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Sermon for All Saints’ Church, December 8 th 2024

Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield begins with a memorable sentence: “Whether I shall turn

out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by any body else, these

pages must show.”

Are we the heroes of our own stories?

There is a tremendous temptation to think so, especially in a culture where the individual is as

highly valued as this one. Teachers, counsellors, therapists, and life coaches conspire to

present us as the leading figures in our own little dramas. The habit of keeping journals

(something I have never been able to maintain) or the writing of autobiographies can help to

reinforce that assumption.

Let me say that, for those who in traditional society were expected to efface themselves entirely

for the sake of someone else, especially wives and mothers, and carers generally, there is

something very healthy, something balancing, about saying “your life has a unique value in

itself.” Nothing that I say here is intended to take away from that, and indeed I believe that such

is the will of God.

And yet, in the last few years of my wife’s life, I came to terms with the fact that my most

important role was to be Ruth’s carer, the one who fed, cleaned, dressed, and generally kept

her safe, night and day, until I could do so no longer. I am entirely comfortable with the

possibility that those few years will have been the highest and most important calling of my life,

however inadequately I performed it.

I did not expect to begin this sermon like that. However, the thought came unbidden, as

thoughts sometimes do, when I looked at the passages from today’s scripture readings about –

John the Baptist. The second Sunday in Advent is often dedicated to thinking particularly about

John.

John the Baptist is well attested. All four Gospels tell his story, and all make very clear his

contribution to the climate of religious thought in which Jesus appeared. John is even described

in an undisputed passage of the Antiquities of Flavius Josephus, the cynically realistic historian

who took part in the Jewish revolt, and then became fully integrated into the Roman Empire.

If we piece together the accounts of the various Gospels, we can begin to see a possible

narrative of who John was, when he was still, so to speak, the hero of his own story.

John represented a late revival of the prophetic tradition. On one hand, he discovered a calling

to teach the people of Israel to repent of the behaviours that harmed their neighbours. What we

hear of his preaching suggests that his instructions were, in fact, quite modest: people should

live peacefully and responsibly in their allotted roles, and not oppress anyone over whom they

held authority. Even Roman soldiers received the same exhortations.

That transformation of life – from a life lived in self-indulgence and whatever one could get away

with, to a life of real responsibility to and for others – was represented by the ceremony of water

baptism. One enters the water as the old person and emerges as something new, renewed for a

better way.

In another sense, John presented himself as a charismatic outsider. He dressed in rough and

simple clothing, ate coarse food, and drew people out into wild, uncultivated places to hear his

teaching. All of this was a way to say, “I am the very opposite of all your regular religious

teachers.” Those were people who dressed in long decorated robes, enjoyed sumptuous meals,

and taught in synagogues and in the Temple precincts. John presented himself as living a

unique life, set apart from all the things that gave ordinary people comfort, convenience, and

esteem.

Finally, John was political. Like the ancient prophets, he was willing to lock horns with political

leaders whose behaviour he regarded as scandalous. Elijah condemned Ahab for introducing

the worship of foreign gods at the behest of his Tyrian wife. John reproached Herod Antipas for

divorcing his first, Nabataean, wife, for the sake of someone closer to his own family.

Prophets were the conscience of their times. They multiplied over the period of the exile, when

the political rule over Judaea was a mess. They diminished in the years after the return from

exile, when the Hasmonaean priest-kings and later the Maccabees took up the standard of

national leadership. Now, the kingdom was once again in the hands of morally dubious

politicians, and John steps forward, ready to criticize them, at whatever cost to himself.

That is John’s story, as far as we can piece it together, before Jesus appears on the scene.

But then Jesus of Nazareth appears, and everything changes for John. Nearly all the accounts

that we have of his ministry and sayings come from the Gospel writers, and they all describe

John with reference to Jesus. John is the forerunner, the foreteller, the one who prepares the

way for the Lord.

Occasionally we have glimpses of what might have been John’s wistful reflection on this turn of

events. Near the end of the first chapter of John’s Gospel, John hails Jesus as the lamb of God:

immediately two of John’s disciples leave him and follow Jesus. In the third chapter, we read

that John was baptizing in one place, and Jesus’s disciples were baptizing in another. Some of

John’s followers appear to complain to him that Jesus is acquiring more followers than John is.

John replies that “He must increase, but I must decrease.”

When we look for statements about John in Jesus’s words as reported by the evangelists, the

separation between the two seems more notable than the interconnections:

Luke 7: 28 I tell you, among those born of women no one is greater than John; yet the least in the

kingdom of God is greater than he.’  …

33 For John the Baptist has come eating no bread and drinking no wine, and you say, “He has a

demon”;  34 the Son of Man has come eating and drinking, and you say, “Look, a glutton and a

drunkard, a friend of tax-collectors and sinners!” 

