Sermon at Parish Mass 1st Sunday before Lent 2015

2 Kings 2.1-12

2 Corinthians 4.3-6

Mark 9.2-9

Every year on the Sunday before Lent we read the story of the Transfiguration of Jesus. This is related in three gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke, and in all three it occurs at a crucial turning point in the story: just after Jesus has first spoken of his forthcoming death, and just before he sets out with his disciples on the final journey to Jerusalem. From now on the story is one of contradiction and opposition, ending in rejection and death. But that journey is framed by visions of glory: the transfiguration, before it begins; and the resurrection, after it ends.

So let us look at this story, as Mark relates it. To understand the transfiguration we need to see where it comes in Mark’s bigger story. Just before this scene Peter had identified Jesus as Messiah, and Jesus then spoke of his rejection and death, which the disciples did not understand, indeed Peter was appalled by the idea.

In common with most people Peter thought that the Messiah would have a relentlessly positive story: a military leader who would lead an army to a glorious victory and freedom for Israel. So Peter is horrified when Jesus says that the Messiah will be rejected and killed. Impossible! But Jesus, who is indeed the Messiah, knows that this is the path he will follow.

Why will he follow this path? Because the Messiah must be faithful to God, in the middle of a world that is not. The world expects a violent Messiah because the world is captivated by the myth of redemptive violence – the idea that we can free ourselves from violence by being violent. So when someone comes along opposing the whole way the world runs, preaching radical non-violence, the God of unconditional love, the world simply isn’t tuned into that message. If Jesus opposes the way the world is, then he must be a violent threat, and therefore must be eliminated by violence.

This is the way the message of Jesus will be perceived, so that is why, if he is faithful to it, he will walk the way of the Cross.

But there is a higher authority than that of the world, a truer perspective – God’s perspective. God sees that Jesus is faithful, while the world is not. So in the transfiguration, when the cloud overshadows Jesus, the voice comes from heaven, just as it did at his baptism, “This is my Son, the Beloved.” But this time the voice adds: “Listen to him!”

Listening to Jesus is what the disciples have not been doing, and are still not doing. They don’t understand that God’s truth and righteousness will be established in the world by a path that renounces violence. The story of Jesus will seem to be so entirely negative, so incomprehensible to them, that in the end the disciples will not be able to follow, and will desert him and run away.

This may be why St Peter wants to make three dwellings for Jesus, Elijah and Moses. The glory he can understand, but not the way of the cross that Jesus has been talking about. So he wants to fix everything there, to stay with the glory without giving up the myth of redemptive violence. But that he cannot do. And as the vision fades and they come down the mountain he finds himself bewildered again by talk of Jesus “rising from the dead”. What can this mean?

Like all of us, Peter needs to listen to Jesus. Six days earlier, after talking about his death, Jesus said, “truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see that the kingdom of God has come with power”.

And now three of them have indeed seen that, in the Transfiguration. What they have seen is that Jesus inaugurates the kingdom by living it. He is the one person in the world who lives as God wants the world to live. In his transfiguration he appears as the “Son of Man”, humanity restored. But he shines with the uncreated light of Divinity. The Human One is the Beloved Son of God. The overshadowing cloud of God’s glory shows his identity with the Father. Moses and Elijah are there not as his equals but as his precursors. They are honoured by being in his presence, not the other way round.

And as there are two of them we can read them also as witnesses, there to testify to who Jesus is, as though Jesus had been summoned to court to give an account of himself. In apocalyptic literature, books like Daniel and Revelation, those who appear clothed in white are those who have been persecuted on earth but have been vindicated in the higher court of heaven. So too Jesus, destined to be opposed and persecuted, is here see in dazzling white as his vindication is pronounced from the cloud of glory: “this is my Son, the Beloved”.

This is what Peter gets wrong. The Kingdom of God is not humanity doing its usual violent stuff but with infinite god-like power. The Kingdom, instead, is humanity turned about and transformed and leaving its violence behind. The Kingdom is seen in power when Jesus does the will of the Father. And those who follow him will enter the kingdom too if they remain faithful.

Jesus calls his disciples to follow his path of radical obedience to the Father’s will, even in the midst of a world that is deeply resistant to that will. This will not be a path of success or victory, as the world understands it. It will be a path of darkness and contradiction. It will often be marked with rejection, and sometimes by the violent opposition of a world that does not want to renounce its violence. We can all think of some of the great risk-takers for the Kingdom: Martin Luther King, Oscar Romero, Dorothy Day.

