of the earth, which he called into being out of nothing. We are created in love, created with a purpose. God has created us in his image, the image of the Holy Trinity, to live life in all its fullness, in his creation which he made entirely good.

But sin has marred that creation, has damaged God’s image in us. Human disobedience and sin prevents us from living as God wants us to. We turn away from communion with God and one another, preferring our selfish interests, our rivalrous desires, the violent exaltation of the ego. Death has become for us not an aspect of the goodness of creation but a tyranny of fear and subjugation, the murderous mechanism that drives the whole human race into a cycle of cynicism and despair.

But God would not allow that his creation should fail. When, in his providence, the fullness of time had come, he sent his Son into the world to put right what had gone wrong. This was foreshadowed in the Old Testament Rite of Atonement, when the priest emerged from the Holy of Holies to enact God entering his creation to bring healing and restoration.

And now Jesus has come, as our true High Priest, to make atonement for us once and for all. God in Jesus has reconciled the world to himself. And we receive that restoration which he has worked for us by repenting and believing in the good news, by turning away from our sins and being faithful to the Gospel.

And yet there is more. Jesus joins up the whole broken human story and brings out of the ruin of the fall something greater than what was lost. For God has now united himself with our human nature. The Body of Jesus, like our bodies, was made from the dust of the earth, and was returned to the earth on the evening of Good Friday. And yet, because of the incarnation, that human Body is also the Body of God. Here at the beginning of Lent we look forward to those tremendous mysteries of Holy Week and Easter. Jesus’ new commandment of love. The institution of the Eucharist, the Body of Christ given for us in a wholly new way. And the death, the burial, and the resurrection of Christ.

For that Body, formed from the dust of the earth, was raised from the dead and ascended into heaven, and lives now in the Church and in the Eucharist. The dust of the earth, our human nature, united with God, has been taken into the life of God for all eternity. And that is our destiny, too, united with Christ. That is the glorious completion of the entire human story signified in these short words:

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.
Turn away from sin and be faithful to the Gospel.

Homily at Mass, Shrove Tuesday 8 March 2011

2011-03-12T16:10:00.000Z

Mark 12:13-17

“They sent to him some Pharisees and some Herodians” to ask Jesus a question about paying taxes to Caesar. Now that’s interesting. The Pharisees and Herodians actually were enemies, opposing parties. Herod was put in power and protected by Rome, and so were his circle of supporters and henchmen. So the Herodians would naturally have approved of paying taxes to Caesar.

The Pharisees were a strict religious party who would have wanted to get rid of the unclean foreign influences of Rome, with its emperor worship and images which they saw as blasphemous – just as on the coin. So they would have opposed paying taxes to Caesar.

The conflict between the Pharisees and the Herodians was a dangerous one. Supporters of Rome were unpopular and could easily get themselves killed by a mob while the Romans weren’t looking. Opponents of Roman rule could be denounced to the authorities as rebels and that would be the end of them.

The Pharisees and Herodians are rivals for power and control, and although they see themselves as opposites they are really mirror images of each other. Their desire is the same. They want power in the way they each understand power – something driven by rivalry, violence and the fear of death.

So they are enemies and yet they become united in trying to trap Jesus. They want him to fall into the trap of coming down on one side or the other, so that the consequences of their own rivalry and violence will devolve on him and not on them.

But Jesus pulls the carpet out from under them with his answer, “Give back to Caesar what belongs to Caesar – and to God what belongs to God”.

What belongs to Caesar is not just the money, but the whole way of living in the world defined by rivalry and violence and the fear of death. Jesus says, give it back. Don’t let yourself be defined by it. Give it up.

And give to God what is God’s. To do that is not to portion out the things of this life – this belongs to Caesar, that belongs to God. Rather it is to recognise that everything we are and everything we have we owe to God. It is all God’s free gift. We simply receive life itself and everything that is ours as a gift, given by one we can completely depend on. God’s gift of life is without limit and will not be taken back, because he shares his own life with us in Jesus. And when we learn to receive life as a gift there is no longer any room for rivalry or fear.

Lent begins tomorrow. It is a season of living more simply, more sparingly, so that we can learn once again to receive our life simply as God’s gift.

This season of penitence and training is another opportunity to give back, to unlearn, Caesar’s way of living, the way of this world defined by rivalry and the fear of death.

Instead, our eyes turn towards the death and resurrection of Christ so that we can give to God what is God’s, that is, everything we are and we have. For it is in relinquishing those human claims of possession and rivalry and control that we are able to receive the life that God lives. It is in giving up everything to God that we receive everything from him.

Sermon at Parish Mass Epiphany 2 2011

2011-01-17T10:56:00.000Z

Sermon at Parish Mass Epiphany 2 2011

Isaiah 49:1-7

1 Corinthians 1:1-9

John 1:29-42

The disciples in today’s Gospel reading ask Jesus what seems to be an ordinary everyday question, “where are you staying?”. And Jesus responds in what seems to be an everyday way, “come and see”. Presumably at that point Jesus is staying in or near a place called Bethany which is where John’s Gospel says that the Baptist conducted his ministry. We don’t actually know where that is, but it’s not the same Bethany as the one where Mary, Martha and Lazarus lived, as that was near Jerusalem and rather than the Jordan.

Anyway, Jesus took the disciples to the place he was staying, and we are told they “remained with him that day”.

As is usually the case in John’s Gospel, there is more going on than meets the eye, and this passage can be read on more than one level. The key to this is the word, “remain”, “stay”, or “abide”. It’s always the same word in Greek, menon, and is a key motif that runs through John’s Gospel. It’s a rich word which means being rooted, centred, solidly and persistently staying. Where you abide is where you are real. It occurs five times in today’s reading, and if we use the word “abide” we can see how they link up:

‘I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it abided on him. I myself did not know him, but the one who sent me to baptize with water said to me, “He on whom you see the Spirit descend and abide is the one who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.”’… They said to him, ‘Rabbi…, where are you abiding?’ He said to them, ‘Come and see.’ They came and saw where he was abiding, and they abided with him that day.

In fact the true and deep answer to the question, ‘where is Jesus abiding’, has already been given to us in the prologue to John’s Gospel:

No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.

And this is enlarged on by Jesus as he leads the disciples deeper into his teaching through the Gospel, that Jesus abides in the Father and the Father abides in him and the Spirit abides on him. And the disciples themselves, and therefore we, are invited to abide in Jesus, and so in the Father.

Our true life, where we are utterly centred and rooted and real, is found in God. This huge answer to a small question is already present when the disciples say to Jesus, “where are you abiding”, and he answers, “come and see”.

But the immediate answer to this question is in fact found in something not huge but very small. Something local and particular and ordinary, a house or room in whatever village Jesus was staying in near the Jordan where John was baptising. Jesus, in the immediate sense, is abiding there.

