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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sermon at Parish Mass Trinity 7 2011

1 Kings 19:9, 11-13

Romans 9:1-5

Matthew 14:22-33

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

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

To ask that is to ask a very modern question of a pre-modern object. Living in the 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

Matthew 15:1-2, 10-14

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sermon at Parish Mass Trinity 6 2011

Isaiah 55:1-5

Romans 9:1-5

Matthew 14:13-21

One version of the story goes like this:

Wilfred the Hairy, who was Count of Barcelona, Urgell and 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.