You may have heard on the Sunday Programme this morning about Father Giacomo Piazza, a priest in Calabria who works with disabled people and was the only person to have the courage to take on properties confiscated from the Mafia. He has received many death threats, usually on feast days of the Church to make the point, such as a bomb sent on Christmas day. But Don Giacomo said the Mafia, who despise disabled people, were disorientated when they came with machine guns and were confronted by people with wheelchairs. “The people in wheelchairs were conscious that they were making a gift to their city, the gift of lifting some of the fear”, he said. They started a small revolution, and now others have had the courage to take over Mafia property and turn it to good use, too.

In this country there is no threat of violence to Christians. But any bishop who speaks out on behalf of the poor, or against violence, is liable to be ridiculed in the press, and told to keep out of politics. As if the gospel could somehow not be read as political. All Christians will be called on from time to time to confront evil and make a stand against the violence of the world.

But however hard and contradictory the path might seem, it is shot through with glory. If we are faithful, our story will merge into the story of Jesus, and become part of the proclamation of the Kingdom. Those who are faithful, even if rejected and opposed on earth, are vindicated in the higher court of heaven. The truth shines out in Jesus glorified, in Jesus raised from the dead and vindicated by the Father. However persistent the violence of the world, the Kingdom of God is the ultimate truth. And we are to be its faithful witnesses, allowing the Kingdom to become real and visible in our lives. Allowing our lives to become part of the vision of humanity turned round and transfigured into the image of Christ.

Sermon at Parish Mass 2nd Sunday before Lent 2015

Proverbs 8.1,22-31

Colossians 1.15-20

John 1.1-14

Stephen Fry caused a stir last week when he was asked on an interview programme what he would say if he met God face to face. Fry is well known as an atheist, and his answer was that he would say, “how dare you”, and take God to task for evil things that aren’t our fault, such as childhood cancer. A God who deliberately created such things, according to Fry, must be “capricious, mean minded and stupid”.

Now it has to be said that Fry has hit upon what for many people is an obstacle or an objection to faith. If there is a good God, why do evil things happen? But we need to look at the kind of god that is being criticised. The god that Fry doesn’t believe in seems to be some sort of designer and controller. But is this the God of the scriptures?

There are gods like that in the scriptures, but they are the gods of the nations who are but idols. Gods who control the weather, the harvest, war, and so on – if you can persuade them to be on your side they will control things in your favour. We might imagine these gods like the Wizard of Oz, sitting hidden behind a curtain, pulling the levers and working the dials of the universe. And we might indeed criticise such a god for the evil things that happen if he doesn’t work the controls properly.

But the story told by scripture is of a God who is altogether different. This God is a mystery who cannot be depicted or even named, the self-existent without explanation: “I will be who I will be”, is all the answer Moses got when he asked for a name.

This God reveals himself as creator, the source of being, the reason why there is anything at all rather than nothing. But if God is the cause of the universe this means that God is not any kind of thing or being within the universe, as the gods of the nations were believed to be. Unlike them, God remains unfathomable. God is not one of the gods.

The God in whom Christians believe is revealed in the story of Israel told through the law and the prophets. And, ultimately, in Jesus, whom Christians believe to be God come among us in a human life. In Jesus the unfathomable God becomes intelligible. We still cannot say what God is, but we can say what God is like, by looking at Jesus.

It is absolutely at the heart of our faith to say that when we look at the man, Jesus of Nazareth, we are looking at the Creator of the universe. Any lesser claim is simply not Christianity. It is there in the New Testament through and through.

We have heard two examples this morning. St Paul writing to the Colossians sets out his teaching of Christ, the image of the invisible God, that is to say, the unfathomable made intelligible. In him all the fullness of God dwelt, through him all things were created, in him all things are reconciled, through the resurrection he is the head of the new creation. The man Jesus is the cosmic Christ, God made visible, the key to the existence and redemption of everything.

St John, in his wonderful prologue, speaks of Jesus as the Word made flesh. The Word was a Greek idea, a kind of rationale and principle of existence. In Greek philosophy this was not necessarily personal, more a kind of force or power. But Jewish philosophers, before the time of Jesus, had interpreted this idea in terms of the Divine Wisdom, God’s creative power, often personified in the Bible as a feminine figure, as in this morning’s reading from Proverbs. So St John is saying, the Word, the rationale and principle of existence, which is God’s creative wisdom, has become human and lived among us, and we have seen him.

