Transfiguration

26 February 2017

I want to begin with something most of you will not have heard before. It is from “ Alice through the Looking Glass”.

The White Queen and Alice are having a conversation. The White Queen says to Alice : “Let’s consider your age to begin with. How old are you?”.

“I’m seven and a half exactly”, replied Alice .

“You needn’t say exactly”, the Queen remarked. “I can believe it without that. Now I’ll give you something to believe. I’m just one hundred and one, five months and a day”.

“I can’t believe that“, said Alice .

“Can’t you?” the Queen said in a piteous tone. “Try again, draw a long breath and shut your eyes”.

Alice laughed. “ There’s no use trying”, she said. “One can’t believe in  impossible things”.

“I dare say you haven’t much practice”, said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’d believe as many as six impossible things before Breakfast”.

This morning we have two, not six, seemingly impossible things to believe before we have our breakfast but, before we attempt this, we may need more than a deep breath and closing our eyes. We need also to realise that the experience of belief is not the same as understanding all this belief leads to.

For example, we may believe that we love someone but it will take years to understand what loving that person means. It could take a lifetime. This is the most assuredly true when we consider belief in God but understanding all that this belief entails may take many years of exploration. It is as if one has put one step on to a ladder but not yet realising the staircase that lies ahead. Perhaps complete understanding only comes when we meet God face to face and know God as he knows us.

The first seemingly impossible thing presented to us is the experience of Peter, James and John on that mountain, which we heard about in today’s Gospel. Suddenly there is this blinding light radiating from Jesus, a symbol of his Divinity. This friend Jesus, with whom they had talked and walked and shared meals with – he who is a friend is now brimming with his Divineness. Yet it is still the Jesus they can see up there in the middle of all this splendour and Reverence. The Gospel says that they were simply terrified. Peter points to the vision and mutters something about three Tents although, really, “He did not know what to say”.

We learn that the figures of Moses and Elijah are seen talking with Jesus. The y are speaking about the coming Passion, death and Resurrection which were to happen to Jesus. This shows that was all part of the Law and Prophecy. If the disciples knew this, it would make them more frightened. Whenever Jesus mentioned this before, they would not hear of it. It did not fit their idea of Jesus.

If the purpose of the vision was to assure them it was all in God’s hands. The end was the smothering Glory now enveloping them – if that was to comfort them, it did not work. The y simply could not get it! The y did not understand until He stood with his wounds, alive in the Upper Room  and when he broke the bread at Emmaus.

We now come to the second seemingly impossible thing to believe before our breakfast. Most of us in the Western part of Christendom have limited our ideas of the Transfiguration to the person of Jesus on his own. What is largely overlooked in our part of the Church is that this Revelation is about our Transfiguration too;  it is about what happens to you and to me. The destiny of Jesus is OURS too.

The foundation message for us is that at the birth of Jesus the whole of creation was directly renewed. Christ assumes our humanity and we were given the gift (grace) to become part of the Divinity. It seems that we have been ignoring this amazing gift, the picture we have for us of Heaven, through Medieval times until now. Is Heaven the reward for being good while on this planet? The foundation meaning for the universal Church is that Heaven is the ultimate destiny of humanity. The glory of the Transfiguration of Jesus is to be shared with you and me. It is not merited but a free gift, which we can only lose by refusing to accept and turning away from God.

It has to be said that the other picture of Heaven as a reward for good behaviour means the Gospel account of the Penitent thief makes no sense at all.

The re are two facts which support the mystery of our being given a gift as part of the Divinity. In the Eucharist, at the offertory, the Priest holds an empty chalice. Into it he pours wine. The n he is given water, to pour a little of it into the wine. As he does he says this prayer:

“O God, who so wondrously created the dignity of human nature and did still more wondrously restore it, grant that by the mystery of this water and wine, we may be made partakers of your Divinity, who in our humanity humbly deign to dwell, even Jesus Christ our Lord”. Julian of Norwich described this as being KNIT together in God.

In 2015, as part of a continuous meeting of Orthodox Patriarchs and Anglican theologians, the following agreed statement was published: “Through our dynamic growth, we are conformed to the image of the Son of God (Rom.8:29) sharing ever more fully in deification (theosis) and all of us with unveiled faces, seeing the Glory of the Lord, as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed in the same image, from one degree of glory to another” (2 Cor.3:18).  In this way we participate in the mystery of Christ’s Resurrection including the Transfiguration.

It will take us a lifetime to understand all this.

One step might be the word of Jesus: “Abide in me as I abide in you” (John 15:4).

I want to end by mentioning something which recently happened to me. Over fifty years ago, as a curate in Middlesbrough , I had a group of young married couples who read Scripture together. We sometimes went dancing afterwards (I have a photo of Fr Crispin dancing with Mollie Simpson) Tony, Molly’s husband, our organist for 50 years, was recently given three months to live. On the phone Molly told me the news. All their four children were there. She said “It’s overwhelming but, Father, we all know where we are going!”. I told her I was preaching today, on the Transfiguration. “Oh”, she said “MY FAVOURITE FEAST”.

