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

Numbers 6:22-27

Galatians 4:4-7

Luke 2:16-21

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

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

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

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

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

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

As the Queen so splendidly said in her Christmas speech,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.