Our true life is abiding in God, but that is not an abstraction. It’s not a nice idea somewhere else. It has to be true in the here and now, in the local and particular, if it is going to be true at all.

Jesus is the Word of God from all eternity, and from all eternity he has been abiding in the Father’s heart. But he is also the Word made flesh. As a human being he shares fully in our nature, our bodily limitation. We are in this place and not over there. We are in this time and not in some other time. We inhabit the present time and space, the present moment. And God is fully present for us, if we will abide in him, in each present moment and place.

Therefore to abide in God we need to be present in our own lives. But so often we are not. Like James Joyce’s Mr Duffy who “lived at a little distance from his body”. We have a constant tendency to be drawn away from the present time and place. Its challenges and opportunities are too ordinary, humdrum, needing too much work, too persistent an attention. The grass is greener – on the other side of the hill. The sun will come out – tomorrow. We fly away to times and places we are not in. And so we fail to be present to ourselves and to God.

But Jesus says, abide in me. That’s the key – abiding in Jesus is where we begin to be present to God and so to ourselves. In him we begin to live truly, deeply and abidingly.

In Christ we are in the Church. Scripture tells us that the Church is his body, and that’s not just a metaphor. If we are in Christ we are a new creation, made part of a new and living body of which Christ is the head. He becomes the principle and source of our life, by the grace of the Holy Spirit and not by our efforts. And that’s important because it means this is a truth we can rely on. The Church as the body of Christ is the extension of the incarnation, the Word made flesh in the world.

Like Christ, the Church abides in God both in all time and space, and in the local and particular, in the here and now. And it is the Eucharist, the sacrament of the body of Christ, which brings this about. The Eucharist joins together the eternal and the local, the Divine and the human.

The Eucharist makes the Church. In this sacrament we become what we receive, the body of Christ. And so the Church is fully present in every celebration of the Eucharist, here and now, in this time and place, and in every time and place.

In the Eucharist our human fragmentation is overcome. We are made one body in Christ, we share one life. And this also makes us one with the Church in all the world. Here our abiding in God, in Christ, is renewed.

And this is the principle by which the world is transformed. If we are abiding in God we are also abiding, truly, in the present moment, in our daily lives, in this world with its opportunities and its needs.

The Eucharist gives us new strength to be truly present, abiding in Christ, in every moment. To be present for our neighbour, for the stranger in the street, for the lonely, for the needy, for the oppressed. To be present in the challenges and needs of our own lives, trusting that God wills us to be in the present moment whatever it may bring, because that is where God is present for us. Even if sometimes the present moment is very dark, and we cannot see quite how or why, we still believe and trust that God is calling us to abide in him, to live with his life.

At the end of the Eucharist we are dismissed with the words, “Go in the peace of Christ”. That doesn’t mean, “go away and forget all about it till next week”. It means to go in the peace of Christ, inhabiting his peace, carrying his peace. We who have been made one by this sacrament of unity are sent out into a fragmented and divided world to be agents of unity and peace.

Through the Eucharist we become the body of Christ. We abide in Christ, the source of our life, and we also abide in Christ in the world for its transformation. This is the bread come down from heaven, says Jesus, my flesh for the life of the world. May we be that body, living with the life of Christ, in the world he came to redeem, this week and always.

Sermon at Parish Mass, Feast of the Epiphany 2011

2011-01-05T09:59:00.000Z

Sermon at Parish Mass Epiphany 2011

Isaiah 60:1-6

Ephesians 3:1-12

Matthew 2:1-12

When I was a little boy, I am told on reliable authority, I used to sing “We three kings of holly and tar”. I suppose I didn’t know what the word “orient” meant, and holly was clearly something to do with Christmas, so I put it in the carol. Where the tar came from I have no idea.

We might wonder as well why we sing of three kings as well, since the story that Matthew gives us doesn’t say that the mysterious visitors from the east were kings, or that there were three of them. There are three gifts, of course, gold and incense and myrrh, so it’s easy to visualise three people carrying them. The idea that they were kings is suggested by a loose link with psalm 72, “May the kings of Tarshish and of the isles render him tribute, may the kings of Sheba and Seba bring gifts. May all kings fall down before him, all nations give him service.” And this idea was readily adopted by Christian kings and emperors of the early centuries as it seemed to offer divine approval to their own autocratic power. So the magi became, in popular imagination, three kings.

This story really grips the imagination, so it’s not surprising that people have tended to put their own interpretations on the text and read things into it.

In our own day people are periodically interested in the latest theory of what the star of Bethlehem might have been – perhaps it was a supernova, a gigantic stellar explosion that looked like a new star appearing in the heavens. Or perhaps it was a comet or a meteor, or a rare conjunction of planets, or a UFO.

All of this is interesting, and there may be something in some of these theories, but they are not what the story in Matthew’s Gospel is about. We need to read the story as it is, and let it speak for itself.

The word Magi signifies people who have spiritual insight – people who are seers and prophets – but who are not Jews. There’s only one other example in the Bible, the prophet Balaam, you may remember the one with the talking donkey, who appears in the book of Numbers and is described by Jewish commentators at around the time that Matthew's gospel was written as a Magos[1]. Balaam is a pagan diviner and prophet who, in spite of not following the Jewish faith, receives a true revelation from God about his blessings on his people Israel. In his prophesies Balaam says that he “bows down” before God – just as the Magi “do homage”, before Jesus, that is they fall prostrate. And then Balaam says, “I see him, but not now, I behold him, but not near – a star shall come out of Jacob, and a sceptre shall rise out of Israel.”

Matthew’s story is making a clear link with the star and the Magi – what Balaam saw afar off, has now arrived. The star has come, the sceptre has risen, the Messiah is here.

The Magi represent religions, peoples and cultures outside Judaism. They haven’t received the particular revelation of God to his chosen people, the covenant with the law and the prophets. But they have nonetheless received illumination and insight from God which has enabled them to seek and find the Messiah. All human longing and searching after God is fulfilled in Jesus.

This is one of the great themes of Matthew’s Gospel which is introduced right at the beginning, with the long genealogy of Jesus which includes four gentile women. It’s unusual enough for a Jewish genealogy at this time to mention women at all, but with gentile women Matthew is making a definite point: the Messiah is born for all people, Jew and Gentile, the fulfilment of all human longing for God.

This theme is taken up again in this story of the visit of the Magi. And Matthew’s Gospel will finish on the same note as the risen Christ gives the command to go and “make disciples of all nations”. This is the “year of Matthew” as we read through this Gospel in the course of the lectionary, and this is one of the themes to listen out for as we go through the year.

We live in a society in which there are many different cultures and religions which we are familiar with in a way, perhaps, which no generation before has known.