Then John is imprisoned because of his reproaches against Herod Antipas, and any rivalry

between them becomes irrelevant.

And so a new narrative arises, which we see especially in the first three Gospels. Right from the

start, the story of John forms an integral part of the story of Jesus. In Luke’s Gospel, John’s

mother Elizabeth and the Virgin Mary are related by kinship. Mary visits Elizabeth while they are

both pregnant, and their nativity stories are intertwined. If you remember Leonardo da Vinci’s

“Virgin of the Rocks” (which has always seemed to me a far finer pair of paintings than his other

surviving works) there we see two cherubic toddlers, one of whom is John and the other is

Jesus, in postures of blessing which make the flight into Egypt seem more like a play-date.

There is a lesson here. Somehow – and we may assume that, sooner or later, John reconciled

himself to the state of things – it became clear that the mission of Jesus would entail a much

greater transformation of the life of his followers than the mission of John.

John’s honour and glory was, not to be celebrated as a great prophet in his own right, but to

become the one who prepared the way for Jesus. We might say that to be the one who

announces the Messiah is perhaps enough of a distinction for anyone. However, for John, it

meant that he accepted that his call and his ministry were actually not about his own objectives,

but were really for the sake of someone else’s.

There is a particular saint-hood that consists in living, not for our own aggrandizement and

reputation, but for the love of the rest of humanity. We have, frankly, seen enough of those

people, usually men, whose entire life seems to be directed towards making their name and

their reputation to be seen everywhere. The way they cope with their own mortality is to plaster

their name over buildings wherever they can. Make yourself famous, they seem to think, before

the darkness closes in.

The message of the Gospel, on the other hand, is that we may find ourselves called to live so as

to contribute to someone else’s story. And all of us, most importantly, are called to live for the

story of the kingdom of God, which is greater than any human institution.

Maybe that will mean that we are called to prophesy, in the name and on behalf of Jesus Christ,

about structural injustice in our society, about the abuse of other human beings by the powerful,

about the waste of the created order through environmental degradation, or the wrongs which

powerful people allow themselves to commit, because they believe that there is no God to

criticize or judge them.

However it turns out, we are surely called to live, first of all for each other, and secondly, for

something that is higher than any of us.

The beauty is that these two things do not conflict in any way. As we serve the needs and

support the well-being of each other and those in need beyond our circle, by that very fact we

are working towards the kingdom of God.

The glory of God and the love of God are made known in the way that people serve each other

and the greater community. As Jesus said repeatedly, the humble shall be exalted, and the last

shall be first. Do not envy – and certainly do not respect – those who glorify themselves for a

vanishing instant. Be grateful that we can work for an order of existence, God’s sovereignty,

God’s kingdom, that will endure forever.

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Sermon for All Saints’ Church, November 10th 2024

The story of the poor widow and her gift to the treasury is well known from the Gospels of Mark and Luke. The imagery would have been familiar to all the devout Jewish believers who frequented the Temple complex constructed by Herod the Great, shortly before Jesus’s lifetime.

In a space known as the Court of the Women, which was the most generally accessible part of the Temple itself, there were thirteen trumpet-like funnels which led into the Temple treasury, arranged along a colonnade. The intended effect of these funnels was that when large amounts of coins were poured into them, they would make a loud rattle and indicate to all around how generous a gift the worshipper was making to the treasury. Conversely, when someone made a very modest gift, like the widow described in the story, there would be a barely audible small tinkling sound.

Jesus, typically for a story-teller of the time, probably exaggerates for effect. The two “lepta” which the widow gave into the treasury are estimated at one-sixty-fourth part of a denarius. The denarius was the standard daily wage for a labourer, as we read elsewhere. These coins were a microscopic quantity of money, less than many of us have in penny jars in our homes, coins too small to be useful. Yet this, Jesus said, was all she had, “her whole life” as the Greek original puts it.

There was a strain in the thought of those days that regarded wealth as a blessing from God; and the richer that one was, the more blessed. Much of Jesus’s teaching about wealth seems to have meant to contradict that attitude, as the prophets had contradicted it in centuries past. 

This contradiction reminded me of a famous legend from 20th-century American life.

Ernest Hemingway wrote a rebuke to the idolizing of the rich in the August 1936 issue of Esquire:

“He remembered poor Scott Fitzgerald and his romantic awe of them [the rich] and how he had started a story once that began, ‘The very rich are different from you and me.’ And how someone had said to Scott, Yes, they have more money. But that was not humorous to Scott. He thought they were a special glamorous race….”