So, from now on, when we are asked, what is God like, we can point to Jesus, and say, like this.

Jesus completes the revelation of God the creator. Creation is good, Genesis tells us. And yet there is evil, both evil suffered and evil done. The scriptures acknowledge this. Many of the psalms are extended meditations on evil and suffering, lamenting, questioning, asking where God is in all this. Then there are the books of Job, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, and so on.

Now the psalms are prayers, not answers. We are not told why evil things happen. The scriptures instead tell of Israel meeting God again and again in the place of suffering and loss. They tell of Israel discovering that this God is a saviour, who cares passionately about his people.

That pattern and story, of God who makes himself known as saviour in the place where evil is experienced, comes to its fulfilment in Jesus. He lived out the story of Israel in person, even to the point of rejection and death on a Roman cross in occupied Jerusalem.

In this above all we see what God is like. The unfathomable becomes intelligible in suffering the evil that is done in the world. The Creator experiences to the full the fracture in creation, the suffering of the innocent, the pointless meaninglessness of it all.

Because, above all, God reveals himself in Jesus as love. It is through love that he came to us, in love that he shared our life and death. And all so that we might live in love, the love of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit from before the universe was made. All so that we might become children of God, as St John says.

This is what God is like, and this is why God is not a controlling god like the idols of the nations. Control is not compatible with love. Love requires freedom. Love cannot exist without the possibility that love might be rejected, without the risk that things other than love might happen. That is why the cross is the necessary price of love in a world that does not want to love.

But the cross is not the end. The Creator’s work is not complete. The Divine Wisdom, the Eternal Word, is still at work. In the resurrection the new creation is revealed. The wounded universe is healed and made new. And in the wounds of Christ, which his hands and feet still display, we see that, somehow, beyond our imagining, even the futility of suffering and death is re-created into something glorious.

To understand what God the Creator is like, we need then to look at Jesus, who has died, and has been raised to the glory of the Father. For he is the firstborn from the dead, the head of the new creation. In him we see creation completed in the only way that is compatible with love. And in him we see what is prepared for all of us, and indeed for the whole creation, even if now it is, as St Paul says, “subject to futility” and “groaning in the birth-pangs”.

The Book of Revelation at the end of the Bible describes that new creation as being like a glorious city where:

‘The home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.’

The God we see in Jesus is not unconcerned with the suffering of the world. Quite the opposite: he comes to meet and suffer with and alongside his creation. This is not the controlling god that some people might want or imagine. But God is what God is, and the gods of our own imagination are but idols.

And the true God gives us a sure and certain hope, founded on the love that will not fail, hope in the ultimate healing of this broken and wounded world, the taking of everything into the resurrection, which in the Creed we call the life of the world to come.

Sermon Presentation of the Lord 2015

Malachi 3:1-5
Hebrews 2:14-end
Luke 2:22-40

Recently there was an exhibition at the National Gallery of late works by Rembrandt. The last picture in the exhibition was the last work that the artist painted: Simeon in the temple, holding the infant Jesus in his arms. Simeon is depicted with that compassionate and complex understanding of age that Rembrandt did so well, one old man painting another. And he is shown quite clearly with his mouth open, speaking. It’s very unusual to see a portrait of someone speaking, but we know what Simeon was saying on this occasion, in the version that’s perhaps most familiar to us:

Lord, now lettest thou Thy servant depart in peace
according to Thy word

For mine eyes have seen Thy salvation.

I think that Rembrandt knew this was his last painting, and chose this scene and those words on purpose. It is a statement of his faith, at the end of his life. The painting was left unfinished at his death, and it was completed and even changed by other hands later. But it is such a tender, trusting and hopeful picture. Like Simeon, at the end of his life Rembrandt too speaks to us, and tells us that he has seen salvation, and all shall be well. 

Simeon, like Rembrandt, did not see what would come after him, the work that other people would do, the way the picture would develop and change. It was enough for Simeon to have seen the Lord’s Messiah. He has lived in hope, waiting for this moment, a hope that personifies the hope of Israel. The hope of restoration after all that has happened to Israel in the past. And now he has seen the Messiah, and knows that God has remembered his people. He can die content.

Israel’s hope is what is in the background of this reading. It is a long hope, centuries old. We need to remind ourselves of a bit of that if we are to understand this reading. Israel’s history has been one of loss and affliction on the one hand, and an on/off relationship with Yahweh, Israel’s God, on the other. 

