Sermon at Parish Mass, 2nd Sunday before Advent

Malachi 4:1-2; 

2 Thessalonians 3:6-13; 

Luke 21:5-19 

“Keep calm and carry on”. We’ve all seen it, on mugs, t-shirts and towels, and countless other bits of merchandise. This, and variations on the theme: “keep calm and carry on.” This dates from the second world war, but was only rediscovered in recent times, on a batch of posters printed but never used. The posters were intended for the event of a successful German invasion. If there should have been a Nazi occupation of this country, the posters would have gone up over the land: keep calm and carry on. Don’t panic, carry on life as normally as possible, the daily round and common task still need to be done.

In the event those posters were not needed. But Jesus gives similar advice in today’s Gospel which was needed. “When you hear of wars and insurrections, do not be terrified, for these things must take place.” Do not be terrified, or even, perhaps a closer translation of the Greek, “don’t panic”. 

Jesus could see the simmering tensions beneath the surface of Judean society, under Roman occupation. He could see the rivalry, envy and violence only just being contained. His prediction that the Jerusalem temple would be destroyed, and (just after today’s extract) that Jerusalem would be surrounded by armies, was fulfilled in AD 70. There was a rebellion by Jewish Zealots, religious fundamentalists who wanted to purify the land by driving out foreigners. They proved no match for the might of Rome and ended up besieged in Jerusalem. The resulting destruction and massacre of the inhabitants were terrible: the equal of anything seen in Syria in our own days. Jerusalem was completely destroyed and left an uninhabited ruin. 

And although Jesus foresaw this before it happened, Luke’s Gospel was written just after, with the memory of those horrifying events fresh in the mind. So the words of Jesus are related in Luke’s account with particular vividness and force. 

But amid all this Jesus says to stay calm and carry on. Don’t panic. Even when you are arrested and persecuted, you should see it as an “opportunity to testify”. That is, an opportunity to carry on doing the normal business of the Church, which is to make known the good news of God in Jesus. 

So even in the midst of disasters going on in the world, the Church is called to keep calm and carry on. The Church must not panic. Must not throw up its hands in horror and give in. Must not cease to engage with the world, for that is what it is called to do. Whatever is happening, the Church must not retreat to a hill top and wait for the heavenly spaceship to beam us away from the wicked world, as various doomsday cults have done down the years. 

The kind of writing that we have heard in today’s Gospel is called “apocalypse”. In modern use “apocalypse” refers to some huge destructive event. But in the Bible it is more than that. Its root meaning is about unveiling. As though you were in a theatre and the back screen was drawn away, revealing the hidden mechanisms that produce all the special effects. 

So apocalypse is not necessarily about destruction. It is about seeing what it going on behind the scenes, the hidden forces driving the world. Now that can mean that destructive forces come out into the open. Sin, rivalry, envy, violent desires simmering away under the surface of things, emerge in wars and insurrections. But the Kingdom of God is also being revealed through the Church. God’s justice, love and peace, the ultimate lordship of Christ over all things, are appearing through the proclamation of the Kingdom. And this is also “apocalypse”, “unveiling”. 

The Church on earth now is in the in-between time, between the ascension of Christ and his coming in Glory. The time between the departure of his visible presence form the world and the fulfilment of God’s kingdom when Christ will be all in all. This is the time of apocalypse, of unveiling, until everything is brought into plain view in the light of God’s judgement and redemption. 

And in this time the Church is to keep calm and carry on. Which means carrying on with the practicalities of being a church of real people with a mission in the real world. It means dealing seriously with the ordinary everyday matters that are needed to keep the mission going.

We see this also in the reading from 2 Thessalonians this morning. The letters to the Thessalonians - that is, to the Christians in Thessalonika, are probably the earliest parts of the New Testament to be written. They contain St Paul’s early theology, in which he seems to expect an imminent return of Christ in the lifetime of those he is addressing. This contrasts with St Paul’s later letters such as Ephesians where he seems to see Christ already filling all things, as though his own process of unveiling had happened and the vision had become for him both more immediate and more universal. 

So 2 Thessalonians is quite an “apocalyptic” letter overall, Christ is coming soon and we are in the last days. But here is Paul, at the conclusion of this letter, not talking about cosmic events but giving directions about very ordinary things: work and eating and payment for food. Just because the Kingdom is on the way doesn’t mean we can give up the necessities of life here and now. In fact, we must carry on doing these ordinary everyday things, precisely because the Kingdom is on the way, and we need to see to the practicalities of life so that we can bear witness to the Kingdom. 

