Sermon at Parish Mass and Baptism Lent 2 2013

Genesis 15:5-12, 17-18

Philippians 3:17-4:1

Luke 9:28-36

In a short while we shall celebrate the baptism of Anna, and rejoice with her, and her family and godparents, as she is made a member of Christ’s church and born again through water and the Holy Spirit.

When Anna’s parents and godparents have made their declarations on her behalf about faith in Christ, I shall make the sign of the cross on Anna’s forehead, with these words:

Christ claims you for his own. 

Receive the sign of his cross.

Do not be ashamed to confess the faith of Christ crucified.

This recalls the words which Jesus spoke just before the passage set for today’s gospel reading. Jesus has just predicted his death and resurrection, to the bewilderment of his disciples, and says to them:

‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it. What does it profit them if they gain the whole world, but lose or forfeit themselves? Those who are ashamed of me and of my words, of them the Son of Man will be ashamed when he comes in his glory and the glory of the Father and of the holy angels.

It is after these words that Jesus takes his disciples up the mountain, and they see his glory, the light shining from him as he is transformed. They see the glory of the Father, the shekinah, the overshadowing cloud which had hovered over the Tabernacle in the days of Moses. And Jesus speaks with Moses and Elijah about his departure, the exodus which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem. In other words, his death.

This revealing of glory on the holy mountain is the beginning of a journey. But it is a journey of contradiction - it is the journey with Jesus to Jerusalem and the cross. Beyond that, and only beyond that, lies the glory of the resurrection. As with Moses of old, this exodus is to accomplish the liberation of God’s people, liberation not from slavery in Egypt but from sin and death.

Even in this scene the death of Jesus is foreshadowed. On the night he is betrayed Jesus will take his disciples up another mountain, the Mount of Olives, to pray as he awaits his death. And there too the disciples will fall asleep, a sleep which is perhaps a symbol of their lack of spiritual perception. 

But the glory of Christ and the glory of the Father are revealed on the holy mountain today, before Jesus leads his disciples along the path of contradiction and suffering. 

In the Bible glory is about the reputation of God, about showing forth God’s nature. So the glory of Christ is a revelation of Divinity. It is not simply a dazzling vision, but something that will unfold its meaning through the path of suffering that Jesus is to take. God’s reputation, God’s glory, will be established in what is to follow, through darkness and the cross to the resurrection. 

That is the path of exodus, of liberation from sin and death. Humanity was created to share God’s life but through sin has turned away from God’s good purpose. Sin itself is a mystery, we do not know where it came from. We simply observe that humanity, from the dawn of consciousness, has preferred to be turned in on itself rather than being open to God. Humanity tends to prefer rivalry, violence, division, possessiveness, jealousy, lust - all those things that close us in on ourselves and shut us out from communion with God and one another. 

The way of the cross, which is the way by which we are liberated from all that, is simply this: God’s love entering into our unloveliness, to free us from ourselves and open us up once more to the love for which we were created. It is this which will re-establish God’s glory, God’s reputation, in his world. 

The great Christian thinker St Augustine of Hippo taught that evil was simply a deficiency, the taking away of good from what God has made. So sin and evil have the ugliness of something marred and damaged, whereas goodness is beautiful, and God is supremely beautiful. This concept of spiritual beauty is of great importance. It has nothing to do with the skin deep beauty of glossy magazines and advertisements. It is the profound beauty of the soul restored in the image of God, reflecting God’s glory. It is the beauty of holiness. It is the beauty of Christ transfigured on the holy mountain.

But in the world as it is, marred by sin and spiritual ugliness, the beauty of God is both revealed and hidden. The beauty of God attracts us to draw us along the way of contradiction, the path of liberation which leads through darkness to the cross and resurrection, to the true knowledge of God. In this week of his retirement some words of Pope Benedict seem particularly appropriate: “True knowledge is being struck by the arrow of beauty that wounds man: being touched by reality, by the personal presence of Christ himself.”

On the path of liberation the beauty of God is made known in the lives he is transforming, and particularly in the life of the Church, and wherever holiness and goodness appear as the true meaning of what it is to be human.

The beauty of the liturgy, of sacred art, architecture, music, helps to draw us into this inward encounter with the beauty of Christ, which, in life as it is, is always a path of contradiction, drawn by glory into darkness through to the resurrection. 

Every Sunday Mass is like the mountain of transfiguration, the beauty of God revealed in the liturgy, in the transformation of material things which are the outward signs of inward grace. But every Lord’s day is followed by the week of daily life, descending to the plain with its crosses and contradictions, when the glory of God sometimes breaks through and sometimes is hidden in darkness.

So too the pattern of our lives, from baptism to death and the resurrection into eternal life. Baptism itself is a sign of dying and rising with Christ, a sign of contradiction and of liberation. It is also a spiritual washing away of sin restoring the beauty which reflects the beauty of God. This is so for all, both adults and children, for Christ is redeeming the whole of humanity, in which all share one common human nature. Christ draws all to himself.

Saint Augustine, on his conversion to Christian faith in his adult life, wrote these words:

Late have I loved you, 

O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, 

late have I loved you!  

You were within me, but I was outside, 

and it was there that I searched for you.  