Has Christ been divided?

22 January, 2017

Here from the novel Shirley is Charlotte Bronte’s portrait of the curate Mr Macarthey:

“I am happy to inform you” she writes “with truth, that this gentleman … proved himself … decent, decorous and conscientious … . He laboured faithfully in the parish: the schools, both Sunday and day schools, flourished under his sway like green bay trees. Being human, of course, he had his faults; these however were proper steady-going clerical faults; what many would call virtues: the circumstance of finding himself invited to tea with a Dissenter would unhinge him for a week; the spectacle of a Quaker wearing his hat in the church; the thought of an unbaptised fellow-creature being interred with Christian rites – these things could make strange havoc in Mr Macarthey’s physical and mental economy: otherwise he was sane, rational, diligent and charitable.”

This is probably a pen-portrait of Arthur Bell Nicholls, her father’s curate at Haworth – and her own future husband. It is certainly warmer than her portraits of other curates in the novel: the Irish giant Malone who carried a sheleigheigh and vanished suddenly from Briarfield parish or the utterly tactless Mr Donne, routed by the formidable Shirley herself.

Yet Mr Macarthey had his faults, his “proper steady-going clerical faults”. In this Week of Prayer for Christian Unity we may hope these particular prejudices are not quite so easily evoked today but I think I think we can still recognise the pattern.

These faults of the rational, diligent and charitable Mr Macarthey can remind us that the primary division to be overcome by Christian unity is not division between denominations but division that exists in the mind and perhaps the heart, of a Christian.

“Has Christ been divided?” St Paul challenges the quarrelling Christians of Corinth.

All such Mr Macartheys treasure identity; they expect wholeness – unity – to come from like-mindedness, common adherence to a defined authority. The builders of the Tower of Babel fit here – one people having one language. We may be tempted to admire their enterprise, their organisational skills and their sheer chutzpah. They aimed higher than a flourishing Sunday school but then so did those building the pyramids – or the Third Reich.

“The Lord confused the language of all the earth and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth”. This confusion of language and this scattering bring to mind another facet of reliance on our own identities – we gain confidence in ourselves and strength by designating someone else as the outsider; the one who is different.

What if God’s scattering and sowing of confusion is not just to punish us for presumption, or shame us, or stop us even, but is for our good? What if God desires a better outcome for us than the uniformity of Babel’s tower?

This story in Chapter 11 of Genesis is followed by the call of Abram in Chapter 12. Abram: the one who leaves his country and his kindred and his father’s house to enter into a covenant with the Lord, a living relationship.  “Now the Lord said to Abram, ‘Go … in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed’. So Abram went, as the Lord had told him”. Abram listens to the Lord; he gives an example in how he lives; he responds promptly and fully. He becomes the vehicle for God’s blessing on the nations – blessing, not through planning together their own thing but through God’s choice to make this relationship.

So to Jesus, walking among us in today’s Gospel. He has made his home in Capernaum, in Galilee of the nations.John has been arrested and Jesus is daunted, perhaps but undeterred. For we hear him proclaiming exactly the same message as John: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near”. It’s John’s message and it is Jesus’ message.

Does this mean they are relying on the strength of a common identity to carry the day? That they are single-minded in pursuing a common project? I don’t think that’s it. There is a resonance of vision, surely but that’s because each is responding to the one heavenly Father. The place where the message is proclaimed and the person proclaiming it, are different.

Those hearing Jesus enter into permanent relationship with him. God calls Abram and Jesus calls these Galilean fishermen, Peter and Andrew, James and John and St Matthew shows them immediately dropping everything. They follow him without question. “I will make you fishers of men” [excuse the translation] – this sounds not unlike “In you all the families of the earth shall be blessed”. Here in this simple and strange encounter on the shore of the lake, God is entering afresh into relationship with his creation.

It’s an Epiphany-tide gospel. It’s manifestation of the light, the great light that has shined in the land of deep darkness and the four fishermen respond whole-heartedly. Here, in this Gospel, there is no divided mind, no self-serving doubt. It’s as if Matthew wanted to give us a memorable portrait of singleness of intent, a perfect unity of thought and action, not counting the cost. It comes from being met by the Lord. The fishermen of Galilee, in a trice, have learnt to find the presence of the living God where previously they had never thought to look for him.

This is true of St Paul as well – of the Pharisee Saul, met on the road to Damascus. He finds the presence of the living God where previously he had never thought to look – as we shall recall and celebrate later this week. There is an immediate response, however long his road of learning and sanctification would prove. Surely it was true of St Agnes too, for whose martyrdom we gave thanks yesterday. She went unwillingly to the altar of sacrifice, yet embraced the sword of martyrdom as seeing God in the most extreme of places: the foolishness of the cross.

Our own disunity is overcome, not by a fierce policing of the boundaries of our identity and not by willing a project into being. This disunity is primarily within each one of us, as we fail day by day to respond to the great light we see with the prompt whole-heartedness of the fishermen-apostles, including that of our patron St James.