This is just as true for us, and for any church. We need to keep the practicalities of life going, and take those responsibilities seriously. So today we are asking all the members of our electoral roll, and anyone else who feels they are part of St Peter’s community, to consider their part in keeping the mission of this church going. This is our stewardship: what we can give out of our time, talents and money. And I’ll talk more about that at the end of Mass.

We as a church are here to bear witness to the Kingdom of God, to play our part in the mission of God as he is calling us, at this time and in this place. This is something we have been praying about during our month of prayer, which concludes next Sunday. 

Engaging with our mission, carrying out the work that God has for us, means that we have to take care of the practical necessities of being a parish church. We have a beautiful building that needs to be maintained - and historic buildings like this aren’t low maintenance or low cost. We have to keep the door open, the roof on, and the people warm (ish). We have to pay our insurance, and the salaries of clergy, the bishop and the Diocesan staff who support all the parish churches. 

We depend also on all the time and talents that people offer. Without the work of many willing volunteers, who do so much, this church simply couldn’t carry on its mission. 

And all of it is so that we can do our work of bearing witness to the Kingdom of God, in this in-between time, the time of apocalypse. For the Kingdom is being unveiled even as the mechanisms of violence, sin, exclusion and destruction are also coming into the open. 

We are unlikely to face anything like the destruction of Jerusalem. But we do see things like the London riots of two years ago, or the burning of the Bravanese community centre just this year, in our parish. 

And when things like that happen it is vitally important that the church is here, in this place, a visible presence in the community, bearing witness to the better way of being and living which is God’s Kingdom of justice, love and peace.

So we are here, in this in-between time, this time of apocalypse, when the veils are being parted until that time when Christ will be all in all. This in-between time is when we say, as we will in the Eucharistic prayer, “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again”.

And if we want a watchword for the Church in this time, we could do worse than the one on so many mugs and tea towels and posters: keep calm, and carry on.

Sermon at Parish Mass, Remembrance Sunday/3rd Sunday before Advent 2013

Photo John Beniston (Wikimedia)

Job 19:23-27a; 
2 Thess. 2:1-5, 13-17; 
Luke 20:27-38 

That Gospel reading may seem to be an odd selection for Remembrance Sunday. We might wonder what has the story of one bride for seven brothers got to do with the rather sober reflections of this day, reflections on war and peace, suffering and sacrifice?

Well this happens to be where we’ve got to, following our course through Luke’s Gospel, as we have been all year. But we can look more deeply. There is a common theme running through all three readings that we have heard this morning. They are readings of contrast: the contrast between the nature of God, and how people fail to understand the nature of God. And that does connect with the reflections of this day.

The book of Job is a long reflection on just this theme. It is a moral fable, Job is a character who enjoys great wealth, peace and prosperity and then suddenly loses everything: his family, his property, his health. And the Book of Job is an extended reflection asking the very human questions that so many people struggle with, “why is this happening to me?”, “where is God in all this?”. But when Job considers the nature of God, it is not so much that he gets an answer, as that his questions fail. 

In the graphic short passage we heard today we see Job experiencing himself as a body being consumed by disease. He knows he is a human creature like anything else in creation, something which begins, changes and ends. But Job also experiences God - and knows that God is wholly unlike that. Job’s experience is that God simply, absolutely, is. Beyond question, beyond concept or image, God is absolute existence without beginning, change or end. But, even in experiencing that contrast, Job knows that somehow relationship and hope remain possible: “I know that my Redeemer lives”. 

This lies behind the teaching of Jesus in today’s Gospel reading. Jesus has a dispute with the Sadducees, a school of Jewish scholars and priests who did not believe there was any afterlife or resurrection for human beings, nor did they believe in angels or spirits. For them, this life was all there was, and what mattered was to keep everything in order in this life, in this society, by observing the Law and offering the prescribed sacrifices to God.

But it’s clear from today’s story that the idea of the resurrection that these  Sadducees reject is simply too limited. They think it must be something just like this life, only carried on afterwards. So when husbands, wives, and everyone else, are raised from the dead, it’s a case of carry on as usual. Hence their question: if a woman has been married to seven successive brothers who’ve all died, whose wife will she be?