Matthew’s Gospel tells us that our approach to other religions should not be hostility, but openness to the truth that they have received. As Christians our dialogue and co-operation will of course point to Christ as the true and complete revelation of God. Not to Christians, who don’t always transparently show God to the world, but to Christ. When we have got to know people of other faiths as friends and neighbours, when we have reached a relationship of deep mutual trust and respect, we can in all humility point away from ourselves and to Christ as the fulfilment of all human longing for God. He is the one who calls both us and our neighbours into that intimate and full relationship, the knowledge of the love of God made visible in a human life.

That is all well and good. But it is not all that this story of the visit of the Magi has to say. There is Herod, too. Matthew draws a sharp contrast between the response of the Magi to Jesus, and the response of Herod.

The Magi come in faith and trust to the one who has been revealed to them, so that they can bow down before him. Although they represent the accumulated faith and wisdom of thousands of years, there is no sense that they are at all defensive about that. There is no sense that they are trying to hang on to anything of their own. They surrender all to Christ, without fear, without resentment, because they find in him all that they truly desire and need.

Not so Herod. His response to Jesus is entirely one of fear. He can only see Jesus as a rival to himself, and indeed when the Magi say that they have come to seek the “King of the Jews” they are using the official title which the Romans had conferred on Herod himself.

We know from history that Herod was indeed ruthless, cruel and paranoid. He had three of his sons killed when he feared they were becoming rivals for his power. The emperor Augustus once joked that he would rather be Herod’s pig than his son, as Herod, observing the Jewish dietary laws, would never have slaughtered a pig. So the response of Herod as described in this story, and the massacre of the Innocents that follows, is entirely in character.

And this is another of the themes of Matthew’s Gospel. People respond to Jesus either with acceptance or rejection. No-one’s response is ever neutral. And when people accept Jesus in faith, like the Magi, their response liberates them from fear and rivalry and violence. The God revealed in Jesus is love. He is entirely free from these dark forces, and if we turn to him in faith then he will liberate us from them as well. On the other hand those who reject the revelation of God in Jesus, like Herod, are left in the darkness and fear that gnaws in their own hearts.

So Jesus presents us with both the fulfilment of our longing for God, and with the crisis of choice, to accept him or reject him.

We who are already disciples of Christ have made that choice in our baptismal promises, which we renew every year at Easter. But we also try to live according to those promises every day. Do you turn to Christ as Saviour? I turn to Christ. Do you submit to Christ as Lord? I submit to Christ. Do you come to Christ, the way, the truth and the life? I come to Christ.

At the beginning of this new year, let us give thanks that Christ has called us to be his disciples, to find in him the fulfilment of all our longings and needs. And let us renew our response of faith to follow him in the way of life and love, the way which liberates us from all darkness and violence and fear.

[1] There is also of course the story of the "Jewish false prophet named bar-Jesus", called "Elymas Magos" in Greek, Acts 13:6-12, but there is no reason to suppose that the author of Matthew knew of this.

Giles Fraser on TFTD

2011-01-05T09:42:00.001Z

Great "Thought for the Day" yesterday from Giles Fraser on Girard, witchcraft and scapegoating, "listen again" here at around 1:46:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9335000/9335437.stm

Sermon at Parish Mass Advent IV 2010

2010-12-21T08:27:00.000Z

Sermon at Parish Mass Advent IV 2010

Isaiah 7:10-16

Romans 1:1-7

Matthew 1:18-end

Yesterday was a feast day which isn’t observed very much these days, the feast of the Expectation of the Blessed Virgin Mary. A week before Christmas, the Church as it were quickens the excitement by thinking about Mary looking forward to the imminent birth of Jesus.

That’s not all. Some old Church calendars listed the day as "S. Maria de la O", because (the Catholic Encyclopaedia tells us), ‘on that day the clerics in the choir after Vespers used to utter a loud and protracted "O", to express the longing of the universe for the coming of the Redeemer.’[1]

The whole creation has been waiting and longing from the beginning, for this, for the birth of the Son of God in human flesh.

We read today Matthew’s story about the conception of Jesus. Matthew is much briefer than Luke, we don’t have an annunciation scene, we are just told that Mary “was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit”. But Matthew and Luke agree in the essential points, which we shall affirm together in the Creed shortly, that “For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven, was incarnate from the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, and was made man”.

The Virgin Birth of Jesus is inescapably there, in the scriptures and the Creed. It’s part of our faith. But sometimes it seems to be almost an act of defiance to the modern age. Is not this something which militant atheists love to attack as irrational and unscientific? Where does the Y chromosome come from? Isn’t it something of a stumbling block to belief? Even Christian preachers and pundits sometimes seem embarrassed to affirm this article of faith.

Well, I think we need to ask why this matters. In Christian belief, God is the creator of all things, visible and invisible, and therefore creation is good. God looked at all that he had made and it was very good, as we read in Genesis. But creation has a purpose which it can’t achieve by itself. The cycles of birth and death, of growth and decay, are closed in on themselves. Ultimately, left to itself, everything ends in death and futility. But God intends something more. St Paul says in Romans:

The creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labour pains until now.

So the labour of Mary, in bringing to birth the Son of God, has this deep connection with the labour pains of the universe as it awaits its redemption, which is the fulfilment of its created purpose.

Again, in Colossians we read:

All things have been created through Christ and for Christ. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.

And in Ephesians we read of:

A plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in Christ, things in heaven and things on earth.

So nature awaits its fulfilment, its liberation from death and decay. And this is the work of the Holy Spirit in and through Christ. Just as in the beginning the Spirit of God hovered over the face of the deep, just as we are told in the psalm that God “sends forth his spirit and renews the face of the earth.”

Grace, the work of the Holy Spirit which is a free gift of God, perfects nature, bringing everything to fulfilment in Christ. Creation has been made for freedom, but cannot attain it without grace.

Nature down the ages has always been being perfected by grace, by the hidden work of the Holy Spirit. Everything in human life and culture which points to a goodness and truth that endures beyond death testifies to this. People have always been feeling their way towards God. More particularly, in the history of Israel God revealed himself in a definite way, through the law and the prophets, pointing to a future fulfilment of all creation in a personal relationship with a personal God, the coming of God’s kingdom of justice, love and peace. In all of that the Holy Spirit has been at work.

It is therefore entirely fitting that the birth of the Son of God, the coming of the Messiah through whom creation is to find its fulfilment, should be by a particular and unique act of the Holy Spirit, the culmination of all the work of the Spirit down the ages. Nature is perfected by grace, but here we have something more. As Newman puts it in his magnificent hymn:

And that a higher gift than grace
Should flesh and blood refine,
God's presence and His very Self,
And Essence all-divine

The fulfilment of all creation begins in the union of created nature with God himself, in the Incarnation of the Son of God in Jesus of Nazareth. This is therefore the supreme work of the Holy Spirit.