I choose, rather, to hold something of myself in reserve and to defend it with a hardened identity against a rainy day but the only identity I can have, or can truly want, is for me to be found in Christ. So I learn to look to the world, not with suspicion that it will rob me of what I have in Christ; not with fear that it will “make strange havoc in my physical and mental economy”. I learn to look to the world not just for the Christ I already know, as if life was a great game of Where’s Wally? (You can now go out and buy a Finding Jesusversion of Where’s Wally? if you want to).

We who are in Christ – we who hear and respond to his call to repent – we have the freedom to look to the world and expect that the great light that has dawned will illuminate us afresh in ways we do not yet know and at times that we have not foreseen.

“Has Christ been divided?”

The answer to Paul’s question, of course, is ‘Yes. Christ has been divided’ but it is Christ himself, God-with-us, who has seized the initiative:

‘This is my body broken for you’. Broken, that we may be whole: made whole within and made one in Christ.

To him be the glory now and forever. Amen.

Launch of St Hild College

14 January 2017, Dewsbury Minster

Sermon preached at the service to launch St Hild College, formed by the merger of the former Yorkshire Ministry Course and St Barnabas Theological Centre, continuing to operate from its site within the grounds of CR at Mirfield.

I am old enough to remember the Beatles. They suddenly hit the headlines and then their popularity soared and soared. They were carried forward on the crest of a wave and the experience for them must have been hugely exciting. There are times when a group enterprise can be like that and the people involved will feel huge satisfaction and excitement with what they are involved in. You see the same sort of thing in a control room when a space probe succeeds in its mission and the scientists cheer, wave their arms in the air and hug each other. It must have been something like that for the first Christians at Pentecost, if we are to believe the Book of Acts. A group of people borne up by a tremendous energy, as it were on the crest of a wave.

Well, the Beatles have come and gone. Space-probes pass on to oblivion. With the first Christians there was something different from normal elation of a human group. This energy came from the resurrection of Christ from the dead and that never dries up.

The launch of St Hild College is an exciting moment, I am sure, for everyone involved. It is different from launching a space programme, or getting into the charts. We know it has to be a response to the sovereign call of God. It will be imperfect, as every human enterprise is but St Hild isn’t a merely human enterprise; it is a Christian one and the dynamic is different. I can give the example of my community, the Community of the Resurrection. It seems to do things which excite a lot of people and there is a buzz about the place but if we, the Brothers, look at each other, we are also conscious of how imperfect we are, of misunderstandings, occasionally conflict and disagreement and things about one another that can be difficult or even exasperating. God’s activity, however, is bigger than us. He seems to do it all despite us. Some of you will know the joke that one of our older Brothers once cracked – that if ever one of us were murdered, the police would have a difficult job, because they would find that everyone had a motive. That is a joke but it illustrates the miracle which Christian community can be. The Gospel has the power to bring everyone together.

The original meaning of the word ‘college’ is of a group of people who are held together. That, of course, is central to the Gospel. The Church aims to hold together the most unlikely people and it expects us all to rub shoulders together; rich and poor, the academic and the labourer, the foreigner and the outsider. All these differences go out of the window and through our life of prayer and worship and rooting in the Scriptures, we receive grace: to be changed from a motley bunch to the People of God.

Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst.

Once you were no people, now you are God’s people.

I am the vine, you are the branches.

All members of the body, though many, are one body.

In a few moments we shall light our candles from the Easter candle; each of our candles lit from one flame. You could say that when we do this, we, being many, are one flame. All these candles carry but one flame. Jesus speaks about this flame in this evening’s reading from Matthew. We are to be a lamp set on a stand.

A lamp does two things: first of all it gives you light to see by. It enables us to see with God’s eyes; to see the world differently; to see people differently. The Christians who help to run food banks or who work to reconcile people in conflict, or who care for the homeless are seeing human beings with different eyes.

This light helps us to see human difference differently. All around us we can see a wrong handling of difference. The needless clashes between nations, the clashes of interest in politics, disagreements within families, racism, rejection of foreigners, thinking ourselves better than others, sheer differences of opinion and of outlook. Jesus calls us to see all those sources of conflict in a different light, the light cast by his lamp and to deal with them in a different way: to be the servants of others, to submit ourselves one to another, to turn the other cheek, to shun tribalisms and parties, to be neither for Apollos nor for Paul but for Christ. The light of Christ reveals everything in a different light .

The second function of the lamp is to guide people in the darkness, like a lighthouse guides ships at sea. Our way of living should draw people to it, as to a lamp in the darkness. Let your light so shine before others that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.

Jesus isn’t so rash as to say that we are like that automatically: he just says we need to let our lamp shine. Does the church in this country let its lamp shine? What can we say about the people of God in Britain at the moment? We are a temple built of living stones but a temple built of living stones is always going to be a bit wobbly. That’s a sign of life. However, what we seem to see in large parts of the church is something different: a loss of wind.

Many of our lamps seem to be short on oil. Many people struggle with prayer, both laity and clergy. They have a need to learn how to pray. That is an extraordinary situation to be in. There is a problem about commitment; people can easily fall away. We are losing young people. We have financial problems but you have to say on that, that if the wind were in our sails, the finance would look after itself.