In my unloveliness I plunged into the lovely things which you created.  

You were with me, but I was not with you.  

Created things kept me from you; 

yet if they had not been in you they would not have been at all.  

You called, you shouted, and you broke through my deafness.  

You flashed, you shone, and you dispelled my blindness.  

You breathed your fragrance on me; 

I drew in breath and now I pant for you.  

I have tasted you, now I hunger and thirst for more.  

You touched me, and I burned for your peace.

As we baptise Anna today let us pray that the beauty of God may shine on her, and on all of us, as he draws us to himself and transforms us by his holiness, now and for ever. Amen.

Sermon Lent 1 2013

Deuteronomy 26:4-10

Romans 10:8-13

Luke 4:1-13

There’s been a lot of testing going on this week, mainly of beefburgers, ready made lasagne, and the like. Testing means examining something to find out what it really is, in this case beef or horse. And when today’s gospel says that Jesus was “tempted” by the devil, that means the same sort of thing. The tempting of the devil is not just trying to induce Jesus to do something he shouldn’t, it’s also finding out who he really is, by the way he responds to the temptation. Is he the Son of God, or not?

What comes just before this scene of temptation in the desert is Jesus’ baptism in the river Jordan, when the voice from heaven had announced, “You are my Son, the Beloved, with you I am well pleased”. And then Jesus, filled with the Holy Spirit, was led by the Spirit in the wilderness. So this going into the desert to be tested is part of his calling, part of what the Father wants him to. Not a diversion from it, but how it begins to be worked out. 

Jesus, as well as being Son of God, is also Son of Man, the representative human. The ways in which he is tested are common to humanity, and he undergoes these temptations on our behalf. Jesus, says the letter to the Hebrews, was “in every respect tested as we are, yet without sin”. So these are representative temptations, of the representative human - Jesus is tested, as all of humanity is, in particular ways.

What these temptations have in common is that in all of them the Devil presents a false idea of God (and therefore of being the Son of God), to see if Jesus will fall for it.

The first temptation, command this stone to become bread. This is the temptation to self-sufficiency, I have all I need, I provide all I require, I’m in control, I’m not going to let go, I don’t need anyone else. It is the temptation to put ourselves at the centre, to make a god of our ego. 

But in truth it is God who is at the centre, God first, not me first. God creates and provides, and gives our being, entirely out of his own generosity. Everything we have is gift. So we don’t need to grasp and control. We do need to recognise our dependence. Letting go means opening my hands so that God can hold me, an act of faith and trust and worship. 

I was very moved this week by Pope Benedict’s unexpected resignation, and I’m sure christians from many different churches will feel the same. How easy in that position to buy in to the personality cult, to think that everything depends on you, that you must carry on at all costs. And what courage and humility and faith it must have needed to say, I can’t do this any more, you need to find someone else. But what an example of faithful, Christian, letting go. We of course don’t have such a burden to carry, but we can nevertheless be taken over by the ownership and control of what we have. Lent, the wilderness, is a place where we can examine ourselves, find out where we need to stop holding on, so that God can hold us.

The second temptation, the offer of all the kingdoms of the world. And in fact in Luke’s version this probably means the Roman Empire, because Luke is very conscious and critical of the political realities of his day. This is the temptation to see the way the world runs as god, the supreme truth, the way that life should be ordered. Violence, injustice, oppression, exclusion, might is right. And Luke simply assumes that the devil does actually run the political structures of the world. The devil personifies all that is destructive, the spiritual personality of the empire.

But the God of Jesus is the God who liberates, who is on the side of the victims of the world and its political structures. The Kingdom of God stands over against the Empires of this world. So we don’t have to collude with oppressive power and we can be called to make a stand against it - including in politics. Whoever says that the Church should keep out of politics hasn’t begun to take the Bible seriously. But also in the workplace, in the home, in our relationships - and recognising also the ways in which we ourselves oppress and exclude.

The third temptation is the most subtle: throw yourself down from the temple, and God will send his angels to protect you. This is the most subtle false idea of god, because it seems to be talking about God. But actually the god who is being suggested here is a god of control, a god on demand, a god who does what we want. This is a spiritual power that we can manipulate - so although the devil talks about “god”, look who is still at the centre - me and my demands. 

The true God does not intervene on demand to arrange the universe according to our whims. The true God allows us our freedom, because he has created us in love, to be free to love. The true God is not a controller, but a lover. His will is our greatest good and our peace. In abandonment to Divine providence we will find all we need. But we have to be free to choose his will, to say, as Jesus will say in Gethsemane, not my will but thine. And there is our true freedom - the freedom to love. 

Today there is so much idolatry even among Christians  - the prosperity gospel and miracle cults abound on the fringes of Christianity, but even in the mainstream churches Christians can be bewildered when they pray for something that seems to them to be good and it doesn’t happen. In God’s will is our peace, and our prayer is first of all aligning ourselves with that will: Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done - before we ask for our daily bread.

Jesus passes the tests. He recognises, and refuses, the false ideas of god presented to him. And therefore he is truly the Son of the true God. Jesus in these temptations represents humanity, and in him we are adopted as sons and daughters of God. We too are called to struggle with the same temptations, because we follow the path of Jesus, which is the way of being truly human. Unlike Jesus, we do not always pass the test. We are not without sin, but through forgiveness and grace we are called to continual conversion, to turn away from these false gods to the one true God.