The Incarnation decisively breaks open the cycle of decay and death, and liberates creation to achieve its purpose in Christ. Therefore it is not only rational and fitting, but we might say even necessary, for the birth of Jesus to take place in a way which shows this to be true. The birth of Jesus from a virgin Mother is an interruption of the normal pattern of life doomed to decay and death, and shows that the liberation of the universe has begun.

So when we affirm in the Creed that the Son of God “was incarnate from the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary” we are not posing riddles about biology or indulging in something unscientific or irrational. We are making a statement that in the birth of Jesus creation begins to attain the freedom for which it was created. The new creation breaks into the old and a fulfilment begins which will take us beyond the knowledge of the senses to the life of God himself.

In this week before Christmas we rejoice that our redemption has begun in Christ, and we look forward to the fulfilment of all things in him. Mary’s longing for the birth of Christ gives voice to the birth-pangs of all creation, its yearning for God who is its creator and redeemer. In that yearning we, too, join, looking forward with unclouded hope to the day when Christ will be all in all.

[1] http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05712a.htm

Sermon at Parish Mass Advent III 2010

2010-12-13T09:46:00.000Z

Sermon at Parish Mass Advent III 2010

St Pancras Old Church

Isaiah 35:1-10

James 5:7-10

Matthew 11:2-11

“Lucia believed in God in much the same way as she believed in Australia, for she had no doubts whatever as to the existence of either, and she went to church on Sunday in much the same spirit as she would look at a kangaroo in the Zoological Gardens, for kangaroos came from Australia.”

That's from one of EF Benson’s delightful Mapp and Lucia books, Queen Lucia. Lucia is a snob and a social climber of great accomplishment, but it seems she could only cope with a God who kept a proper distance and didn’t make any inconvenient demands.

Not so John the Baptist. He was a prophet, like the prophets of old, and as we heard last week a bit of a fire and brimstone preacher, saying to the Pharisees and Sadducees, “you brood of vipers, who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” He saw himself as preparing the way for the Messiah, God’s anointed deliverer, who would gather his chosen ones but, in John’s words, “burn the chaff with unquenchable fire”.

Time passes, and John has been imprisoned for making outspoken comments about Herod. He’s heard about what Jesus was doing, but curiously this seems to make him doubt whether Jesus really is the Messiah after all. So he sends a message to ask, “are you the one who is to come?” Jesus does not give him a direct answer. He simply lists for him the things he has been doing over again, the things that John has already heard about:

The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.

This in fact summarises the miracles that Jesus worked in the previous section of Matthew’s gospel, in chapters 8 and 9 there are stories in which Jesus does all of these things. So why does John doubt?

Perhaps he doubts because this is not quite what he expects the Messiah to be doing. As we’ve seen John expects wrath, fire, punishment. And not without reason, because the Bible seemed to say that’s what he should expect.

The way that Jesus lists his miracles in fact refers to five different texts from the Prophet Isaiah which give the signs which will mark the coming of the Messiah. We heard one of them this morning from Isaiah 35, “the eyes of the blind shall be opened, the ears of the deaf unstopped, the lame shall leap like a deer and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy”.

But in each of these texts as Isaiah gives them the sign of healing and restoration is coupled with a promise of punishment and vengeance. Evildoers are going to get their comeuppance. So we had this morning “Here is your God, he will come with vengeance, with terrible recompense.” And there’s something like that in all five of the texts that Jesus references[1].

But Jesus only quotes the bits about healing and restoration. Now John knows the Bible. He knows that Jesus is giving some of the signs of the Messiah. But not all of them. The punishment of the wicked doesn’t seem to be happening. So can this really be the Messiah?

Jesus doesn’t say yes or no. He simply says, “blessed is anyone who takes no offence at me”. Actually in Greek it’s “blessed is the one who is not scandalised in me”. The concept of scandal runs right through the New Testament. Skandalon means an obstacle, a stumbling block, a snare, a trap. But it also has a mysterious attractive power. It has a kind of magnetic force that you can’t get away from, like something in your path that you can’t avoid bumping into. Jesus is saying that in what he is doing, in how he is proclaiming the Kingdom, people will respond to him like that.

The greatest scandal in the Gospels is the cross. That the Messiah should end up rejected, lynched by a mob, refusing to save himself, forgiving his murderers. That is a stumbling block, an obstacle to faith, if you expect God to descend with military might and destroy the wicked. As St Paul says in 1 Corinthians,

We proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling-block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.

In the Gospels nobody’s response to Jesus is ever neutral. They respond either with rejection or with faith. People are drawn to Jesus willy-nilly, and find in him either a stumbling block they can’t get round, or the corner stone and solid ground of God’s salvation. Either way, they can’t avoid the choice. You can’t treat Jesus like a kangaroo in the zoo, you can’t take him or leave him as you please. Lucia’s safe tame God is not an option.

To come up against Jesus is to be brought to the point where we must choose. Rejection, or faith. Stumbling block, or corner stone.

So Jesus does not say to John the Baptist, yes I am the Messiah. It is up to John to choose how he responds. But Jesus does say, blessed are you if you do not find in me a stumbling block. Blessed are you if your response is faith, not rejection[2].

The cross is not the only scandal in the Gospels. Jesus heals on the Sabbath. He criticises the religious authorities. He teaches in strange parables which reveal to us our own inner stumbling blocks, our own scandal.

And now in this time of Advent we are preparing for Christmas. Bethlehem has its own share of scandal, too. God revealed to us in the muck and mess of chaotic human lives. God coming to live with his people in the midst of upheaval caused by the arbitrary dictates of an occupying Imperial power. God born in improvised accommodation, dispossessed, vulnerable, marginalised.

And that is what we are preparing to celebrate. Every year we come up against the scandal of Christmas. And every year we are invited to renew our response of faith in the God who did not stay remote from us but came to share our human life as it actually is.

The season of Christmas parties and shopping is in full swing, and I wonder how much that really reflects the good news that God has drawn near to us in Jesus. I don't know if you've seen the "Christmas Tree" in St Pancras Station. It consists entirely of Champagne bottles, piled up in a great pyramid, with a sign in front saying that anyone found tampering with the Christmas Tree will be prosecuted. And a very merry Christmas to you, too.

Now there's nothing wrong with a party, and Champagne is nice, but I don't need a whole tree full of it. When pleasure becomes anaesthesia it can also be a denial that there is anything of value in our lives as they are. And that is to avoid the place where God comes to meet us, in life as it is, in our own situation whatever we are dealing with, amid our failure and mess and falling apart and making do.

But Christmas says that’s exactly where God meets us. And blessed are those who are not scandalised in Jesus. Blessed are those who find in him good news for the poor, healing for the sick, new life for the dead. Blessed are those who find in Jesus the Messiah, the Saviour, the hope of all the world.