That article, transmitted through multiple critics and essayists, turned into a conversation, or confrontation, between the two authors that never actually took place. 

The point of the Gospel story – and the Hemingway story – is that it is not the quantity of money that is important. It is the attitude of entitlement which the possession of great wealth sometimes brings.

Jesus made his observation about the poor widow making her gift, in the context of a scathing critique of the religiously learned and privileged. Jesus – if he said the words attributed to him by Mark – accused those learned in the law of breaking the law by consuming the resources of widows, while benefiting from the social prestige of being religious leaders. It is this accusation of hypocrisy, of claiming to help ordinary people, while one is really only helping oneself, which Jesus makes many times in the Gospels.

A quite different attitude towards the poor widow is shown in the story of the prophet Elijah for our first reading. Here again, the prophet is in conflict, as Jesus was, with the rich, powerful, and entitled. King Ahab and his wife Jezebel, the princess of Tyre, together had introduced the worship of the Phoenician (and other) divinities Ba’al and Asherah. In revenge for this act of religious disloyalty, Elijah threatens Ahab with a long drought: “As the Lord the God of Israel lives, before whom I stand, there shall be neither dew nor rain these years, except by my word.” The drought duly happens. 

But the drought then catches Elijah himself out, because the wadi from which he was drinking dries up. So God tells him to go, of all places, into the Tyrian kingdom, home of Jezebel, to a widow and single mother. She is not a believer: she swears by “the Lord your God” that she has nothing to give him. But for her willingness to help Elijah, she is given a miraculous and inexhaustible supply of grain and oil until the drought comes to an end. 

But Elijah is still in a weak and perilous position. Ahab hunts for him and does not find him. Eventually Elijah appears before Ahab and challenges the pagan priests to a contest of prayer and sacrifice, to see which of them can call down fire from heaven over their offerings. Elijah’s victory over Jezebel’s priests only incenses her more against him, and he has to flee to the desert, where God appears to him in the sound of sheer silence. For the rest of his ministry Elijah is in a sort of stand-off with the kings of Israel in Samaria. He cannot resolve the conflict, even though he denounces what he sees as their religious crimes.

Two major lessons, I believe, may help us in today’s readings.

First, even when God is with us, not everything goes the way that we hope it will.

If you read the Psalms, you will see how often the godly experience affliction, insecurity, and even threat. We now believe that the Psalms were first collected as poetic prayers that could be offered by those who came to the Temple to pray to God for help in their difficulties. There was a Psalm for every kind of misfortune: illness, poverty, slander, the treachery of false friends.

The Psalm-writers affirm that God is with those who are afflicted; that God cares for the humble; that God casts down those who are arrogant, and confide in their own wealth and power. But God does not promise to wreak vengeance on the enemies of the humble and godly straight away. It is enough to know that long arc of God’s providence bends gently but surely in the direction of justice. 

Second, God’s love reaches out to the poor and unprivileged, even when in the eyes of the world they seem to suffer.

Jesus’s preaching often held up as an example those who were most insecure and powerless, especially the widow and orphan, who had lost their provider and were at risk of total destitution. He reaches out to people in that condition in love, reassurance, and support. So did the prophets before him. However, Jesus did not inaugurate some great social upheaval to transform the economic and political system in Judaea. That would be attempted after the end of Jesus’s life on earth in the political revolt of Judaea from 66 CE onwards. The result was a catastrophe for the Judaean people, leading ultimately to the destruction of their Temple and their scattering throughout the Eastern Mediterranean.

So, the message is that God is with those who are in affliction. That does not end the affliction, sadly. However, it does stress, beyond any contradiction, that the moral order in the universe does not favour the proud, the arrogant, the self-centred and entitled rich, who seek only to profit at the expense of everyone else. God is present with those who seek for a better order of things. As our Psalm for today said:

7 The Lord sets the prisoners free; the Lord opens the eyes of the blind; * the Lord lifts up those who are bowed down;

8 The Lord loves the righteous; the Lord cares for the stranger; * he sustains the orphan and widow, but frustrates the way of the wicked.

Today, preachers across the country will be trying to respond to the events of the past week. And it is complicated. There will be some, I am afraid, who will regard the election result as an answer to prayer. Those who voted with the majority may have hopes for better times. Have compassion for them, since it seems almost certain that those hopes will be disappointed.

For those of us who hoped for a different result, it is even more complicated. We are the people of a God of love, and it is not our calling to detest or despise anyone, even those with whom we disagree deeply. There will almost certainly be a time of grieving, a processing of the loss of what might have been. That is a natural and inevitable feeling, but it belongs to the world of public affairs.