So our mission at this moment needs to be twofold. First of all mission to the Church. Faith needs to be rekindled in many Christians and one task of bodies like St Hild College is to build up its students in the treasures of God, so that they can go out into the Church as lamplighters. The church is full of life: we need to help all the baptised to tap into it.

This can only happen if we are also looking outwards. Without looking outwards, renewal of the Church is impossible. We find ourselves by looking beyond ourselves. The words of Isaiah we have just heard are as fresh as they were thousands of years ago: “I have given you as … a light to the nations, to open the eyes that are blind. To bring out the prisoners from the dungeon, from the prison those who sit in darkness”. We would want to add: to set people free from individualism and centring on self, to enable young people to have a solid foundation to their life, to bring belonging to people who are isolated, to bring to our consumer society a sense of eternal things, to bring justice to the poor and oppressed and the love of God to our society with all its ills. This mission is more than a social programme; it is about the spreading of the kingdom of God.

So we pray today for the prospering of Saint Hild College in all its diversity, bringing together people from many traditions many localities, churchmanships, denominations and backgrounds; the treasures of the Church, to be loved and rejoiced in, because there is a message to be proclaimed, a job to be done and a light to be shone.

The Baptism of Christ  

8 January 2017

Today we keep the feast of the Baptism of Jesus. Because of the quirks of the church’s calendar, in which some festivals are coupled with a specific date like Christmas, others are based on specific Sundays, like this one, so that while we kept the great feast of the Epiphany on Friday we have now rushed on thirty years in the life of Jesus as we commemorate his Baptism in the Jordan today. These thirty years contains within it the childhood of Jesus and, going backwards even further, his escape into Egypt to avoid the murdering agents of King Herod.

The word “Epiphany” means a revelation, a making known publicly of what has been known by some, if not by many, all along; so helping us, the onlookers, to see more of the picture which gradually develops, not just in the Bible but in recorded human experience all down the ages. The feast of the Epiphany is also described as “The Manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles”. Up to this point matters concerning the one to be born of a woman is within the small limits of the Jewish nation, now with the three mysterious visitors Jesus is made known as the one to be the “Saviour of the world”; they present their mysterious gifts and disappear but they are only the forerunners for the journeys of Paul and other apostles which, over many years, spread the good news all over the world, making Jesus Christ known, by words certainly but even more by example, as we shall be seeing. Here God is revealed as a baby, along with his doting parents and the saviour is revealed as one whose horizon is limited to the bountiful supply from his mother’s breasts and the removal of the soiled nappies which was probably Joseph’s main task! Jesus is a very human baby and not in any extraordinary way, whatever the circumstances of his birth might have been.

So we move on to today’s events and fast forward to thirty years when his by now well-known and rather feared cousin John is calling people to a baptism of repentance in the waters of the river Jordan. John saw himself as preparing the way for Jesus and was amazed when he turned up for baptism and cries out to his Lord and cousin that he, John, is the one who needs Baptism, for Jesus was without sin but, no, John has to go through it and what we might call the holy machinery is brought on to the stage, a voice from heaven and a dove and Jesus is immersed in the water. There are many reminders here of times when God spoke to the people of Israel; there is even the dove which reminds people of the time when the waters took charge. So this baptism is a significant sign; Jesus is, as they say, ”going public”, If he was without sin, then why did he go through this solemn ritual of forgiveness? This caused many of the early Fathers to scratch their heads too but two reasons surfaced and have remained. By going through with this, Jesus demonstrates his humanity – remember the dirty nappies? Even more importantly, because the waters have nothing to cleanse Jesus from they are themselves cleansed: it is, as it were, the Baptism of Water, all water, that utterly essential element for the sustenance of the whole world, let alone mankind. Jjust think how each of us is daily dependent on lots of water and what a smelly and itchy world it would be without it; no tea either, or beer, or life.

The ways in which the ministry of Jesus is still exercised is revealed in these festivals. They are all, each of them, an Epiphany, the birth, the wise men, the flight into Egypt, being one with all those who have to run from their homes and the example revealed by countless followers of Jesus right down the years, as the medieval poem sums it up “Where charity and love are, there is God”. Supremely in this service is the “Eucharist” the great thanksgiving when in obedience to his commands we eat the bread of his body and drink the wine of his blood. Surrounded with splendour, the building, the music, the fancy dress of the clergy but at the centre – and without which this would have no meaning at all – is the plate containing the bread and the cup of wine and we receive it as the “Body of Christ” and the “Blood of Christ” as Jesus commanded us, in a circle of charity and love which must bear fruit wherever Christian people are to be found. How to do it? Just ponder the life of Jesus and then ponder it again and again and again. How does my life match up with our contemplation of this? However, charity and love are NOT solely exercised by adult practising Christian men and women – thank God – and I want to end with a story.