But Jesus refutes this by speaking of the resurrection life as something wholly different. It is not like this life. The children of the resurrection are children of God. 

The truth that Jesus tells us today is that there is no death in God. For God, death simply doesn’t exist. So that, for God, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are alive, in the present tense. Never mind that they died centuries before Jesus, and that their tombs were well known. They are alive, because God is alive. Absolutely, overflowingly, vivaciously alive: and they are children of God, sharing in his nature.

So what the Sadducees are wrong about, ultimately, is not the resurrection, but God. They are projecting this life of beginning, change and ending, this life bounded by death, onto God. They suppose that anything new that comes from God must be like that, too.

But Jesus reveals God in whom there is no death. God who is the source of all things, the wellspring of all life, without limit. God is not a creature, not a thing which begins, changes and ends. Therefore God continually gives of himself without being diminished. Life continually pours forth from the heart of the creator, in whom there is no death. There is no limit to the life that God lives, and there is no limit to the life that God gives to the children of the resurrection.

We need to learn, as Job does, that the fulness of life does not lie in any created thing: possessions or health or family or any other things that we might lay claim to and say are “ours”. The fulness of life lies in God, who alone absolutely is, without beginning, change or end.

If we can trust that, if we can believe that to be true, then the life of the resurrection is something we can begin to live even now. All are alive to God, in the present tense. It is in this present moment that God simply absolutely is, without beginning, change or end. It is in this present moment that we can know God in the ground of our being, pouring forth his life without being diminished, like water rising endlessly from a pure spring. 

The alternative is to live according to the old way of living, life bounded by death and limitation. If we imagine that this is all there is, then we have to strive to hang on to what’s ours, to stop other people taking it from us. Because this life is limited, we end up in rivalry with others over what we want to possess. And rivalry leads to violence. And violence leads to death. The irony is that if we try to hang on to the little we’ve got, we lose it. We end up with less life, not more. Jesus knew this of course. “Those who try to make their life secure will lose it, but those who lose their life will keep it.” (Luke 17:33)

If we conceive of God, and therefore life, in terms of our death-bound existence, this leads not to the true God but to an idol of our own making. And idols, because they are a monstrous reflection of our own limitations, have no source of life in them.

St Paul in our reading from 2 Thessalonians talks about a “lawless one” who declares himself to be God. This idea occurs in a few places in the New Testament: an “antichrist”, that is, an alternative messiah, an alternative revealer of God. But the so-called “god” this figure reveals is monstrous. It is a personification of human society ordered according to rivalrous, violent desires, resulting in idolatry and death. There have been leaders of states and armies who have filled such a role. In St Paul’s day it could have been a Roman Emperor. But we might think more of Hitler, or Kaiser Wilhelm, or of any totalitarian society so devoted to its own ideology that human lives count as nothing.

We remember today the tragedy of war, and its human cost, which we shall be reminded of in the reading of the names of those who died from this small community in two world wars, and particularly the terrible number from the first world war. 

The cause of war is always ultimately a failure to believe and trust in God, in whom there is no death. It is a collapse of human society into rivalry and violence as though there were nothing else.

But even when human society fails, even when it falls into the catastrophe of war, God is still present to redeem and to save. Time and again God calls us back to himself, to the gift of resurrection life which he offers. 

War is always evil, but once it is unleashed there can still be actions which are themselves good: acts of heroism and self-sacrifice, the defence of the weak and helpless. Any Christian response to war must always be aimed at restoring peace and justice, and that can be at great cost. And we remember this at the foot of the cross, the symbol of God’s own self-giving love, his sacrifice of himself to us in Jesus, so that we - and all we remember today - might share with him the life of the resurrection.

Today we reflect on the cost of war, in the past and today, in so many parts of the world. But we also commit ourselves afresh to live according to God’s ways of peace and justice, and therefore to renounce the ways of rivalry and violence. We commit ourselves to believe and trust in God in whom there is no death, to whom all are alive. For all life and being comes from God, the inexhaustible source, who calls us to himself and gives himself in love. And it is according to that love that we must live.