God’s kingdom is not in mourning, because it is not diminished by the outcome of a political process. The sovereignty of God is as mighty and eternal as it always was. However, as is most often the case in human history, the kingdom remains hidden under the shadow of worldly powers that resist it, defy it, or ignore it. That is the mystery of the Cross, and we are the people of a crucified and risen Lord. God vindicates those who love the afflicted through the power of the resurrection. But God’s kingdom is not of this world, and there will be many times when this world seems not to care.

There will be much in the next few years which will frustrate us, worry us, or alarm us. As a non-citizen and immigrant, I feel some of that anxiety. At the same time, I acknowledge, and lament the fact, that the privilege of language and skin colour will probably (though here I speculate) make my situation easier, than that of people who speak different languages or have darker skin. 

But as the Church, our mission is clear, and it is the same as it was weeks, months, or years ago. We are called to be God’s people, to hear God’s Word and live it. We are called to share the Sacrament of the Eucharist with each other, not just for ourselves but for the sake of the whole world. We are called to speak words and perform acts of compassion and love for those who are in need, for those afflicted or in trouble, and yes, even for those who are deeply misguided. 

We do all this, knowing that the one who was incarnate in Jesus Christ, and brought a message of love to the world is, by the power of the Cross, ultimately stronger than arrogance, prejudice, bigotry, or hatred. These things shall pass away. The Word of God will not pass away.

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Sermon for All Saints’, October 20th 2024

As time goes by, I appreciate more and more the way that our readings for this season, in the track that we use, shed light on each other. It is a traditional principle that the way to read Scripture is to relate it to other scripture. That needs to be done carefully: it is too easy to begin by assuming that one knows what scripture is “really” about, and then find echoes of one’s own preoccupations wherever one reads.

I mean something more thoughtful and humbler. First, remember that Jesus, the apostles, and above all Paul were saturated in the language and images of Hebrew Scripture, our Old Testament. They naturally found there the language to express what they believed was happening, refracted and transformed through the stories in the Gospels.

The “servant songs” in Isaiah chapter 53 present us with both the benefits and the risks of reading the New Testament in the light of the old. The liturgy of the stations of the Cross for Good Friday quotes this poetry to express the desolation of Jesus at his Passion. Down the centuries Christian interpreters have insisted categorically that Isaiah was foretelling the suffering of the Messiah. It is regrettable when Christians one-sidedly appropriate the Scriptures for their own purposes in this way. It led to claims that Jewish readers did not understand their own sacred texts, and has done much harm.

Scholars today insist that the servant songs are poetry. They are not a coded metaphor, to be read in one way only. Through poetry, the prophet who took the mantle and the name of Isaiah (maybe some centuries after the first Isaiah) explored how the personification of the people of God entailed suffering; that God was with the servant who suffered; and that beyond suffering there was hope, redemption, restoration. Some scholars nowadays argue that the “servant” represents the people of Israel as a whole. For the sake of the world, God called his beloved people to suffer. Through their sufferings they became an example and a source of hope to the world.

I confess that it is hard not to hear echoes of the story of Jesus in this ancient poetry. Maybe those who wrote the stories of the Passion had the servant songs echoing in their minds. Jesus may have remembered Isaiah’s prophecies as he faced his destiny. One can draw spiritual messages from these poems without colonizing them, without claiming them as the exclusive property of the Christian message.

Service, suffering, sacrifice for the sake of the people: we certainly see that in today’s reading from the Letter to the Hebrews. “He learned obedience through what he suffered; and having been made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him.” The echoes of Isaiah are clear.

Just before today’s Gospel from Mark, Jesus had foretold his Passion, in more detail than before. Mark, with his usual brutal frankness, showed the disciples completely missing the point – again. They hear Jesus foretell his terrible sufferings and his rising again – and all they think of is who will be closest to Jesus, when he is raised in glory. They skip over the sufferings and ask for the sweet treat at the end. Jesus reminds them that there is suffering first, which they must take on. He then says that “all right, you will have the suffering, but you have to wait and see who gets the treats.” In a way, it serves them right.

The rest of the disciples join in the debate, and prove to be just as status-obsessed as their colleagues. Jesus, yet again, has to explain what leadership in the kingdom of God means. He draws a distinction between the world outside and the kingdom that is coming into being. In the world of Imperial Rome and the puppet kingdom of the Herodians in Judaea and Galilee, power was expressed through grandeur, intimidation, and fear. “Those seeming to rule among the nations make a big thing of their lordship, and their great ones impose their authority over them.” Mark uses some rather unusual compound words, based on the roots of “lord” and “authority”, to describe imposing power and control over the people. There is probably some satire here, which is difficult to recover.