One of the monks of Ampleforth was travelling in the rush hour from Kings Cross to Victoria and as he squeezed into the train at Kings Cross just behind him was a young family with two small boys clutching gold plated helium balloons so that all one could see of the boys was two golden balloons touching the roof the carriage. At Warren Street there was another smaller invasion with a couple and their daughter in a buggy; she was very distressed and hating the crowds and noise and so making a great deal of very sad noise herself. My informant then saw one of the golden balls moving down the carriage with a small and determined small boy at the other end. He pushed his way through, came up to the screaming little girl and said loud enough for many to hear “You look sad, would you like a balloon? He handed her the cord, at which the screaming stopped, the littler girl smiled and the small boy was re-joined with his parents. Then it was Oxford Circus and a very strange sight met those waiting on the platform, for out of this overcrowded train there came forth smiling passengers and two small boys with one helium balloon. They had all encountered God but that would probably not be their words and when Fr Dominic Milroy wrote up this story he headed it “Epiphany on the Jubilee Line.”

Naming of Jesus

1 January 2017

Numbers 6.22-27; Gal 4.4-7; Luke 2.15-21

Driving around the country to Ministry Division meetings is not inherently pleasurable but it sometimes brings unexpected benefits, usually courtesy of Radio 4. So it was that on one occasion recently I heard the following tale. In a clearing in the Australian bush a young koala was carefully climbing a eucalyptus tree. A good way up, he gingerly edged his way out on to a perpendicular branch. There he paused, gathered himself together, shut his eyes, spread his arms and jumped. Inevitably, the ground met him rather sooner and harder than he had hoped. Dazed, he stumbled away to recover. A few moments later he was climbing the tree again. So it went on, – three, four times. On a neighbouring tree sat two birds. After the fourth attempt, one said to the other, “Do you think it’s time to tell him he’s adopted?”

Views of adoption have changed radically in the last half century or so – in large part as a consequence of our increasing ability to distance birth from conception – so that there is now significantly less perceived difference between an adopted child and, say, a child born by IVF. Yet the koala reminds us that there is still something about genetics: he doesn’t share his parents DNA and he doesn’t have a natural ability to fly. Thus we come to the heart of this feast: on the one hand, we don’t share the DNA of our true parent, God – indeed, God does not have DNA; on the other hand, Jesus clearly does have DNA but is the true and only Son of the Father, full of grace and truth.

It is this Jesus, the Son who shares our human constitution, whom we see being grated into the fabric of human society. He is not marked out as different but, rather, as like all others. In accordance with Jewish law and custom he is named and circumcised. The rites may, at one moment, seem awesome and deep; at another, arbitrary and meaningless – but they are performed ‘in accordance with the law.’ As far as it goes, the attempt to enfold Jesus into the life of the world is sufficient: we are in little doubt but that he shares our lot, he is one of us.

However, that is not enough. Just as Austin Farrer observed that shepherds do not serve the sheep by going down on all fours to identify with them, so Jesus does not become the Saviour by identifying with us. He is the Saviour because that is the divine purpose. He becomes one with us in order that we might become one with him. This is wholly beyond the scope of Jewish expectation of a Saviour; wholly beyond the hopes of the systemically disadvantaged black and Asian youth in our urban areas and, for much of the time, beyond our own hopes and imaginings. It is all too easy to become obsessed with being human and seeing Jesus as a means to being a slightly better human, or as a comfort in the trials of being human. This feast, then, is not so much the celebration of Jesus’ identity with us. Rather, it is the moment of wonder as we realise the audacity of the ‘plan hidden from the foundation of the world’ in which the Father, who has loved us from the beginning, takes this most radical step. We begin to see that it is not we who are human – we are mortals, destined to die – but Jesus who is truly human, with a life that does not end in death but, instead, in death God opens a door to eternal life: ‘God raised him up from the dead and gave him glory’.

So we come back to the koala. He finds himself the child of parents with gifts and abilities which he lacks. We find ourselves the Brother of this Jesus who, as St Proclus had it yesterday, “is adored by angels on high and eats with tax collectors here below”, the one who “lies in the arms of his mother, yet also walks on the wings of the wind”. This speaks to us not so much of exciting possibility as of utter difference and unfathomable distance. Paul, writing to the Galatians, uses the image of adoption – but we are not persuaded. The image of the young koala is too powerful: we know that we do not possess what is needed for us to be truly Brothers and Sisters of the incarnate Lord. It is just this possibility that the miracle of Incarnation addresses; just this new reality that this feast celebrates, for God offers not just adoption but the enfolding in grace. Here, once again, we are indebted to Thomas Cranmer for the richness of the Christmas collect – ‘we, who have been born again and made your children by adoption and grace…’

Grace can never be counterfeited. God alone is the source of grace; grace is God’s own being present to transform, support, lead – and we are, finally, called to be children of the one heavenly Father not by genetic modification but by grace. The koala’s adopted parents face a difficult moment: not only must the koala accept a radical difference from his parents which nothing can overcome but he must also accept that he will never be able to fly – except in an aeroplane, or with a hang-glider. We, on the other hand, are invited to step off the branch and find ourselves walking on the wings of the wind.