Times of wilderness and testing do not mean that God has abandoned us. Jesus was led by the Spirit in the wilderness, and sometimes in our lives the Spirit will bring us to a place where all that is familiar and comfortable and safe seems to have been taken away. But this is so that the Spirit can free us from false gods and lead us to depend more faithfully and trustingly on our loving heavenly Father. And the abstinences and disciplines of this season of Lent can help make a space for this too, so that as far as we are able within the duties of our life we follow that path into the wilderness during these 40 days.

Lent is a time for the wilderness, for silence, space, prayer, self-examination. For the purification of the heart from false gods so that we can find our true peace and lasting joy in the true God who creates us, and loves us, and saves us.

Sermon Epiphany 3 2013

Isaiah 62:1-5

1 Corinthians 12:4-11

John 2:1-12

I think I must have first seen the Wizard of Oz in the cinema, rather than on the television at home. My reason for thinking this is that when I was little we only had a small black and white telly, and one of the great features of the Wizard of Oz is the use of technicolor. The opening sequences in Kansas are in black and white until the storm comes and Dorothy gets carried off by the twister. Then she opens the door of her house and steps out into a wonderful colour landscape. She has arrived in Oz! That’s still a stirring effect when we see it now, but in 1939 it could have been the first colour film that many people had seen. Imagine the impact then. “Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas any more.”

Well today we have heard the Oz moment from John’s Gospel, the wedding at Cana. When Jesus reveals his glory it is as if a whole new dimension appears, like seeing the world in colour for the first time.

This is the third of the gospels of Epiphany, which relate in different ways the manifestation of God in Jesus. From Matthew’s gospel we had the story of the Magi following the star to find Jesus, the one who is born to be king. From Luke we heard the story of the baptism of Jesus, when heaven was opened, the Holy Spirit came down in the form of a dove, and the voice from heaven declared that Jesus was his beloved Son. And today we have the story of the marriage feast at Cana in Galilee, the first of the signs that Jesus gives in John’s gospel.

All of these stories are about the revelation of God in Jesus. “Epiphany” means “manifestation”, it is about something going public, being seen. And all of these stories, in one way or another, point to what lies ahead in the story of Jesus. They show that the glory of God will be made known in Jesus above all in his suffering, death and resurrection. Epiphany points to the cross and the empty tomb.

So when the Magi came to Jesus, they gave him gold because he was a king, frankincense because he was God, and myrrh. Myrrh for embalming and burial, the spices of Good Friday already mingling with the incense of adoration of the Christ child.

And when Jesus was baptised by John, he went down into the waters of the Jordan and was raised up again, a figure of his death and resurrection, just as is our own baptism in the waters of the font.

But, we might wonder, how is the wedding at Cana hinting at the death of Jesus? There doesn’t seem to be an obvious link. But John is such a good storyteller. The scenes in John’s gospel are like panels in an altarpiece, little pictures full of detail and meaning, which if you see them all at once you can see how the details and imagery connect from one scene to another, bringing out new depths of meaning. 

So, the story of Cana begins, “on the third day”, which immediately is a hint of the resurrection “on the third day” that is yet to come. “And the Mother of Jesus was there.” The Mother of Jesus appears twice in John’s gospel: here in this scene, and at the cross. Jesus says, “my hour has not yet come”. In John’s gospel, the “hour” of Jesus always refers to the crucifixion, which is seen as the fulfilment of everything that Jesus has come to do, Jesus reigning from the cross, pouring out his life, his spirit, into creation. So, too, at Cana we are told that Jesus “revealed his glory”; and in John the glorification of Jesus, like the hour of Jesus, is the cross. 

So in this scene at Cana the glory of Jesus points forward to his death and resurrection. But it also looks to the context of Jewish belief in which this story is told. That is the world which awaits the glory of Jesus. There were six stone waters jars for the Jewish rites of purification. These represent all the promises and hope of Israel, God’s promise that he would purify his people and make them his own. And in fact the jars are of such a size that they would normally be found in the temple, rather than a private home. But they are empty; Jesus commands them to be filled. The law does not need to be abolished, but filled up, transformed, with the glory and grace of God which is what the law anticipates. The ten commandments are not out of date! But they are there in anticipation of grace: if you live in expectation that God will fill you with his Spirit, then of course you will repent of killing, and stealing, and adultery, and so on, because God wants you to be like him, and God is not like that. John has already told us this in his prologue: “the law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.”

This is what Jesus has come to do: to restore and complete the work of creation, to fulfil the law so that it overflows into grace, to pour out God’s glory into the world. All of this Jesus will achieve through his death and resurrection, and it is foreshadowed in this wedding feast. 

So Jesus gives this sign of transformation and glory, the water becomes wine. The wine of the new creation, the good wine which has been kept until the last, the wine which transforms this wedding feast. 

What are weddings about? Well, amid all the celebration and feasting, the one essential thing that a wedding is about is union, the union of bride and groom. But where are the bride and groom in this story? They seem to be conspicuous by their absence. But the prophets in the Old Testament spoke about the wedding feast of the kingdom of God, which is also about union: the union of heaven and earth, of God and humanity, God’s spirit poured out into creation making all things new. 