First, after the reign of King Solomon, Israel had a row and split. Ten tribes formed the northern kingdom, leaving only the tribes of Judah and Benjamin in the south. 

Then, in the eighth century BC, the northern kingdom was conquered by Assyria. The territory was annexed and the ten tribes absorbed into Assyria so that they lost their identity. They were never heard of again.
That left only the southern kingdom of Judah and Benjamin. This was conquered by Babylon in the sixth century and the population carried off into exile. The temple in Jerusalem, the heart of Judah’s worship, was destroyed.

Seventy years later, the population was allowed to return and rebuild. But things weren’t the same. Those who remembered the old temple wept when they saw the new one. There was much missing. The Ark of the Covenant and the tablets of the Law were gone. Above all, the glory of the Lord, the shekinah, a shining cloud that showed that God was dwelling with his people, was absent. Ichabod, they said, the glory has departed.

But the prophets said that one day God would restore his people, God would return visibly to his temple so that once again his people would know that God was with them. 

And today Simeon, in the temple, tells us that is fulfilled. He hails the infant Jesus as the glory of God’s people Israel. Jesus is God’s glory in person, returning to the temple, the visible sign that God dwelling with his people. He is also the Law in person, replacing the stone tablets of old, and he is carried there by his mother, Mary, who became the new Ark of the Covenant by bearing God in her womb.

And old Anna points us to another hope. She is the daughter of Phanuel of the tribe of Asher. The tribe of Asher was one of the ten tribes absorbed into Assyria seven centuries before and never heard of again. But now she is back. Anna represents both the return of the lost tribes, and also, as she is a woman, symbolically stands for Israel the bride that the Lord has come to marry, an image often used in the Old Testament. 

We are told that Anna had “lived with her husband for seven years after her marriage, then as a widow to the age of eighty-four”. Rather like Israel’s short existence “married to the Lord” followed by long exile and loss of identity. And those numbers aren’t accidental, either: seven into eighty-four is twelve, the number of the tribes, a number that signifies completion. All will be gathered in.

But Simeon sees only the beginning. He sees that God is keeping his word, and that is enough. He knows that he will not live to see the working out of God’s promises. Though he does see that this will only happen by means of conflict, the fall and rise of many in Israel. He does see that the child will be opposed and the inner thoughts of many will be revealed. He does see the sorrow that like a sharp sword will pierce Mary’s heart. 

That foresight that was given to him then must have been very mysterious. How can the glory of Israel and the light of the nations be made known through a way of contradiction and suffering? But he did not doubt. Once he had seen Jesus he knew that God could be trusted however strange and unexpected future events might be.

Today’s great feast is about faith and fulfilment. The faith of Simeon and Anna that God would remember his people. The fulfilment of that hope in the coming of Jesus. It is the start of the story of the Church, which is the gathering in of all people into God’s kingdom, the return of the lost tribes of every nation. The Church is the people formed by Jesus who is both the glory of Israel and “the light for revelation to the Gentiles”. It is the fulfilment of what was spoken by the prophets that Israel’s God would be the saviour of all the world.

So we too are part of this story. We too are the bearers of faith and promise. God has visited his people in Jesus, his promises will be fulfilled. Like Simeon and Anna, we do not see the end, except by faith. We do not yet see God’s kingdom of justice and peace filling the earth. We do see that there are times of sorrow and opposition on our journey of faith. But it is enough for us to have seen Jesus, to know him present with us. Our eyes have seen God’s salvation.

The Lord’s Messiah has come. He is God dwelling with his people, in the Eucharist, in his Church, in those we seek to serve. God is faithful. The future is his, not ours, and when we have done our part others will take up the story of faithful witness and service. Like Simeon, like Rembrandt, we can faithfully hand over our work to a future we do not know, because the saviour has come and, in the end, as Julian of Norwich said, all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.

Sermon at Parish Mass The Baptism of Christ 2015

Genesis 1.1-5

Acts 19.1-7

Mark 1.4-11

Je suis Charlie. I am Charlie. We are Charlie. Following last week’s terrorist murders in Paris this slogan has appeared in demonstrations and social media. The magazine Charlie Hebdo was the target of the attack. But people want to say, not just them, us too. We are all in this together. It is an expression of solidarity. People collectively rejecting violence and seeking a better way. Solidarity is a powerful idea – it was the name of the union movement in Poland that helped to bring down communism. There is a sense in solidarity that humanity is more than the sum of its parts, that together we can seek what we cannot achieve by ourselves.