This incomparable gift seems beyond our powers even to communicate, let alone grasp. Yet God has already anticipated our stammering, faltering difficulties: in the so-called Aaronic blessing God gives us a pointer and a reminder that renews our faith and our hope. More importantly, it gives us a way of declaring to others something of the mystery made known to us in Jesus: “The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you; the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace”.

Jesus came to…

18 December 2016 – Advent 4

What can anyone say in this run up to the pre-Christian midwinter festival, when Christmas music has been played in bus stations for a month already, coloured lights glimmering from windows, cards arriving; even presents? Who are music, the lights, the presents, for? Are they really for the Christ child? 

How many celebrating will actually go to the services that clergy almost kill themselves to put on? Midnight? Of the Dawn? In the morning? Mattins? Evensong? Not to mention carol services, christingles etc?  It’s pre-Christian observances that not only survive but flourish year by year.

Switch back over 2,000 years to Palestine : what were they doing then? They were waiting for a Saviour, a Messiah, a new Moses, a new Joshua; they were pretty desperate: “Thy holy cities are a wilderness, Sion is a wilderness, Jerusalem a desolation, our holy and beautiful house where our fathers praised thee”.

Palestine Israel is stable for the moment but the Middle East hasn’t changed a lot. People don’t flee, abandon everything, risk drowning, for no reason

Over 2000 years ago, they all believed in one God or another. Israel clung to hope of Divine intervention, in the birth of God’s chosen one. So that’s what they were expecting, praying for. However, what the angel said to Mary was a bit different:

“You are to bear a son, and will name him Jesus, for he will save his people – FROM THEIR SINS”.

Yes, from their sins. Not from the Romans, not from the Herods but from their sins.

Today Jesus comes to save us, not from the world and its people but from our sins.

The angel’s message was true prophecy, for it was indeed Jesus’ mission to save God’s people from their sins. It was a huge struggle for Jesus to get the message over and not just be the new Moses, the new Joshua freeing his people from oppression, from tyranny, from exploitation but to free all God’s people, from their sins.

Sins, like addictions, are what tyrannise over us. I began to make a list of addictions and then remembered how in a sermon when a brother departed this life listed addictions, he conspicuously omitted the one that he wasn’t aware of, his own besetting sin. These are our tyrants, the sinful addictions of which we are not aware. These are the ones that are so destructive and hold the human race back from being the true children of God that He created us to be.

Straightness

4 December 2016 – ADVENT 2: Year A

Poets, story-tellers and other observers and commentators on the human condition have occasionally pointed out the curious fact that in order to arrive at an intended destination the traveller sometimes has to go by a roundabout and circuitous route. Alice at the beginning of her adventures in the Looking Glass world, you may remember, had to go off in the opposite direction in order to reach the place where she wanted to be. Not surprisingly, she found this most provoking and extremely disconcerting. Or there was the Rabbi of Cracow, who had to make the long journey to Prague in order to discover that the hidden treasure he had been told about in a dream was actually buried under the hearthstone in his home in Cracow . Then there was the younger son in the Lord’s Parable who had to go into the ‘far country’ in order that he might ‘come to himself’ and so discover who he really was and where he truly belonged.

In contrast to all that, the prophet Isaiah, quoted in this morning’s Gospel reading, speaks of the road along which the Lord will come to his people as ‘straight’ – straight, direct and undeviating, not for him is there to be any going to Birmingham by way of Beachy Head!

The prophet Malachi speaks of the Lord sending his ‘messenger to prepare the way before’ the One who is to come. In due course John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness of Judea , proclaiming ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near’. This is the one of whom the prophet Isaiah spoke when he said ‘ The voice of one crying out in the wilderness ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight’’.

It was the Baptist’s commission to clear away all the obstacles, all the hindrances and blockages which stood in the way between the Lord and the hearts of his people. The re are to be no twists and turns, no deviations, no diversions; the way between GOD and his people is to be open, direct and straight, without obstacle or obstruction: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight’.

In many ways it is regrettable that in current usage the word ‘straight’, like the word ‘gay’, has been hijacked into the service of sexual politics. In spite of that, however, straightness remains an almost universal symbol for what is right and true, just as crookedness is a symbol for what is wrong and false. In English idiomatic usage the word ‘straight’ has two principal meanings. The re is the mathematical meaning, as when we speak of a straight line, a straight course, a straight road. Then there is the metaphorical and moral meaning, where ‘straight’ means honest, truthful, sincere, just. So we speak of someone being ‘straightforward’, someone who will give a ‘straight answer’ and who plays a ‘straight bat’. We speak of someone ‘going straight’ after a career of crime and fraud. Where deviousness or dishonesty is suspected we might say that there is something here which does not seem quite straight and we might refer to someone being as ‘bent’; a bit of a twister, a crook in fact.

It was John the Baptist’s mission to ‘prepare the way of the Lord’ by calling for it to be made ‘straight, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins’.

Such is the inclination, the tendency, of our wayward nature to go crooked, to prefer pliant expediency to straight principle, that John’s message still has to be heeded. In so many ways we are tempted to be not quite straight in our dealings if we think that we can get away with it – to be not quite straight in our speaking if we think that telling the truth might not be wholly to our advantage – to be not quite straight in our thinking if we suspect that straight thinking might lead to uncomfortable or inconvenient consequences.