And Jesus himself is the bridegroom, John the Baptist calls him that. So here, at Cana, Jesus appears as the Lord come to marry his people, his bride, Israel to whom whom he was betrothed of old, Israel now expanded to include all believers of all races and nations. “Jesus revealed his glory, and his disciples believed in him.”

And that is the feast to which we are called. Jesus has come to fill up our old vessels of water with the new wine of his kingdom. He has come to pour out his spirit into creation, making all things new. He has come to celebrate the marriage of God and humanity, of heaven and earth. And we are called to this feast of union with God, to be filled with his transforming glory. From Bethlehem to Calvary, from our birth to our death, God’s glory is present in Jesus to transform the world.

Now I’m sure most of us can easily identify areas of our lives which are not filled to overflowing with the glory of God. But this work of transformation is a gift of God to us, not something that we have to achieve ourselves. It is grace, God’s free gift.

That grace is given to us, and the feast of the kingdom is anticipated, in Baptism and the Eucharist, through which God’s transforming power enters our lives under sacramental signs. The new wine of Cana recalls the water and blood that poured out from the side of Jesus on the cross, the tide of sacramental grace which is making all creation new. God’s glory fills up to overflowing the ordinary things of life, bread, wine, water, human lives, transforming them with his presence and his very self. 

The grace of our baptism endures throughout our life, God’s action joining us once and for all to Jesus in his death and resurrection. But the Eucharist brings new grace every week, every day. It is the feast of transformation in which bread and wine, our life and our labour, are transformed by Christ, filled with his presence, made new. Today, as in every Mass, that grace is poured out to fill and transform our lives. One of the Collects for the Epiphany season expresses this very well. It is a good prayer to use in preparation for the Eucharist:

Almighty God,

in Christ you make all things new:

transform the poverty of our nature by the riches of your grace,

and in the renewal of our lives

make known your heavenly glory;

through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord. Amen.

Remembering Edith Thompson

Address at University College London on the 90th anniversary of Edith's death

9 January 2013


For about 20 years now a service of remembrance has been held on this day at St Barnabas, Manor Park, Edith’s parish church, where she and Percy were married in 1916. It was while I was there as a student on placement that I first encountered her story. Parish churches have a particular role in English culture, as they are there, available, for the wider community, of all faiths and none, as well as for the congregation of worshippers. They are historic buildings, visible signs of continuity, places which hold the memory of a locality.

Remembering is about giving life, like putting back together a body, re-membering. It is about finding our place, our membership, in the community of narrative. Just as the Eucharist, the central act of Christian worship, for which parish churches were built, is an act of remembrance, anamnesis, not forgetting.

People remember because they are concerned about keeping faith with the truth. By truth I don’t simply mean empirical facts, though those are important, things like the evidence in a trail and the verdict of a court. I mean a commitment and attention to the truth of the human person, the profound and mysterious identity which stands before us and yet which eludes reduction to mere data. Each human person is unique, unrepeatable, a world of possibility and a depth of mystery. And that unknowability is perhaps part of what is meant when the Book of Genesis says that human beings are created “in the image of God”.

Attention to the truth of the person matters because it is so often obscured and forgotten, and when that happens the person herself is in danger. Would it have been possible, I wonder, to have hanged Edith Thompson if her character had not first been blackened, if she had not been reduced from the mystery of a person to the merely empirical mask of an immoral adulteress?

The anthropologist René Girard has I think contributed greatly to our understanding of how the mask of myth comes to obscure the truth of the person. According to Girard, human desire is mimetic, that is we imitate – unconsciously – one another’s desires. So I and the person I am imitating will desire the same thing, and if we can’t both have it we are in danger of rivalry, and even of conflict and violence, for desire is never static, and forgetting the original object of rivalry shifts into a mutual obsession of the rivals themselves. This triangular nature of desire is well known, but Girard’s genius lay in showing how these triangles join up, how desire and rivalry can spread through the interconnecting networks of a wider group, a whole society. 

And if a whole society is threatened by its own violence, mimesis produces another phenomenon: the scapegoat. The mimesis of the group resolves itself against a convenient victim, all against one. The violence that threatened the group is defused by being unleashed against someone who, crucially, has to be seen by the group as deserving what they get. So, classically, scapegoats are held guilty of taboo breaking crimes, of offending the gods, of bringing the plague, of mysterious and impossible poisonings, and so on. The key thing is that they must seem to be completely different from the group. The truth of their human identity – that they are actually just the same as everyone else – has to be obscured for mimesis to do its unconscious work.

In Edith’s story I think we can see both these things going on: both the triangularity of desire and its disastrous consequences, and the escalation to her designation as the scapegoat, the descent of the veil of myth over the truth of the person. Before the court she became a different kind of being, removed to the other side of a boundary of taboo where, somehow, death did not appear as violence but as justice.