Sermon at Parish Mass, All Saints 2013

Daniel 7:1-3, 15-18

Ephesians 1:11-23

Luke 6:20-31

Howard Carter, describing the dramatic discovery of the Tomb of Tutankhamen in 1923, wrote this:

“At first I could see nothing, the hot air escaping from the chamber causing the candle flame to flicker, but presently, as my eyes grew accustomed to the light, details of the room within emerged slowly from the mist, strange animals, statues, and gold - everywhere the glint of gold. For the moment - an eternity it must have seemed to the others standing by - I was struck dumb with amazement, and when Lord Carnarvon inquired anxiously, 'Can you see anything?' it was all I could do to get out the words, 'Yes, wonderful things.'”

Today, the Feast of All Saints, is a day when we gaze into the hope to which God has called us in Jesus Christ, and as our hearts are enlightened we begin to see wonderful things, such wonderful things as we can hardly put into words.

Saint Paul speaks to us of those wonderful things. Admittedly there are times in his letters when he does seem to go on a bit. But in other places, like the letter to the Ephesians, part of which we heard this morning, we hear St Paul with his eyes fixed on the vision glorious, and so full of the tremendous hope and glory which he sees in Jesus Christ that words are hardly enough to contain what he has to say. He wrestles with language and bursts open the limits as he pours out his heart to his beloved Christians in Ephesus.

St Paul is writing to a church, not to new Christians but to an established church which has been around for a while. But, like the first glimpses into the Tomb of Tutankhamen, he does not assume that they see everything all at once, or have arrived at the full knowledge of God. Far from it: instead he prays that they will be given a spirit of wisdom and revelation as they come to know the things to which they have been called. And what things! 

I pray that... with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which God has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power for us who believe, according to the working of his great power.

This great power of God, says St Paul, is the power which raised Jesus from the dead and put all things under his feet. And it is a power which is for us who believe.

But what is that power? It is the power at work in Jesus who was handed over to death and then raised to life. It is the power which raised Jesus - and here is St Paul straining with language - far above all rule and authority and power. 

Paul is here talking about two different kinds of power. The power which raised Jesus is a different kind of power to the “power” which he has defeated. That power is power as the world knows it, the power that handed him over to death, the power that casts out and creates victims. The power of might and domination is defeated by the power of God who raised its victim from the dead.

This is why the beatitudes, in today’s Gospel reading, seem to be such a statement of contradiction. Jesus describes a society that that he calls “blessed”.  To be blessed is to be in tune with God’s purpose in creation. You are blessed if you inhabit the world in a way that reflects what God is like. But the people who are blessed, according to Jesus, are not the people who the world expects to be blessed. 

Blessed are you who are poor. Blessed are you who are hungry. Blessed are you who weep. Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you.

That is what it looks like to inhabit the world in a way that reflects the power of God. And it looks like that because the world does not reflect the power of God. The world runs, instead, according to the power of might and domination, the power of accusation and casting out. And when the Kingdom of God starts becoming real in the world it is the victims, those on the margins, those who live precariously, those who take risks for peace and justice, those are the ones who are blessed, those are the ones in whom the power of God is at work. 

So the power of God appears as a contradiction, a way that will be opposed, in the world as it is. But nevertheless this is the power of God for us. It is God on our side, on the side of humanity, working to save us and bring us into his Kingdom. And Jesus himself followed the path of the beatitudes, Jesus himself was God’s power for us, at work in the world so that the same power might be at work in us. 

This is what the saints knew, those who in every age have followed the same path, and shone as lights in the world. So many, known and unknown. 

To be a saint is to be a person in whom Jesus lives. Jesus who is God’s power at work in the world and in us, for us. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me, said St Paul in his letter to the Galatians. And that in fact is true in principle of all of us, indeed of every human being, though it may appear to different degrees. 

Christ is the Word through whom all things were made, in whom all things exist. He is present as the Word of our creation in the ground of our being, whether we realise it or not. And the vision of Christ, the knowledge of his glory, is the revelation which grows in us as the eyes of our heart are enlightened by faith. This is the “glorious inheritance among the saints” of which St Paul speaks. We come to know God more and more as we are transformed by the same power which raised Jesus from the dead and put all things under his feet.

This is what we are all called to, this is what God’s power is working in us, the same power that raised Jesus from the dead and put all things under his feet. That Christ should come alive more and more in us, that all the ways in which we still live according to the power of the world should be converted and subject to the true power of Christ. 