[1] The references are: Isaiah 29:18 (“vengeance” verse 20); 35:5-6 (“vengeance” verse 4); 42:8, 17 (“vengeance” verse 13); 26:19 (“vengeance” verse 21); and 61:1 (“vengeance” part of verse 2).

[2] After preaching this it occurred to me that this may explain verse 11, “the least in the Kingdom of heaven is greater than” John the Baptist: at this moment John is still poised on the cusp of choice, has still to accept Jesus definitively as the Messiah. In fact, the Gospels do not tell us how John responded after this scene at all, or what choice he made. It is left to the Tradition of the Church to tell us that John’s beheading was an act of martyrdom, of witness to the truth.

2010-11-27T08:03:00.000Z

Vigilate, Eversholt Street

The ordinary time is over.

Trumpet blast of ice wind, needle sharp
Grey bricks bare trees thrill to the

Deep sounding
Shard shivering
Silence shouting

Word too immense for any thing.

First and Last.

The ordinary time is over.

Anglican Covenant - Updates

2010-11-08T16:25:00.005Z

I have had a couple of very thoughtful and helpful responses to my post below at More Than a Via Media:

First response: Covenant, Catholicity and Eucharist

Second response: Covenant, Catholicity and Instruments of Communion

This has also been picked up by Fr Dan Martins at Living Church here.

Anglican Covenant

2010-11-05T17:11:00.007Z

Is the Anglican Covenant Catholic?

In November General Synod will be asked to approve a draft Act of Synod adopting the Anglican Communion Covenant. This is being presented primarily as a way of dealing with disputes and living together as a family of churches. But it is also an ecclesiological statement; it expresses a particular understanding of what it is to be the church, of what “church” and “communion” mean. As the Covenant text makes clear, accepting the Covenant entails accepting this understanding of the church. But is it an understanding that Anglican Catholics can recognise and accept?

As John Riches has pointed out[1], the Covenant, like the Windsor Report before it, draws on different and sometimes conflicting ecclesiologies. So its vision of what the Church is, and consequently what communion is, is incoherent. Above all, it is the lack of a clear Eucharistic ecclesiology, and the prevalence of other views which owe much to the Reformation, which is a serious obstacle for anyone approaching the Covenant from a Catholic perspective.

This is apparent from the beginning. The Introduction to the Covenant Text, which is said to have “authority in understanding the purpose of the Covenant” (Covenant 4.1.1) sets out its theological frame of reference. So paragraph 1 describes our calling into communion as a gift of God, a participation in the Life of the Trinity, and cites The Church of the Triune God (CTG) in support. So far so good. But then the Introduction makes no mention at all of the Eucharist – in a document setting out what communion means and how it is effected! One might ask what happened to CTG’s central thesis that it is the Eucharist which “reveals and realises the gift of trinitarian communion given to the Church by the Holy Spirit”[2]. Likewise ARCIC’s Church as Communion[3] occasionally appears in the Covenant, but with the complete omission of its emphasis that it is the Eucharist which is constitutive of the Church. These are important documents, agreed by Anglicans, about the nature of the Church’s communion; and yet the Covenant, whilst borrowing from them in passing (and not always with a citation), ignores their central message completely. (There also incidentally seems to be an odd bit of process theology in the statement that the life of the Holy Trinity “shapes and displays itself” through the church.)

So if the Eucharist does not make the Church, does not establish communion, what does? The Introduction lays heavy emphasis on the covenants of the Old and New Testaments. Significantly, this includes the first mention of baptism, and it is the new covenant of Christ into which we are said to be baptised, rather than His body. True, paragraph 3 of the Introduction does state that the universal Church is Christ’s Body, but in the context of common life and mutual responsibility, of the working out of covenant.

John Riches argues there is a strong thread of Reformation ecclesiology running through the Anglican Covenant. In classic Reformed theology the true Church is invisible; it is the believer’s personal relationship with Christ which is foundational to belonging to this Church; the local, visible, institutions which serve this Church are human constructs whose members may or may not be among the saved, and so need clear membership criteria to ensure as far as possible that only true believers get in. And the language of covenant – a covenant constructed by human beings – is not far away from such a view. This has to be the theology of the Anglican Covenant of course, because it is at heart a document about how to tell when people don’t belong to the visible institution, and only a Reformation ecclesiology can do this with sufficient clarity.

So, in the Introduction, the covenants established by God in Scripture segue seamlessly into the covenant which we are now to make together to maintain our communion. No qualification or explanation is supplied to let us know if we should understand the word “covenant” differently in this case. What is proposed is a functional structure that one has to opt into, if, that is, the existing members approve the applicant’s doctrinal and moral worthiness. It is church imagined as something that human beings construct in the service of the Gospel.

This is, indeed, what evangelicals have been campaigning for. Oliver O’Donovan, for example, in 2006 envisaged a “communion” where “Christians are not admitted as Christians by other Christians, only recognized as Christians on the basis of the Holy Spirit’s work in them” and the Archbishop of Canterbury’s role is “to give voice and effect to judgements the churches have reached about the work of the Holy Spirit in their midst, to speak and act on behalf of their common mutual recognition”[4]. There’s no room there for the catholic principle of recognising people as Christians (even if not very good ones) on the basis of their common baptism.

The Covenant is also marked by a continual confusion between the local and universal meanings of “church”. The Anglican Communion is, we are told in the Preamble (citing Revelation 7:9), “people of God drawn from ‘every nation, tribe, people and language’”. That seems rather universal, even eschatological. Likewise, 3.2.3 tells us that new and controversial matters “need to be tested by shared discernment in the life of the Church”; and that’s “Church” in the proper case, without qualification, even though what is being talked about is Anglican, that is local, churches. But as Anglicans we can claim to be no more than the historic local churches of the British Isles and their more recent descendants elsewhere in the world. As such we do indeed share a common life in which we belong to each other. But that common life must not be confused with that of the universal Church of which we are but part.

Vatican II’s understanding of local churches is, “legitimate local congregations of the faithful united with their pastors” sharing the Apostolic ministry and celebrating the one Eucharist (Lumen Gentium) [5]. The universal Church is present in all local churches but is more than the sum of its parts; it is, foundationally, a Divine reality which the local churches receive and participate in, not something constructed from below. In the Covenant this ought to follow on from the Trinitarian basis of communion mentioned in the Introduction, but the connection fails to be made.

When it comes to the structures of discernment and discipline proposed by the Covenant the local seems to be imitating the universal with the new centralised mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion. Are we here looking at other “communions” with envy? If so, we are making a basic mistake about Anglican ecclesiology. The Roman Curia has a universal competence precisely because Roman ecclesiology is universal: the Catholic Church subsists in the Roman. Likewise the Orthodox can have firm structures of discernment and discipline because they claim to be the universal Church and so, collectively, know the mind of the Church. Anglicans can make no such claim. So are we trying to imitate something we are not with this incipient quasi-Papalism? Or is it rather a local Protestant understanding of the church, a human club with membership rules, mapped globally?