Girard himself, having been an agnostic, became a Christian once he had read the Bible, for he realised that the Bible generally doesn’t do this. Unlike the other ancient texts he had studied, the violence in the Bible – and there is a great deal of it – is not disguised, the humanity of the victim never quite disappears from view. This is perhaps most obvious in the crucifixion of Jesus. The whole scapegoat mechanism is in plain view: the murderous mimesis of the mob, the accusation of blasphemy, the ritual boundary of separation outside the city wall, the actual innocence of the victim, the unconsciousness of his killers. “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” What it all amounted to was a denial of truth. Jesus, on trial for his life before Pontius Pilate, said that he had come into the world to bear witness to the truth, and Pilate had replied, “truth - what is that?”, before washing his hands of the whole notion.

Avis Graydon also came to faith after her sister’s death, and remained devout for the rest of her life. It was Avis who requested that there be an annual Mass offered for members of the Graydon family on the anniversary of Edith’s death. 

But of course it is not only Christians or religious believers who wish to remember Edith, to keep her story alive. Attention to the truth of the person is fundamentally about recognising our common humanity. It is about resisting the veil of myth that tries to reduce a person to a scapegoat. The deaths of Percy, Edith and Freddie were acts of absurdity, a denial of meaning, a turning away from the truth of the person. 

And such denials and absurdities have not ceased. The death penalty persists in many parts of the world, and we cannot afford to be complacent about it never coming back here. It worries me that we have a government which likes making noises about unravelling our commitment to European Law and human rights. It worries me that in December British subject Lee Aldhouse was extradited to Thailand to face a murder charge apparently without the UK authorities first obtaining the usual assurances that the death penalty would not be sought. It worries me that our government wants to bring in a law to allow homeowners to kill intruders, the Prime Minister announcing the plan to the applause of his party conference and saying, “When that burglar crosses your threshold, invades your home, threatens your family, they give up their rights”. 

As a Christian priest I am someone who remembers a particular narrative, who interprets the world through the story of a particular person who was betrayed and handed over to death. Christians place that narrative in a framework of faith because we believe that it did not end with the killing of the victim on Good Friday, that after human violence had done its  perennial worst something new, unlooked for and wholly creative entered the world. For Christians the resurrection points to a creative principle behind the universe which simply will not give up on us; it is an assurance that absurdity will not win in the end, that the truth of the person will not finally be lost, that the human project will not ultimately fail.

I would like to suggest that that leads us to a common ground, whether or not we happen to identify with a particular religious narrative. Believers view the project of creation as embracing the whole cosmos and everyone in it - not just the minority with a religious outlook. And it seems to me that, whatever one’s faith, to be attentive to the truth of the person entails rejecting absurdity and the denial of meaning. It is to be committed to a true humanism which affirms that each person is unique, unrepeatable, and profoundly mysterious, and that therefore each person actually matters. It is to keep faith with the truth. And that, I would suggest, is reason enough for us all to remember.

Sermon at Parish Mass, Epiphany 2013

Isaiah 60:1-6

Ephesians 3:2-3a, 5-6

Matthew 2:1-12

The TV quiz programme “QI” sometimes has some trick questions to which no-one knows the answer, such as “how can you tell the age of a lobster?” and “what do the signal bars on your mobile phone mean?”.  The contestants can win extra points if they spot this and wave their “nobody knows” card. 

Another “nobody knows” question that could be asked is, “who were the Magi?” We meet them, of course, today, the feast of the Epiphany, and we know what they did in their brief appearance in St Matthew’s Gospel. But Matthew just says that they were Magi, magoi in Greek, without explaining what that means. He says that they came, literally, from “the land of the sunrise”, which is poetic, but doesn’t actually locate them anywhere. The land of the sunrise is like the end of the rainbow: however far east you travel, it’s always further still. He also doesn’t say how many there were - the idea that there were three of them is surmised from the fact that there were three gifts. And he certainly doesn’t say that they were kings.

So these Magi, these visitors from the land of the sunrise, are quite mysterious. They must have been wise, scholarly, well versed in astronomy, and with the means to undertake a long journey carrying expensive gifts. And that’s about all the clues we have. They could have been priests or astrologers from Persia or Babylon. But they could equally have come from  almost anywhere else. And perhaps that’s the point. The Magi represent the whole gentile world, the whole world outside Judaism, with all its richness, learning, and wisdom. 

Quite early on the tradition of the Church amplified the story of the Magi to make this point. In art, we usually see them as men of three different races, representing the three known continents of the time: Europe, Asia and Africa. Quite often, too, one is old, one young, and one middle aged. They were assigned exotic foreign-sounding names - in Western tradition those that stuck were Caspar, Melchior and Balthasar, but other parts of the church have different names. The Magi are very inclusive! The very mystery that surrounds them makes them universal. 

They are outsiders - people from beyond Judaism, outside the covenant and the law of Sinai - and yet they receive a sign from heaven calling them in to the heart of all that the law and the covenant mean, into the heart of God’s revelation of himself. They represent all the longings and insights of every culture and race, converging on Jesus. They are drawn out of themselves by the mystery of Christ’s birth, only to find themselves on the inside after all, at the heart of the mystery that called to them from afar.

And they are called to worship. That is the most important thing that the Magi do. Before they present their gifts, they worship the Christ child. They fall down before him and worship. 