The Jesus community must be the very opposite of these despotisms. The leader must be the servant of all, the one who washed the disciples’ feet at the Last Supper.

The kingdom of God is counter-cultural. I have said this before. Bear with me: there is a twist in the story coming up. Just recently I received a publicity email from an organization called The Living Church, which advertised a particular take on scripture. It promoted a collection of texts entitled “the New International Version Upside-Down Kingdom Bible.” The publicity text claimed that “God calls believers to live faithfully in a way that flips the wisdom of worldly kingdoms on its head.” The edition then presented extracts from Scripture organized around themes of how to read the world’s values differently.

If we over-stress the counter-cultural nature of the Gospel, we risk assuming that the message of Jesus is for “religious” people only. That was how those who founded monasteries in the Middle Ages thought. Inside the monastery there was humility, service, work for the good of all, and shared prayer. Outside there was class distinction, glorifying of the leader, competitiveness and institutionalized violence. Two worlds were opposed to one another. We risk sending a message that a community of faith has nothing useful to say to the community of the world. (Believe me, the world is already only too ready to assume that we do indeed have nothing useful to say.)

Here comes the twist. Bishop Mary Glaspool of New York, in her weekly email a few days ago, wrote about servant leadership. Bishop Mary traced the modern use of this phrase to a book published by Paulist Press (a publisher of spiritual literature) in 1977 by Robert Greenleaf entitled Servant Leadership. This work applied the ideals of “servant leadership” to managing any kind of organization or community in the entire world. It has spawned quite a literature, which proposed that good “servant leaders” practice ideals such as “prioritizing others, empowering others, sharing power, focusing on personal growth, and honoring diversity.”

The leadership that Jesus taught and lived as an example is needed, not just for communities of faith, but for all societies made up of human beings.

“Imperial” leadership (let’s call it that) the leadership associated with grandeur and authority, exalts the value and the dignity of one individual, or one ruling elite, at the expense of all others. It surrounds the leader-figure with sycophants and enablers, who constantly reassure the leader that all is well, and that the leader is admired and feared. We see that in despotic regimes around the world. We even see it in a candidate for high office in this country.

“Imperial” leadership is not just wicked and demeaning to the vast mass of a people who are talked, cajoled or bullied into abject adoration of one inherently unworthy object. It is also fundamentally ineffective. It does not enhance the flourishing of human life in its fullness. It does not enable the diversity and variety of human culture to make our lives richer, more beautiful, or more life-affirming. On the contrary, it sucks the energy and the resources out of a people. In the Eastern European tyrannies – and in the so-called absolute monarchies centuries earlier – much of the energy of the regime was devoted simply to keeping itself in being, by identifying and suppressing challenges and threats. Such regimes tried either to coopt the life of the churches into their own machine, or to suppress them brutally because they represented an alternate focus of authority.

The contrast to “imperial” leadership is the leadership that was personified by Jesus, and that should be – though that is not always the case – practiced in the Christian churches, and those bodies influenced by them. Such God-given leadership will not seek to oppress the weak or glorify the strong. It will not seek to impoverish the poor to benefit the rich. It will raise up the faint-hearted and care for the sick, the needy, the outsider, and the vulnerable. You only have to read the Psalms and the prophets to see how ancient that idea of good leadership really is.

The world needs not just the leadership of Christ, but Christ-like leadership, in every aspect of its life. That means, in turn, that the world needs the Gospel to be preached, and Jesus’ mission and message to be made known. The Gospel is not just for a future realm, a hereafter prayed for and believed. The Gospel is vitally needed for today’s world, here and now. We teach and share the message that the God made flesh, the divine principle lived among us in humble service. There can be no higher or better example of how to lead and care for people.

What James and John missed, of course, was that there was no advantage or priority to be claimed in the glory of God. The joy and love of being in the presence of God has no “more” or “less.” To live in the community of the saints of God is absolute and utter fulfillment. Let us do all we can to show that glory in the lives that we lead and the examples we offer here and now.

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Sermon for All Saints’ Church, September 29th 2024

The memory of Jesus was preserved among his followers by the gathering and collecting of sayings. Preserving pithy sayings was quite a custom in the ancient world (not just in Europe either) but in the case of Jesus it became a major way to keep his memory fresh in his followers’ minds. 