That idea is not wrong, and it is echoed in the scriptures. But the scriptures add the extra dimension that solidarity needs: God, the creator and redeemer, in whom and by whom alone we can achieve our created purpose. For instance, the idea of solidarity runs through today’s gospel reading: John is baptising in the wilderness, and “people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins”.

The Greek does give the sense of an enormous crowd: the whole population has come together for baptism, confessing their sins. This is collective repentance, collective seeking after God. Repentance means turning away from sin and towards the Lord. And all the people do so in the expectation of grace, in the hope that God will raise them up and give them new life.

John the Baptist tells them that repentance by itself is but a beginning. Repentance prepares us to receive the gift of new life, but it is God himself who must give it to us. So he says of the Messiah who is to come: “I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.” He will pour out the gift of the God’s own life upon those who repent.

But here there is something in today’s reading that may seem a little strange. John has promised that the Messiah will baptise believers with the Holy Spirit. But when Jesus comes to the Jordan, it is he who gets baptised. He is baptised by John, with water, in the river Jordan. And he is baptised with the Holy Spirit, as he sees the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending on him like a dove.

So it is Jesus who receives the baptism that John has said will be given to the people. Why is this? The answer is in the idea of solidarity, of everyone being in this together. All the people have come together seeking repentance and new life. But it is Jesus who enters the water, Jesus who receives the promised Spirit. Jesus does so not as an individual alone, but as the representative and head of all humanity. The human race has a new beginning in Jesus. All who are baptised into Jesus are made one with him in that new beginning. And all are made one with him in his Divine life, for he is both God and man. Jesus is God’s solidarity with the human race. So those who are baptised into Jesus, in him, have been baptised with the promised Holy Spirit. The voice addressed to Jesus is now addressed to the whole of humanity, as found in him: “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased”.

This voice from heaven speaks to us not as separate individuals, but as part of a redeemed humanity made one in Christ. This is why the alternative name for baptism is christening. The Spirit says to all who are baptised, “You are Christ”. We are all made one in Christ Jesus, one new humanity. Christ is the new Adam, but so, in him, are we.

The Creator Spirit is poured out to save us from sin and death and to create us anew as beloved children of God. The letter to the Hebrews speaks of this idea of human solidarity in Christ:

Since, therefore, the children share flesh and blood, [Christ] himself likewise shared the same things, so that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death[1].

God’s solidarity with the human race, in Jesus, means that he shares everything that it is to be human, including death, in order to save us from death. And indeed the symbolism of baptism is that of death and resurrection, as Jesus descends into the water to be raised up.

But that is not the only reference to the death of Jesus in this passage. Heaven is “torn apart” as the spirit descends. Mark uses the Greek word for “torn apart” only twice: here, and at the death of Jesus on the cross, when he tells us that the “curtain of the temple was torn apart, from top to bottom”[2].

The curtain in the temple hung in front of the holy of holies, the empty space filled with the presence of God. In Hebrew this curtain was called “the heaven”. It symbolized the cosmos, the visible creation concealing the invisible presence of the Creator. So, in both places, at the baptism of Jesus and at his death, the heaven is torn apart, the veil removed, and the Creator Spirit is poured into the creation.

At his baptism Jesus commits himself to his calling as Messiah, the new and representative human, God’s solidarity in person with the whole human race. And on the cross, by his voluntary pouring out of himself even to death, he fulfils that calling and his solidarity is complete.

The death of Jesus is a consequence of sin, and so it unmasks the heart of our sin. It is an act of religious violence, murder perpetrated by people who think that death is the ultimate reality, and who can only conceive of God in those terms. This is the false imagination of God, the fear of death, that has enslaved humanity from the beginning, as Hebrews says. But by surrendering himself to death Jesus tears heaven apart and the Creator Spirit is poured into creation to make all things new.

The Spirit is the true and living God in whom there is no death, who does not deal in death, who does not want death. God is love and light and life, and in him is no darkness at all. The first-fruits of that outpouring of the Spirit is the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, breaking the power of sin. And, in him, all humanity now can be freed from sin and raised to eternal life.

All this is both promised and already present when Jesus comes to the Jordan and is baptized. In him, all humanity turns towards the Lord in repentance. In him, all humanity is born again and receives the Holy Spirit. And in him all humanity hears at last the true voice of our Father, who loves us and wants us to live in him: “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased”.

---

[1] Hebrews 2:14-15

[2] Mark 15:38