The Magi are called out of themselves, out of their familiar world, to seek Christ, and worship him. And these mysterious outsiders stand for all of us. The vocation of all human beings is to be drawn out of ourselves into the mystery of God. The journey of the Magi represents our own interior journey, our fundamental orientation as created beings - to go beyond the boundaries of our ‘self’, so that we can truly find ourselves in God. And it is also, paradoxically, a journey into unity, just as the Magi gathered at the crib represent all nations gathered into one in Christ. It is a journey which seems to have two directions, which are really one: into the mystery of God, and into unity in Christ.

For Christians this is expressed above all in the worship of the Church, the liturgy that we celebrate day by day and week by week. Our corporate worship reminds us both that we are drawn together as one people, united in Christ, and that we are called beyond ourselves into the mystery of God. 

This is realised above all in the Mass, the Eucharist, which is the one act of worship we have received from Christ, “do this in remembrance of me”. Although a priest or bishop presides, Christ himself is the true celebrant at every Eucharist, his real presence is at its heart. The Eucharist is the highest worship we can offer, for in it we are united with Christ in his own offering of himself, his eternal and perfect worship of the Father. 

It is in the Eucharist above all that we see the two directions of worship, like the two directions of the Magi’s journey. We are gathered together in one, made one Body in Christ through the sacrament of his Body - not just this congregation gathered here today, but every Eucharistic community throughout time and space, all are one body, one Church.  

And the Eucharist also points us beyond ourselves into the mystery of God, into the very worship of the Trinity that the Son offers to the Father in the Holy Spirit. In the Eucharist every human group is broken open and made partakers in the cosmic mystery in which we worship with angels and archangels and the whole company of heaven. 

All the apostolate and service of the Church flows from this worship, from partaking in the life of the Trinity. Just as the Magi bowed down in worship, and then offered their gifts, so too the Church lives a life of service and self-giving in the world because we draw that service and self-giving from the heart of the worship of God. It is a grave mistake to see the Church as a human group committed to social activism first, and worship second. The Divine worship given to us in the Eucharist is fundamentally what we are about; everything else flows from that.

The two directions of worship are expressed physically and symbolically in how we celebrate the Eucharist. The use of set liturgies, holy days, vestments, forms that have been hallowed for centuries, are not actually part of Christ’s commandment to us, but remind us that the Eucharist is something we do not devise ourselves. It is worship that comes to us from beyond us, that we receive and enter into. 

And the adornments of worship, music, incense, lights, images, all speak to us of the transcendent, our worship drawing us beyond ourselves into the mystery of God. But at the same time we gather together to celebrate the Eucharist as the people of God, joining in the assembly with our brothers and sisters every Lord’s day.

As you may have noticed, during Christmastime we have rearranged the sanctuary and have been celebrating Mass facing East, in the older tradition of the Church. This is a temporary arrangement, partly occasioned through the way we have had to use our limited space at this season. But it does help to remind us of the transcendence of our worship. As we pray we all stand facing the same way, facing East, the sunrise, the symbolic direction of the resurrection. This helps to remind us that our worship calls us beyond ourselves, from out of the closed group into the mystery of God. 

And when the altar is back and we celebrate in our more usual way, with the clergy facing the people, we will be reminded more of being gathered together into one in Christ. 

But whichever way we arrange the sanctuary, we need to bear in mind that both things are always going on: our worship draws us out of ourselves into God, and at the same time draws us together into the unity of the Body of Christ. Our worship would be impoverished if we forget one or the other. 

This feast of the Epiphany, at the beginning of a new year, is a good day to commit ourselves afresh to offering the best we can in intelligent and lively participation in this greatest act of worship. Christ calls us, like the Magi, to seek him and worship him, so that we can be drawn into the very life of God, and at the same time discover our unity with one another in Christ. This is our fundamental vocation as human beings. The Church worships in Christ, with heaven, and on behalf of all creation, so that in God’s purposes all things may find their fulfilment in his Kingdom.

Parish Bulletin, Christmas 2012

As I write the second TV series Merlin is currently showing on Saturdays. Its retelling of Arthurian myth has both ancient and modern elements; set in a world of magic, mystery and high adventure, it uses this backdrop to explore issues of our own time: pluralism, belonging, the place of the individual in society. But something is missing from the tale: faith. There are plenty of references to the “old religion” of magic and druidism and the spirits of nature, but none to any “new” religion. There is no church or cross or image of a saint anywhere in sight, nor any mention of any belief system other than the forbidden arts of magicians. The BBC’s Camelot, it seems, is a secular realm in which faith has been sidelined and the spiritual is mistrusted, a metaphor perhaps for our own age whose inchoate spiritual longings seem at odds with any too confident public expression of faith. 

The Arthurian myths became popular, formulated into epic poems, in the high middle ages and then, too, explored issues of their own time. In retelling the stories of a past golden age these poems were commentaries on their contemporary society, but unlike Merlin are rich in Christian symbolism and insight. In an age of violence and aggression, it is Christ and the saints who inspire the best actions of the characters, and the chivalry of the knights, which could have been a violent ‘code of honour’, is reinterpreted as the heroic quest for the Christian virtues. And yet, alongside these, is a world of pre-Christian belief, of magic and ‘faerie’, of wizards and nature spirits who somehow seem to have carried on existing in this Christian narrative.