Such is our tendency to deviate from the straight and the true that sometimes we find it difficult to know what, in fact, is straight and true.

If you have a line on a piece of paper and you want to test whether or not it is straight, you lay a ruler along it. So we have rules and customs and laws which society has evolved over many centuries to help us to keep straight, or at least to indicate what is not straight, in our dealings with one another.

However, the value of human laws is limited. After all, the rule of law is the work of human minds and human minds are subject to an inherent disposition to distortion and deviation from the straight. Since human law is concerned only with relations of human beings living together in society, it does not help individuals in many of their personal and private problems. Such individuals must then have recourse to their conscience but consciences are not infallible. The y don’t necessarily have all the information. Also, consciences can be manipulated; we can persuade ourselves about the rightness of anything. History shows us that human beings are capable of committing the most horrendous actions without question or qualm – inquisitions, holocausts, pogroms, ethnic cleansing – often claiming the authority of conscience for what they are doing.

So we need something more reliable than either human laws and the human conscience if we are to ‘prepare the way of the Lord and make his paths straight’ in our hearts and lives and in the strained and tangled complexities of the world in which we live.

Christians believe that we have been given one faultless, straight edge, one perfect and utterly reliable ruler and measure – God himself, revealed in human terms in the person of Jesus our Christ and our Saviour, he who is God’s way of being human.

He is humanity’s prime meridian from which all else is reckoned. He is the lode-star by which our course is set, our true north, the correct compass setting for our nature. In him we see the straight way of being properly and fully human, without distortion and without compromise. In him, with him, through him we are given the straight course to God.

So, in responding to the Baptist’s call to prepare the way of the Lord and make his paths straight by our repentance and in seeking to have the mind of Christ in our response to the responsibilities and relationships of our lives and in disposing ourselves to allow Christ to be formed in us, we might do well to pray the words of the old Collect, asking that with Jesus ‘as our ruler and guide we may so pass through things temporal that we finally lose not the things eternal’.

CHRIST THE KING

20 November 2016

I understand that the Queen usually has only one glass of wine at lunch. One day she asked for a second glass. Her famous Mother responded:-

“Do you think that wise, darling – you have to reign all afternoon!”

Speaking of “reigning” today we celebrate the Feast of Christ the King. Perhaps there might be a question of what this means exactly, applied to Jesus.

Through the years, the accounts we have of various Kings reveals characters more infamous than worthy. From the times of the Old Testament down to today, the records show individuals with hands soaked in blood, or immense wealth. Millions of people have suffered from such persons. How then may we consider Jesus with this title?

In the New Testament the belief was that Jesus descended in the tradition of David, anointed as King, with the concepts of priest and messiah but Jesus himself doesn’t seem to clarify, exactly, how he understood this attached to himself. He claimed that his Kingdom was “not of this world” and he spoke of himself as one come not to Rule, not to be served but to serve. Its ambiguity is exposed at Christmas, which resounds with the image of Kingship. How do we experience Christmas? We find a baby crying in a cow-shed.

Interestingly enough, the image that the first Christians adopted to signify who Jesus was, were associated with the belief that he came “to save the lost sheep of Israel – and even all humanity – to take them back to the Father.

The two principle images were the Good Shepherd and the Risen Christ entering the Shadow of the dead – to bring back the departed, beginning from Adam and Eve to all the dead. Holy Saturday, between the cross, the death of Jesus and the Risen Jesus, came to be the most prominent Icon in Eastern Christian Churches. These images were everywhere in the second  and third centuries in the catacombs and baptisteries of the Eastern Mediterranean .

With the Roman and Greek State adopted Christianity as its official religion, there was a change in the images of Christ. The old pastoral image survived, particularly in the Eastern Churches but from the arrival of very large and triumphant baptisteries in the empire the portrait of Jesus began to dominate the apses – with him as Emperor – with the appropriate vesture – seemingly judging humanity.

Now the sheep became the good people, who had kept the Law and who were allowed into heaven whilst the goats were the bad guys, who had failed to keep the Rule and were sent down to Hell. This symbol of reckoning, called significantly the Doom, flooded the Churches of the West. Folk across Europe faced this challenge each time they entered a Church.

These rather different images of Jesus lived together in the Church and the Gospel stores of Luke 15 – the lost coin, the lost sheep – and the Prodigal Son, remained beloved and a central focus for teaching about Jesus. Balancing the image of Law and of Love has remained part of out Christian heritage up to today.

In the world of scholarship and New Testament, the focus of the Triumphant of Jesus Christ was both the Cross and the Resurrection.

In John 12v32 Jesus says “I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me” and in 20:17 “I ascend unto my Father and to my God and your God”.

In today’s Gospel we see the union of the two images – the one come from God to seek the lost and take them to the Father and the recognition of the kingship of Jesus. Thepentitent thief failed to keep the Law yet when seeking the help of Jesus says “When you come into your kingdom, remember me”. Immediately Jesus is the Good Shepherd returning to the Father – today in  Paradise .