As John Riches says, the Covenant and its predecessor the Windsor Report, “drink from diverse wells and the result is a mingling of ecclesiologies which sit quite uneasily alongside each other. The call for the strengthening of the so-called ‘Instruments’ [of Communion]… receives very uncertain support from the ecclesiological reflections which are offered here. In the end, most support comes from those traditions endebted (sic) to the Continental Reformation and there to its more radical wing.”[6]

The Covenant is a confused document. It incoherently references different ecclesiologies, but its overwhelming tenor and direction is Protestant. The statement in 2.1.2 that Anglican churches have been “reshaped” by the Reformation is a worrying clue to this. In May 2008 Cardinal Kasper called on the Anglican Communion to decide whether it belonged to the church of the first millennium or to the Protestant Reformation. The repercussions of the possible answers to that are of course very much still with us. But the Covenant, insofar as it is clear at all, points to an answer which Catholics will find very difficult to accept.

Matthew Duckett

matthew_duckett@yahoo.co.uk

November 5 2010

[1] J Riches, “Talking Points from Books”, The Expository Times, 2008; 119; 417. See also NT Wright’s reply in 119; 469 and Riches’ reply to Wright in 119; 521.

[2] The Church of the Triune God - The Cyprus Agreed Statement of the International Commission for Anglican - Orthodox Theological Dialogue, Anglican Consultative Council 2006, para 12.

[3] http://www.prounione.urbe.it/dia-int/arcic/doc/e_arcicII_communion.html

[4] O O’Donovan, A Conversation Waiting to Begin – the Churches and the Gay Controversy, SCM Press 2009, p 23

[5] See also Cardinal Ratzinger’s lucid exposition of the Ecclesiology of Vatican II,

[6] J Riches, Op. Cit., 420

Letter in the Church Times, 29 October 2010

2010-10-29T17:49:00.000+01:00

Sir,

That the Diocese of Sydney persists in permitting deacons to “administer the Lord’s Supper”, even after this has been declared unconstitutional, will surprise no-one. For decades the usual teaching in Sydney has viewed sacraments merely as acted preaching, a subordinate adjunct to the ministry of the word. Indeed D Broughton Knox, principal of Moore College 1959-85, taught that water baptism was only an “apostolic custom” which might be replaced, for example, by converts giving their testimony (Selected Works, Volume II: Church and Ministry [Sydney: Matthias Media, 2003]). A friend in Sydney has told me of churches where this teaching appears to have been put into practice.

The stated reason for allowing deacons to “administer” the Eucharist is Sydney’s practice of restricting presbyteral ordination to rectors of parishes. This, it is claimed, is Biblical. But the New Testament describes local churches in which there were presbyters, plural. They can’t all have been the one in charge, so must have shared in the presidency and pastoral care of the community. This in plain common sense must have included the weekly synaxis and breaking of bread as its principal act. Likewise presbyters, plural, are to be called for if anyone is sick (James 5:14). The presbyterate in the New Testament is a collegial ministry of word and sacrament in which there is room for complementary roles. For Sydney, however, it is monarchical, and mainly about designating the man with the power.

For Anglicans faithful to universal tradition, a “Eucharist” presided by a deacon is no more than a simulated sacrament. Sadly this is now all that is on offer to Anglicans in Sydney’s hospitals and prisons, since chaplains can’t be priests. Even the dying can have no guarantee of receiving the “last and most necessary Viaticum” mandated by the Council of Nicea (Canon 13). Much has been said about the unconstitutional nature of Sydney’s actions, but little, as far as I know, about the spiritual harm that may result.

You report Archdeacon Narrelle Jarrett as saying, “it is a tragedy that deacons cannot fulfil the full sacramental ministry”. No; the tragedy is that Sydney refuses to give priestly ordination to those who need it for their ministry. It is a tragedy entirely caused by the revisionist and unscriptural theology of ministry which Sydney has embraced.

Yours sincerely,

The Revd Matthew Duckett

Sermon at Parish Mass and Baptism, 19th Sunday after Trinity 2010

2010-10-11T21:34:00.001+01:00

Sermon at Parish Mass and Baptism, 19th Sunday after Trinity 2010 (St Pancras Old Church)

2 Kings 5:14-17

2 Timothy 2:8-13

Luke 17:11-19

Babette’s Feast is a film and a story set in a bleak area of Denmark in the 19^th century. Babette, a refugee from revolutionary upheavals in Paris, arrives in a small and very religious community where she takes up work as cook to two elderly spinster sisters, the daughters of the local protestant pastor.

Over many years she gains their trust and respect. Then one day she learns that she has won a large sum of money on a lottery ticket in France. Rather than return to her old life, she spends the entire winnings on a feast for the villagers. Unbeknown to them, Babette used to be the head chef in one of the finest restaurants in Paris.

The feast she provides is sumptuous and extravagant, full of rare delicacies and fine wine. The villagers are shocked as they see the preparations, fearing that such luxury will be a sinful indulgence of the flesh. They decide that they will have to eat the meal out of politeness, but are determined that they will not take any pleasure in it or even speak about it.

But it doesn’t work. Babette's feast is just too good. As they eat and drink together, they can’t help enjoy the feast. The pinched narrowness of their respectable, fearful religion gives way. A community that had survived by everyone remaining in their proper place rediscovers itself in love and openness. The diners are redeemed by the unexpected joy of a life rich beyond their imagining.

In today’s Gospel reading something similar happens. Ten lepers ask Jesus for healing, nine of them Jews and one a Samaritan. Lepers in Biblical times were outcasts from their communities, shunned by religious laws which decreed that they were unclean. Curiously this brings the Jews and the Samaritan together in a way they wouldn’t have been otherwise. Jews and Samaritans ordinarily regarded each other as outcasts, because of their religious differences. But now they are all outcasts together from their own communities.

Then they are healed by Jesus, as they had asked. What happens then? Well, Jesus has told them to show themselves to the priests. The Jewish law said that if you had been cured of leprosy you had to be examined by a priest who would certify that you were once again ritually pure, so you could rejoin your community. And this is exactly what the Jewish former lepers do.

But not the Samaritan. He couldn’t show himself to a Jewish priest; even if he was no longer a leper he would still have been an outcast Samaritan. Perhaps he might have shown himself to a Samaritan priest instead. But he does not. Instead, he turns back to Jesus, praising God in a loud voice, and falls at his feet. The Samaritan ignores the religious law, breaks through its restrictions, and finds in Jesus what really matters, God’s love and redemption.

It looks as though the Samaritan is disobeying Jesus, by not going off and showing himself to a priest. But in fact he has found in Jesus the one true priest who offers salvation, healing and wholeness to all.