The mediaeval poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is one of the great stories of Arthurian myth. It begins with the celebration of Christmas at Camelot. There is feasting and merriment:

For there the feast was unfailing full fifteen days,

with all meats and all mirth that men could devise,

such gladness and gaiety as was glorious to hear…

With all the bliss of the world they abode together,

the knights most renowned after the name of Christ,

and the ladies most lovely that ever life enjoyed.

(From JRR Tolkien’s translation, Unwin, 1975.)

But, too, there is Christian worship, the very reason for the feast:

When the king was there come with his courtiers to the hall,

and the chanting of the choir in the chapel had ended,

with loud clamour and cries both clerks and laymen

Noel announced anew, and named it full often.

Into this scene comes the Green Knight, an extraordinary apparition, with green skin, green beard, green clothes and on a green horse. He sets a challenge to the knights, taken up by Sir Gawain, who then has to seek out the Green Knight a year later, in his ‘green chapel’ in the forest. His quest sets him many challenges rich in Christian meaning and symbolism.

The Green Knight is almost certainly the ‘Green Man’, a mysterious figure, half man, half tree, found carved in many mediaeval churches. He is probably a survival of a pre-Christian nature deity, a symbol of rebirth, herald of the return of spring and new growth. His appearance in churches, and in Christian-framed narratives such as Sir Gawain, has puzzled some. Should he really be there? Nor is he the only reminder of a pre-Christian age. Across our country, customs such as well dressing and maypoles remind us of folk history and instinctive beliefs that go back long before the coming of Christianity.

The feast of Christmas was instituted by the Church around the fourth century to mark the birth of Christ, but it builds on a pre-Christian celebration. December 25 was chosen to mark the birth of Christ as this was already a day of feasting marking the winter solstice, “Yule” as it was known in northern Europe. This celebration in the depths of winter of the imminent return of the sun and new life was deemed appropriate for the birth of the Son of God, the light of the world and the creator of life. But many of the customs of Yule continued. Holly and ivy, evergreen in the midst of winter, and representing masculine and feminine principles, were revered by the Celts; and were later given a Christian symbolism in carols. They are still used to decorate our homes and places of worship at the time of the solstice.

The old Yule had celebrated creation and the insight that this was a divine gift. But it did not say much about what the ‘divine’ might actually be like. The fear that the gods might turn out to be cruel, capricious or uncaring still lingered.  But in the birth of Jesus a new light shone into the world: God dwelling among us as a vulnerable child, showing that God is love by enacting that love in a human life. In WH Auden’s long poem For the Time Being the angels, announcing the birth of Jesus to the shepherds, sing:

After today 

The children of men 

May be certain that 

The Father Abyss 

Is affectionate 

To all Its creatures, 

All, all, all of them.

St Paul, speaking to the philosophers of Athens in Acts chapter 17, asserts that God is not far from anyone, for “in him we live and move and have our being”. That insight seems to be common to all times and cultures. But in the birth of Jesus we see so much more.  His coming into the world is God’s revelation of himself, what we could not have known with certainty from nature alone: that God is personal, that he loves us, and has created us so that we can share in his divine nature forever in heaven. 

Jesus, born for us in our world, is both the face of God turned towards humanity and the face of humanity turned towards God. He is the meeting place, where earth touches heaven, where human lives touch their ultimate meaning; and he shows that the nature of that meeting is love.

This is what the poets of the old Arthurian myths knew, but the modern scriptwriters of Merlin seem to have forgotten. The old insights and mysteries and celebrations of pre-Christian days are not annulled by the coming of Christ, but find their place in a larger picture and a greater light. The gift of creation, as it were, turns out to have a gift tag on it, and it reads: “from your Father, with love”.

So, this Christmas, enjoy that gift: food and wine, feasting and merriment, friends and family. Enjoy the crisp frost under foot of a walk in the countryside or through a park, and look out for a Green Man if you happen to be visiting any old churches. Enjoy the long dark nights, knowing they will soon give way to the growing light and springtime in the cycle of the seasons, of death and rebirth. But I hope you will also celebrate the birth of Christ, the light of the world, the Word of the Father through whom all things were made, born in time in substance of our flesh, Jesus, the Redeemer and Lord of all creation. 

My very best wishes for a merry Christmas and a happy New Year to you all.

Father Matthew

Sermon Christmas 1/The Holy Family 2012

Images are copyright, but click here for a picture of "Our Mother"

1 Samuel 1:20-28

1 John 3:1-2, 21-end

Luke 2:41-end

Last year I went to the Grayson Perry exhibition at the British Museum. Among the artist’s works on display was a pair of sculptures called ‘Our Father’ and ‘Our Mother’. Made in cast iron, they depicted a man and a woman, leaning on sticks, each of them bent over beneath the weight of an enormous pile of baggage, loaded on to their backs and hanging off them all over.

The Father figure was laden with guns, grenades, tools, books, barbed wire and coffins. The Mother carried baskets of fruit and bread, water flasks, mixing bowls, religious icons, and a baby. Both of them, somewhere in their bundles, also carried a withered corpse - their own father and mother, who had themselves carried these burdens before.