Our Monarch, like David, was anointed with oil and made her vow to be faithful to her role of Queen. She has not only remained faithful to her vows,  she has increasingly revealed how much her faith means to her. So I think we should allow her a second glass of wine.

Second Sunday before Advent 2016

Perhaps the use of the word “Apocalyptic” is so overworked nowadays that we just close our eyes and our ears, which is a sad thing to do, for in Scripture the apocalyptic is a serious Jewish tradition and it is more than merely looking at tea leaves and proclaiming the bloody and tearful end of the world! It is a wakeup call and Luke tells it to us as an introduction to Holy Week and, much more importantly, a warning that following Jesus for each and every one will involve pain, misunderstanding and worse.

In the year 70 AD the great temple, built by Herod, was destroyed and the Jewish exile from the Holy Land really began. Was this judgement? There were those who thought it was, as there are those to this day who try and see every act of violence, whether an earthquake or a tram crash to be some divine, with a very small “d”, retribution. However, for the Christian there will be many trials and persecutions over which many suffered and died and wars come into this condemnation which cannot be explained or used as a vehicle for blame. This passage accepts wars as being part of the fallen world in which followers of Jesus are going to get caught up.

In a couple of hours there will be a solemn remembrance of all who have died in wars – 17 million in 1914-1918, 40 million in 1939-45 for that, much more than 1914, was a total war. I was eight in 1939 and can still remember the sundering of families as children were encouraged to leave London, then after some three months came back to the darkness of the blackout and the bombing attacks of the early 1940s as civilian casualties mounted. Think of Coventry, the London docklands, Dresden, Leipzig and the many other places and people destroyed. We have made heroes of the dam busters but if the Germans had been able to do it, they could have destroyed Sheffield, or even Huddersfield by emptying the reservoirs and causing huge floods and this was indiscriminate slaughter which reached its climax in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. All this and more is remembered today, for this is not a victory parade and anyone who has experienced active military life knows of the longing for there to be another way to preserving life and living together other than killing each other. Of course there will always be differences but killing people is not going to achieve this any more than hanging petty thieves on a gibbet and leaving the bodies to rot was any sort of preventative.

Between the two wars of the twentieth century there was but 20 years, in the 71 years since 1945, there have been almost continual skirmishes and bigger events when countries or factions within countries have sought supremacy with bigger and more effective weapons and we shelter under the comfortably named not Ministry for War but the Ministry of Defence!

So it is a sad and bewildered world that we inhabit. Regular employment for many is long forgotten and we have recently heard the voice of the many and when all who are thought to be able to do something don’t want to know.

From the Tolpuddle Martyrs through the years there have been protests, lives have been sacrificed and sometimes something is achieved. Pope Francis is giving a lead in his option for the poor but there is a long way still to go; it feels that our entire societal structure has been “weighed in the balance and found wanting”.

God made the world and, because he made it, it is good but one of the great things that makes it good is freedom – and that opens the door to power. Jesus was killed when the leaders of the Jewish community under the Roman government had no authority to execute him, so Pontius Pilate had to order crucifixion.

I know it might sound a bit well-worn and dumb but pray, not for ourselves (unless we have some spare prayer time) but pray for those in authority that, unlike the high priests and Pilate, they might be strong and long for peace. I am not thinking of those National Days of prayer in the war when we prayed for success but rather prayer for all sorts and conditions of mankind, not by getting bogged down in complicated lists but by saying the office with intentions, praying our way through the newspapers, sharing our bewilderment with Jesus who certainly did not have easy slick answers to every question he was asked.

Solely by virtue of our Baptism we are members of the people of God and people whose vocation is primarily to lift up Jesus that all might be drawn to him. That is our task.

A story to end with. The scene is a Japanese prison full of prisoners of war, mostly English caught in the fall of Singapore. Conditions were bleak, amenities nil, brutality commonplace. Among the prisoners was a young man from somewhere in the West Midlands. He was a good churchman, organist and altar server and if fortune had been kinder to him would quite likely have been a student at our hostel on the way to ordination instead of the living hell of a Japanese prison. However, he did not sink into misery and despair, as so many did, his cheerfulness and sanity helped all. He seemed older than his years and even the guards recognised his special quality. He didn’t appear to hate them, after all they were conscripts too. Then he became ill, a commonplace where medication was rare and medical attention non-existent and after a long time of great suffering born indomitably, he peacefully died. Word got round of his funeral and virtually all the mobile inmates of two prisons, next door to one another, attended, wearing out of respect their one and only shirt. Somehow the funeral service reflectyed his unassuming faith in the certainty of God’s love. At least one prisoner was profoundly affected by this young man’s life and death and from that moment until his own death some sixty years later, he was a sincere and devout churchman and known to be so. In this young man we see enacted the last sentence of today’s Gospel: “By your endurance you will save your souls”. Note please that the final ”s” isn’t a typo; the souls are really in plural, for by that young man’s endurance many souls were touched and some saved.