We believe that Mark’s was the earliest Gospel to be compiled; Matthew and Luke are both greatly expanded and developed versions of Mark’s basic narrative. These two Gospel writers expanded Mark by including a large repertoire of Jesus’s sayings, which had not found their way into Mark. Since some of the sayings are common to Matthew and Luke (but not Mark) biblical scholars long ago proposed that there was a common source containing nothing but sayings, which these two Gospels drew upon. This source is sometimes called Q, for the German word Quelle, which just means … source.

There is also an early Gospel which did not make it into the canon of the New Testament, called the Gospel of Thomas. This Gospel has no narrative, no miracles, no stories of the birth, Passion or resurrection of Jesus. The Gospel of Thomas consists of nothing but a very long list of sayings attributed to Jesus. 

There is a problem with sayings. Have you ever, as a school exercise or otherwise, collected pairs of proverbial sayings which say the exact opposite of each other? Sometimes trying to encapsulate wisdom ends up in contradictions. (Is one wiser when small or large costs are concerned … ?)

Something like that happens with a passage in Mark’s Gospel for today. Jesus’s disciples tell him that some unnamed person has been casting out evil spirits in the name of Jesus, without being part of the fellowship of the apostles. They tell him to stop, but Jesus replies that “no one who does a deed of power in my name will be able soon afterwards to speak evil of me. Whoever is not against us is for us.”

Now the irony is that in Luke chapter 11, Jesus says that “Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters.”

The contexts in which these sayings are reported are slightly different, which may explain the apparent contradiction. Luke’s Gospel may also have a distinct understanding of the Christian community, where the tradition of the chosen leaders and authentic representatives of Jesus was more important to the life of the Church.

But these sayings set me thinking about who, in our world today, speaks on behalf of and in the name of Jesus. And it is complicated. 

Let us start with the positives. 

When yesterday we honored the life and ministries of David Brown, we remembered with gratitude and love someone who taught the church in this region how to lead “clusters” of parishes in shared ministry. Parish churches can keep their distinctive identity and memories while being a part of something bigger and wider than themselves. That was something that David taught the church.

Let us also remember the ecumenical worship service which we participated in last July, between our fellow congregations in the Essex neighborhood, churches from Essex itself, Centerbrook, and ourselves here in Ivoryton. It was a positive joy to share ministry, to share communion with our Congregational, Baptist, and Lutheran fellow-Christians, and to raise funds and food together for the Soup Kitchen and Pantry which we continuously support. 

Let us then be grateful for this act of sharing, and also remember that it was not always this way even among the mainline Protestant churches. The open and collegial sharing which we now practice is a gift of grace to the churches, and has only become normal within many of our lifetimes. 

I hope and trust that this mutual recognition between the different Christian families will only grow and deepen as time passes. Sometimes that may mean mergers of traditions; sometimes it will mean mutual recognition of baptism, shared ministries, and open Eucharistic hospitality. That, I believe, is the message that God is giving us towards living in greater unity.

That is the easy bit. For the rest of this sermon, I should like to reflect on the much deeper question of how we respond to movements which claim the name of Jesus but do not, in your understanding or in mine, teach the Gospel revealed to patriarchs, prophets and apostles. ‘Not everyone who says to me, “Lord, Lord”, will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only one who does the will of my Father in heaven.’  [Mt. 7:21] 46 ‘Why do you call me “Lord, Lord”, and do not do what I tell you? 47I will show you what someone is like who comes to me, hears my words, and acts on them. [Lk 6:46-7]

We live in an age when the name and symbolism of Jesus is greatly abused and misdirected. I will not say “than ever before” because this is something that has happened many times. There were those, even in the Episcopal Church, who believed that the Scriptures could be quoted to justify slavery. But there is a particular version of this problem in our own time.

In the past weeks the diocese of New York has announced three separate presentations on the topic of a very troubling movement which is sometimes mis-called “Christian Nationalism.” This movement was critically analyzed in theological terms some weeks ago by Rev. Dr. Carter Heyward, one of the very first women priests in our church, at a lecture in St Thomas’s Church 5th Avenue. Christian Nationalism and its psychology was the subject of a presentation last week at the Cathedral in New York by my former colleague Rev. Dr. Pamela Cooper-White, recently retired from both the Cathedral staff and from Union Seminary. Finally, there will be a panel in the series entitled “Essential Conversations” about the “Sin of Christian Nationalism” in New York and online on 15th October. 

So-called “Christian Nationalism” is neither Christian, nor does it speak to the true foundations and heritage of the United States. It has co-opted the name of Jesus to support a narrow, exclusive vision of what a “correct” American society should be like. It is predicated on an imaginary vision of conservative postwar America: white, segregated, based on the patriarchal traditional family, before civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, or any of the emancipatory movements of the 1960s. It claims that this country was founded on exclusively conservative Christian values, which is simply bad history. Much more dangerously, it claims the name of Christian for a fever dream of conservative opposition to everything that has made our society more diverse and welcoming in the past decades.