The Jewish lepers had a choice. They could have made the same response as the Samaritan. They could have realised that in Jesus God was breaking open all the sacred boundaries and religious laws which had made them victims for so long, outsiders to their own people. But instead they chose to go back into that system, now that they could be on the inside again and return to their safe but narrow existence. They were ritually clean, back on the right side of the religious law, but missing out on the fullness of life and joy which made the Samaritan shout with praise.

Jesus himself was to end up an outsider to the religious law. Condemned to death for religious reasons, he was hanged on a tree which the law said meant you were under God’s curse. But the veil of the temple, the veil of religious law and sacred boundary, was torn in two when he died. And from the tomb where his body was laid new life has sprung up for all people. Life and love beyond our imagining, God surprising us with joy, breaking in to us from outside all the boundaries we draw to keep ourselves safe.

Religious laws and purity codes can take many forms, and some may not seem to have anything to do with religion. But distinctions of social class, race, and nationalism are really part of the same mechanism when they draw boundaries through human society and create outsiders and victims. Jesus shows the nullity of all these sacred boundaries.

In Jesus all the systems of fear and exclusion break down, and with them the narrow but safe existence which we thought was what God wanted. God, it turns out, is not some thing to be afraid of but some one who loves us, and that love surprises us with joy, transforms our lives beyond our imagining with the richness of the heavenly feast, the banquet of God’s kingdom.

Today we give thanks and praise to God as we celebrate this Eucharist, and in as fine a voice as we can manage I hope. Today the risen victim, Jesus our Master and our Priest, comes to us once more in bread and wine. Today Mia will be made a partaker, with us, of Christ’s death and resurrection through the waters of baptism.

In Christ there is no-one who is unclean, no-one who is an outsider. The light of the resurrection shines on our lives and calls us to follow Christ and to shine as lights in the world today and all the days of our life.

Sermon at Parish Mass, Ordinary 26

2010-09-30T22:43:00.003+01:00

Sermon at Parish Mass, Ordinary 26 2010

St Michael's Camden Town

Amos 6:1a, 4-7

1 Timothy 6:11-16

Luke 16:19-31

A dentist and a priest died and presented themselves to St Peter at the pearly gates. St Peter asked them to introduce themselves.

The first said, “I am John Driller, I’m a very successful dentist famous for the number and speed of my tooth extractions.” St Peter replied, “Well done, good and faithful servant! Have this silk robe and golden crown and take up your residence for eternity in this luxury villa with swimming pool and landscaped gardens.”

The next said, “I am Father Jim Studious, I’ve been a faithful pastor of St Mary’s church for 47 years and I’m famous for the length and erudition of my sermons.” St Peter replied, “Well done, good and faithful servant! Have this cotton robe and paper hat and take up your residence for eternity in this small hut with an outside loo.”

“Hang on a minute!”, said the priest. “Why does the dentist get a better deal than me, when I’ve devoted my life to the church?” “Well,” said St Peter. “Up here we judge by results. When you preached, you sent people to sleep, but when the dentist was trying to put people to sleep, they prayed!”

There are lots of jokes and stories about people being surprised by what they find in the afterlife, and there were at the time of Jesus as well. What we’ve heard today is probably a story that was already in circulation and which Jesus took and adapted to teach his own lesson.

The story as used by Jesus and told in Luke is on one level a moral fable. It speaks of the “Great Reversal” which is one of Luke’s key themes: the humble are exalted, the rich and powerful cast down, as Mary announces in the Magnificat at the beginning of Luke. It also enlarges on a pair of Luke’s Beatitudes and Woes from earlier in his gospel: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the Kingdom of Heaven”; “Woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation.”

The rich man’s purple and fine linen indicate that he was a member of the ruling classes. As such it was his responsibility to use his power and wealth to do good, to seek justice and equity, to feed the hungry and clothe the naked. The Old Testament prophets are quite clear about that, and it’s a tradition in which Jesus and Luke firmly stand. Riches and power are not something that indicate God’s special favour. They are rather a gift to be used for others, a test to see how we will use what has been given to us.

But this rich man uses his wealth in idle luxury. The description of him is extreme to the point of being comical: he does nothing except eat enormous banquets of rich food, stuffing himself with delicacies every day.

Meanwhile, Lazarus waits outside the gate, starving and ignored. Dogs lick his sores, unclean animals which further identify him as an outcast.

But when they die their situations are reversed. The rich man is buried – not a dignity that we’re told was afforded to Lazarus – but finds himself in torment in Hades. Lazarus is carried by angels to the bosom of Abraham, an expression which may mean that he is reclining at a heavenly feast.

But the rich man still doesn’t get what the problem is. Even in Hades he conceives of Lazarus as no more than a useful slave, someone who can be ordered to come and quench his thirst, or carry a message to his brothers. But now there is an impenetrable barrier between them, where once there was a gate, which the rich man could have passed through if he had wanted, though Lazarus could not.

So there is a warning here about social justice and the right approach to wealth.

But this is of course a parable, so there’s more to it than appears on the surface. For a start, as a parable it can’t be taken as a literal description of conditions in the hereafter. The Greek reference to Hades or the underworld is not part of Jewish or Christian belief.

As with many parables, the twist in the tale comes at the end, when the rich man wants his brothers to be sent a warning by means of Lazarus. And Abraham says, “if they will not listen either to Moses or to the prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone should rise from the dead.”

Beyond the basic lesson of the moral tale, this parable is about the Resurrection. Jesus, like Lazarus, was counted as nothing by the world which rejected him and put him to death. The rich man simply didn’t see Lazarus when he was alive, or if he did just assumed that he was getting what he deserved.

So too Jesus was treated as a criminal, a blasphemer, one who was under the curse of God, by people who really believed that this was true. They simply couldn’t see that Jesus was innocent. The resurrection was God’s vindication of that innocent victim. The resurrection reveals that God is for the victim and not against him.

The resurrection therefore also reveals the wrongness of the way human beings tend to live. Human society tends to seek its own security by creating victims and scapegoats, people who “don’t count” and so can be excluded and ignored.

A few months ago the Evening Standard launched a stirring campaign about the dispossessed in London which you may have seen. It revealed that all over London, on run down council estates and elsewhere, people are living in debt and poverty, without opportunities for jobs or education, trapped on the margins of society. And so often this is within a few hundred yards of posh houses, expensive restaurants, swish nightclubs.

This isn’t news to the Church which has been ministering in these areas all along, and it won’t be news to us here in Camden. But it’s amazing that it took a front page journalistic campaign to bring this to the notice of Londoners in general. So many people simply didn’t know, couldn’t see, what life was like for hundreds of thousands of people in the capitol. We don’t see the excluded people, the victims, so long as we are comfortable and safe.