But if a saint is a person in whom Christ is fully alive, we might wonder what happens to that person’s individuality? Are they simply swallowed up? But the power of God is not power according to the world. God does not destroy or obliterate. The Word of our creation, which is Christ, is our call to full and unique personhood, realised in Christ. The saints are not clones, in fact they are the most authentically human and diverse people we know of. The more Christ comes alive in us, the more we become truly ourselves. 

Meister Eckhart, in one of his sermons, illustrates this in a beautiful image:

When master sculptors make figures out of wood or stone. They do not introduce the figure into the wood or stone, but chisel away the fragments that had hidden and concealed the figure; they give nothing to the wood, rather they take away from it, letting fall beneath the chisel the outer layers, removing its rough covering, and then what had lain hidden beneath shines out.

The power of God, which is for us, transforms us into who we truly are, as the false self that we really aren’t is gradually stripped away. The saints are real people. And we are called to be real people too, people who are truly ourselves because Christ is truly alive in us. This is our glorious inheritance among the saints, through the immeasurable greatness of his power for us.

Sermon at the Mass of Requiem, All Souls' Day 2013

Wisdom 3:1-9

1 Peter 1:3-9

John 6:37-40

“This is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day”

All that he has given me. We catch a glimpse of what that “all” means in this Mass of “All” Souls. A Mass offered for all the faithful departed, in which we will read the names of those we particularly wish to remember. There are lots of names to be read, and it will take a while, as it should, because it is a sign that we care, that the bonds of love are not broken by death.

And in churches all over the world other Christians will be doing the same, today and in this season. Millions upon millions of names will be read, so many lives remembered with love and thanksgiving and prayer. And that is only this year. Countless souls have gone before us down the ages, from every tribe and language and people and nation. This Mass of All Souls commemorates a great company indeed.

But the “all” that Jesus talks about is not just the vastness of the number being redeemed. It speaks also of his embrace, his redemption, of all that it is to be human. He came down from heaven to share all that that means, to take it all to himself. His incarnation is his giving of himself, the Divine fulness emptying itself into the condition of our transitory, precarious, human life. Even to death. Even to that last emptiness, the uttermost limit to which being can be reduced. And all for love. “God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son”, says St John.

All of which means that there is no aspect of human life, no place, no condition, not even death, where God is not present to redeem. Jesus has known everything that it is to be human, so nothing and no-one is beyond his reach. 

The redeeming work of Jesus means that God is present in the real, the actual, to redeem and to save. In human lives as they really are. With all their love and striving and giving, and all their weakness and sickness and failure and sin. “Don’t speak ill of the dead”, people say. But what I suspect they sometimes mean is “Don’t speak the truth of the dead”. Well, we don’t need to speak it, necessarily. Love passes silently over what does not need to be said. But we can own it. The hope of redemption means that we don’t have to pretend. We can own that those who have died struggled as we do and often failed as we do. But we can own that truth in love, without blame, because God owns the truth in love, without blame. The truth that we are all sinners together whom Jesus has come to meet and redeem. 

And we do not need to fear the truth about ourselves or about those who have died. Jesus knows it all very well - that was why he came to redeem us. And in heaven even our sins will be glorious. Every sin pardoned, every sinner who slips into paradise, is yet more glory and praise for Jesus the Redeemer. And the greater the sinner who is saved, the greater the joy in heaven.

And the hope of redemption frees us too from that most pointless of regrets, for what might have been. Jesus came down from heaven to this actual world, and not some other one that doesn’t exist. The Redeemer comes to us right where we really are, to redeem the actual mess of our lives, all that we are and have been. 

And so we pray for the living and the dead, for all are in truth alive to God, holding all before God in the place where we find ourselves: caught up in the redeeming work of Christ. Most especially we pray with and in Christ in the Eucharist, which is his self-emptying even to death that all might be saved from death and raised with him.

It is true that we may not assert as an article of faith that all will certainly be saved. Love can only be given and received in freedom, and will not impose itself.

Nevertheless the Scriptures do not tell us of a select few standing before the throne of God and the Lamb, but of a great multitude, which no-one could number. And Jesus did not say he would raise up “some” or “most” of what the Father has given him. He said “all”. When the harvest of the Son of Man is finally gathered into his kingdom, it surely will be great indeed.

Jesus said, “Everything that the Father gives me will come to me, and anyone who comes to me I will never drive away”.