Obviously, it ignores most, nearly all, of the teaching of Jesus. It takes no notice of Jesus’s heroic and consistent embrace of the diverse peoples of his time, of women and men, of fishermen and rabbis, of zealots and tax-collectors. It ignores Jesus’s message that love for God’s people takes priority over all social and religious norms. Dr Cooper-White, in her address, said that this “Christian Nationalist” movement begins with the angry ethnic deity found in archaic parts of the Hebrew Scripture, and leaps to the Jesus of the Book of Revelation, visiting destruction on the evildoers at the end of time.

Pamela considered how sincere Christian people can respond to this phenomenon. She proposed that trying to argue down the hard-line true believers will not work. In fact, trying to win by argument may be a waste of time with many people. However, there are people somewhere in the centre, people tempted by the vision of a more traditional, as they think, more ordered society whose fears are stoking this nationalist, nativist movement.

The world has changed dramatically in our lifetimes, and there are some older white people who apparently feel adrift in it. Many of the changes have meant simply affirming, welcoming and honoring the personhood of people who used to be deprived of their rightful place in their communities because of race, gender, or sexual identity. Along with (I believe) the overwhelming majority of Christians, I thank God for the way that culture and society have embraced all forms of diversity. I can think of nothing more horrendous than returning to the shame and prejudice-filled way of life that existed in both the UK and the US in the 1950s and early 1960s. I recall the embarrassment expressed in the early 1960s when a minister in my church dared to refer to a child whose parents were no longer living together. Broken marriages brought shame, and were not supposed to be discussed.

For whatever reason, there are some whose reaction to this multicolored and diverse society is to feel lost and insecure. Culture warriors play on that insecurity. Pamela proposed that one can reach out to some people in the middle, so to speak, with emotional understanding and empathy – which in no way means agreement – for their sense of being adrift. Thus one can begin to build potentially productive relationships.

Christian life can be a witness to the welcome of the Gospel. We have it in our power to be witnesses for the true message of Jesus: that God loves all kinds of people and wishes their dignity to be respected. We can show that we are not afraid of encountering people who are radically different from ourselves. We can live into that spirit of welcome.

Let that welcome, that example, be the good deed that we do in the name of Jesus Christ. 

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Sermon for All Saints, September 8th 2024

Thirty years ago, before the Revised Common Lectionary was published in 1994, the Church of England had a two-year cycle of readings. That meant that when I was an undergraduate at Oxford, the same readings came up in my third year as in my first. I must confess to having heard the same sermon at least twice.

That thought came to me while preparing today’s thoughts. I knew that I had preached on these texts before, almost exactly three years ago, and discovered that it was on September 5th 2021. (I believe it was an in-person service, though it may have been online). I am not so vain as to assume that after three years, you would remember anything that I said then. However, to avoid repeating what has been delivered before, let me reassure you that this is an entirely new sermon, based on a different part of the Gospel reading.

Let us (always) remember the Gospel context. In last week’s readings, Jesus had just been talking about how the pollution of our nature comes from inside, from the moral choices that lead to wrong conduct, rather than from the ritual impurity incurred by failing to perform some ceremonial duty. It has been a time of painful controversy. In today’s reading Jesus leaves Galilee for a while, in order to take a break. In fact, it seems more like a vacation: Tyre, in present-day Lebanon, was the first major city on the shore of the Mediterranean north-west of Galilee. It was a significant journey in terms both of distance and of culture, especially if one walked.

After the encounter with the Syro-Phoenician woman with the sick daughter (on which I preached three years ago) Jesus returns by a rather complicated route round to the region called the “Decapolis”, the “Ten towns” which lay to the south and East of the Sea of Galilee, on quite the opposite side of the sea from Tyre. We are not entirely sure how strong Mark’s grasp of the geography of this journey was. It is quite possible that the man who was deaf and had an impediment in his speech was a Gentile, a non-Jew like the woman near Tyre, but we are not told that for certain.

In any event, Jesus is here trying to get a spell of retreat away from Galilee and the pressure of the crowds (and maybe the controversies which his healing and the disciples’ behaviours had stirred up). But Jesus cannot resist showing compassion. People bring an afflicted person to him, knowing his reputation as a healer even outside the region of his ministry. In a rather graphic, tactile way, Jesus heals the man’s deafness using saliva, and his speech is restored. We might expect that someone who had completely lost their hearing, would therefore have been unable to hear their own voice and would have spoken in an unclear way.