The resurrection reverses all that. The humble and meek are indeed lifted up, raised even from the death that human violence inflicted. The resurrection is God’s judgement on a society which survives by creating victims. But it is also God’s inauguration of a new society, of his kingdom. The old order of sin and death gives way as God exposes and reverses the extent to which we have been complicit in it.

The Church always looks to Jesus. She is continually being taught by the Lord who was put to death for our sins and raised for our justification, and who sends his spirit to inaugurate his kingdom, his new life, in our lives.

The Church in this society in which there is so much exclusion, so much need, must be continually proclaiming and living the Gospel of the risen victim. Jesus risen from the dead alone undoes the sinful ordering of human society and makes new life possible for everyone – for the poor and dispossessed at our gates, and even, if they can but believe, for the rich and powerful.

Sermon at Parish Mass, 21st Sunday in Ordinary Time 2010

2010-08-23T17:51:00.003+01:00

Sermon at Parish Mass, Ordinary 21 2010

St Pancras Old Church

Isaiah 66:18-21

Hebrews 12:5-7, 11-13

Luke 13:22-30

I’ve never been to the sale at Harrods, but I have seen the coverage on the news from time to time. Crowds of people camp outside, sometimes for days, wanting to be first in to grab the best bargains. And then the doors open and in they rush. And it seems as though some people simply grab whatever’s nearest, at random, just so they’ve got themselves a bargain and can say they bought something in the sale.

Probably very few of the people who do this really need the thing they wait so long for and then buy. But they do desire it. And they desire it because everyone else desires it, too. Human beings have this natural tendency to imitate one another’s desires. That’s how advertising works – if you can convince people that someone else wants the latest iPhone or aftershave or shower curtain, then you start to want it too, regardless of whether or not you actually need it.

In crowds, like the crowd outside Harrods, the imitated desire spreads, until everyone wants the same thing, but at the same time they’ve forgotten why they want it. The crowd converges on one object. That’s when desire can be dangerous, if it’s not controlled. It can lead to rivalry and violence. Like the crowd on Good Friday who, from one planted suggestion of what they might desire that started to spread, ended up all shouting “crucify him” with one voice.

Jesus knew about this dynamic of desire and the crowd, and it appears in today’s gospel reading. We are told at the beginning that he is on his way to Jerusalem, and that is one of the great themes of Luke’s Gospel, Jesus as the prophet, the new Moses, on his way to his exodus, his death and resurrection, by way of the crowd on Good Friday. And this frames what Jesus says next.

When he says, “Try your best to enter by the narrow door, because I tell you, many will try to enter, and not succeed”, the Greek conveys the sense of a large crowd, all trying to squeeze through the same door at once, and causing a log jam, so no-one can enter. So it is specifically "the crowd" that can't enter the narrow door.

This is in response to a question someone asks about whether only a few are being saved – and it’s the present tense in Greek. Jesus doesn’t answer that directly, but responds with this story about how desire works, and how being part of the rivalrous crowd, locked in imitated desire, can stop you entering the door of salvation. Just as the crowd on Good Friday driven by their own violence see neither the innocence of their victim nor their own guilt. It’s as though he’s passing the question back to the questioner, and saying, examine your desires. What does it mean to be saved? What is it that you desire? What is driving you?

Jesus then goes further with a parable that questions his audience’s assumptions. The master of the house has locked his doors and denies that he knows the people outside, even though they protest that they had eaten and drunk with him, and that he taught in their streets. Jesus had done these things. But it was not enough to have been to dinner with Jesus, as many Pharisees had. It was not enough to have had him teaching in your streets. Many people at the time were thinking, “a great prophet has appeared among us, God has visited his people”, and therefore we’re alright. This proves that God is on our side. This proves we still belong to the Covenant. So we can relax. Not so, says Jesus. His teaching has to be understood and followed.

Then his teaching gets quite shocking, when he says to his audience, “you will see Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets in the Kingdom of God, and you yourselves shut outside”. In their place, says Jesus, will be people from east and west and north and south. People from foreign nations, Gentiles, taking their places and feasting in the Kingdom.

It is not enough to assume that you belong to the right crowd. That because you count Abraham and the prophets among your ancestors that you are therefore going to be saved, that you are safely on the inside. If you don’t understand and follow their teaching you may well find yourself on the outside and others you thought were outsiders taking your place.

This is another of Luke’s themes, the “Great Reversal”, the overturning of the criteria for who’s in and who’s out, the vindication of the outcast and the rejected who turn out to be the people whom God was closest to all along.

And this picks up the teaching of the Old Testament prophets, such as that from Isaiah 66 today, which foretells that Gentiles, all the nations thought of as unclean outsiders, will become the people of God. They will even become priests and Levites, says Isaiah.

That is truly radical. This part of Isaiah was written at the time when the Temple worship in Jerusalem was being developed and strictly codified. It was very boundaried worship, very clear about who was in and who was out. Elaborate purification rituals had to be followed by the priests before they could enter the holy place and offer sacrifices for the rest of the people who remained outside. And Isaiah blows open that boundaried sacred space and all the world comes flooding in. And those who enter, those who “get it” will be the people who understand the real meaning of the law and the prophets, whether they are Jews or Gentiles.

Are there only a few who are being saved? It is not enough to rely on being part of a group that you think is “safe” as a kind of insurance policy. Because that is defining ourselves over against other people, we know we are OK because those people over there are not. In the time of Jesus people defined themselves in this way by being descended from Abraham.

For us it may be different. This week I had a card through my letter box informing me that I would be going to hell unless I prayed the simple prayer that followed, which was about letting God into my life. And the message then said, “if you have prayed that prayer with sincerity, congratulations, you are now going to Heaven”. But the subtext of that, I think, was, "you can choose to be an insider or an outsider to our group, but we are quite clear about where the boundary is".

Lest it be thought that I'm having a dig at the Pentecostal community that sent that card, I wonder how much of our Catholic obsession with things like the apostolic succession and valid sacraments is really seeking a security which comes from defining ourselves as not being like other people. To the extent that it is, we are still being driven by the dynamic of the crowd. We are still missing that narrow door into the Kingdom.

Our identity is not something that we need to imitate or borrow from other people. Jesus offers us a way out of rivalrous desire and its relentless descent into violence. He offers us the truth that our identity is God’s free gift in creation. This identity is a mystery we can’t define or pin down because we are made in the image of God who is unknowable. We can therefore let go of our imitated desires and everything by which we try to construct our own identity. We can embrace the risk of that mystery, knowing that there, and only there, are we truly safe. It is in receiving God’s free gift of our true being that we are being saved.

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Isaiah 66:18-21

Hebrews 12:5-7, 11-13

Exodus 12: 1-4 [5-10] 11-14
1 Corinthians 11:23-26
John 13:1-17, 31b-35

The Samaritan Woman at the Well

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