Having lost my own parents some years ago I found that I was very moved by those sculptures. They seemed to me to be deeply compassionate; they told the truth, but without blame. None of us is born into a vacuum. We all inherit, in one way or another, the baggage that passes down the generations - the weight of expectations, hopes, success, failure, all the things that people can’t cope with or even name, all the limitations that come with our upbringing and that of our parents and grandparents. Now most families try to do their best with what has come down to them, but sadly we have to acknowledge, too, that families can also fail even to the extent of being wilfully cruel and abusive. 

But however good the human family is, however loving and caring, it can never be everything. It can never be quite the idyllic group dwelling in unity that is sometimes romantically imagined. Children, particularly, are always different - unique, unrepeatable individuals, never the same as their parents, always to an extent new, unknown and unknowable, surprising and strange. 

The process of discovering this can be painful and difficult, for both child and parents. Individuation is a necessary and healthy part of growing up, but it does mean discovering our separation, that we are not simply an extension of our parents. That our need for belonging, for completion, is one that our human family can never meet.

There is, as it were, a tragic dimension to the family, the dimension of inevitable separation and difference, of failure however hard we try, and the Bible pulls no punches in describing it. 

From Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel, through the Patriarchs and the Kings, the Biblical family is something that always seems to be going wrong. Stories like that of Samuel, Hannah and Elkanah that we heard today, where things seem to go right, are exceptions requiring Divine intervention. There are more dysfunctional relationships in the Bible than in even a Christmas episode of ‘East Enders’! And I do wonder sometimes if those Christians who make a lot of noise about ‘traditional family values’ have actually read the Bible. Indeed, the Swiss Protestant theologian Karl Barth, who certainly had read the Bible, once commented, “the idea of the family is of no interest at all for Christian theology”.

But then, in the fulness of time, God sent his Son. Born fully human, he shared our human life not in the abstract, but in all its particularity, in all its limitation. And so he was born, as he must be, into a human family. 

St Luke portrays that family with particular intimacy in his Gospel, and today, uniquely among the gospel writers, he gives us a glimpse, not of the baby Jesus, but of the adolescent. Jesus in today’s reading is twelve years of age, which was the age at which Jewish children assumed their own responsibilities under the law. We see Jesus at that symbolic point of individuation, his emergence from the shadow of his parents as his own proper person. That day, perhaps for the first time, Jesus seemed to his parents to be new, strange and unknown.

I expect many of us can remember a moment like that, in our teens. And if you haven’t got there yet, don’t worry - it’s alright! That time when we realise that we need to do and express our own thing, and the fussing and anxiety of parents or guardians seems to us to be focussed on a place, on a stage of life, that we are leaving behind. 

For many of us that might have marked the start of what are sometimes called the difficult years, of teenage rebellion in one form or another. This is really part of ordinary development, of emergence from childhood, as psychologists such as Carl Jung have described. But for Jesus, as soon as he appears as his own person, in his own right, his focus is not on himself, but on his Father. “Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?”. And of course this Father is not his human foster father Joseph, but God. 

Luke, in his description of the Holy Family, does what he often does. He gives us a ‘great reversal’ - the turning round and reordering of the world as Jesus comes to proclaim the Kingdom of God. The putting right of all that has gone wrong. So the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph seems to be the ‘traditional’ human family turned on its head. The most important person in this family, the person at the centre, is the child - who traditionally would have had no rights or position at all. The next most important, the one with a speaking role, and who ponders these things in her heart, is his mother - not, as might have been expected in a patriarchal society, his father. And Joseph seems to be the least important. In the gospels, he doesn’t actually get to say anything at all.

With the coming of Jesus, everything that has gone wrong in human society from the beginning is being turned round, and transformed into the Kingdom of God. And that includes the family. With the coming of Jesus, the tragic history of humanity is broken open, and a new beginning is made. 

Beyond the limitations of the human family, Jesus points to a new relationship, a new way of belonging. Humanity, re-created in Christ, is complete at last. “Call no-one on earth your father”, says Jesus elsewhere in the gospels, “for you have one Father, in heaven”. No human family, no human ‘other’ can complete us. No family or network of relationships can fulfil the need for belonging and unity to which we aspire, but cannot reach by ourselves, but only by grace.

Now of course it is right to affirm the goodness of human relationships and the family. When families work well they are communities of love, nurture and protection whose members remain committed to one another through good times and bad. Human relationships can reflect the goodness of God in creation. But they also point beyond themselves to something greater, which is one reason why the Church traditionally has regarded marriage as a sacrament - a sign mediating grace.

Jesus points us to God as our Father. Only in God do we find the ground and source of our being, the one ‘Other’ who completes us and makes us whole. Only in God can we truly name as brothers and sisters all our fellow human beings, because we discover that they belong to us, and we to them, to the extent to which we also discover ourselves in Christ. 

If we allow Christ to make us anew, through his grace, then we will enter his kingdom, which is the true human family at last: redeemed, made new, whole and complete, finding itself in one another and in God. And that is good news for all of us, whatever our family background may be, whatever life has been, whatever relationships and communities we are part of. Jesus offers a new beginning, a new way of being human. Not in some idealised world remote from the reality of our lives, but here and now, coming to meet us, turning the world around right where we are.