When I taught at Union Theological Seminary, the healing miracles of Jesus, insofar as they related to removing disabilities from people, were often seen as morally problematical. Quite understandably, those who live, and often live well, with a disability do not see it as an impairment or a deficit, but as a difference which may be part of their identity. To some seminary students, the idea that people were waiting to be “cured” of their disability seemed patronizing, and even unjust to those who manage their difference so well.

My late wife Ruth, before we came to this country, worked for an infrastructure organization in north-east England which supported voluntary groups, including groups supporting people who were disabled or “differently abled”. Those who did not hear, and expressed themselves in sign language, formed a highly articulate and at times militant community. They valued the social cohesion that they experienced as a signing population. They used sign language for all sorts of purposes, including poetry, and did not regard using it as an impairment. When cochlear implant surgery began to be available to restore hearing in some cases, there were those within that community who regarded the offer as an unwelcome intrusion on their identity. I say this, not in the spirit of approval or disapproval; I do not affirm or reject those ways of thinking, merely say that this is something sometimes heard in the disability community.

So how, in that light, can we respond to the healing narratives in the New Testament? Healing from disabilities in the Gospels needs to be looked at through the same lens as the healing of those possessed by evil spirits – which is after all the theme of the first story in the reading.

First, the healings have to be understood in their social setting. There was, as we read in John’s Gospel, a tendency to suppose that a physical impairment was a punishment for sin. Jesus’s healing serves as a public demonstration, apart from anything else, that this was not the case.

There was in those days no formal system of support for those with physical impairments, and certainly no sense that they formed a community with their own self-determination. Jesus’s healings could be seen as acts of very necessary compassion for those who might become destitute.

Most importantly, I believe that the healing stories are symbolic. They are told to make a teaching point about Jesus’s mission and the kingdom that is breaking into the world.

An interesting word is used to describe the man with the speech impediment: he is described as kophos and mogilalos, “deaf and unable to speak well.” The latter word is used only in one other place in the Bible, in the LXX translation of the Isaiah passage that we heard read earlier.

In the Isaiah translation the “tongue of the mogilalos” is translated as “tongue of the speechless”. Mark intentionally uses this rare word to echo the passage from Isaiah.

Let us listen again to part of the reading from Isaiah:

5 Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened,
    and the ears of the deaf unstopped;
6 then the lame shall leap like a deer,
    and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy.
For waters shall break forth in the wilderness,
    and streams in the desert;
7 the burning sand shall become a pool,
    and the thirsty ground springs of water.

All these remarkable transformations demonstrate the breaking-in of the power of God. Viewed at its simplest, the Isaiah text could be read as a prophecy for the restoration of Israel, and its redemption from oppressors. But Isaiah’s poetry invites us to imagine a more comprehensive re-ordering of creation, where all the harmful things that afflict God’s people are done away with.

So, healing can mean something more all-encompassing than just the restoring of one person’s abilities. Healing can mean being given a special insight into truth. Jesus uses the example of those who, through no intent of their own, have difficulties in communication, to contrast with those who resist his message, and thereby make themselves voluntarily, unnecessarily, blind or deaf.

In John chapter 9, the story of the giving sight to the man born blind offers another occasion for making this point:

39Jesus said, “I came into this world for judgement so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.” 40Some of the Pharisees near him heard this and said to him, ‘Surely we are not blind, are we?’ 41Jesus said to them, “If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, ‘We see,’ your sin remains.”

What does all this say to us, as we try to respect, love, and include those who experience varieties of disability or impairment?

First of all, there is one obvious lesson. We are called to take note, to learn, and always to respond with respect to those who live with limitations on the conventional array of human senses or abilities. They know better than anyone how they wish to respond to their situation.

Society should never set limits on what people can achieve, even when they seem to lack some of the usual faculties. This is the season of the Paralympics, and it is a pleasure to see the huge media investment in broadcasting and celebrating these astonishing performances. (I take only a slight satisfaction in the fact that in these games, Great Britain has more medals than the United States.)

There is a more profound theological lesson, which I first heard from a former student, now a priest in Wales, who wrote powerfully about his experience parenting a son with very extreme autism.

Relative to the wisdom, power, and love of God, we are all profoundly limited. Not only are we intellectually unable to understand the mysteries of God even when those appear to us in creation, or in the incarnate Jesus; we are morally limited in our ability to be as dedicated, as generous, as self-giving to one another and those in need, as we know we ought to be.

The breaking-in of the kingdom of God promises us that all our limitations can and will be overcome, in a variety of ways, times and places. At special moments in our lives, the divine light can break into our busy, murky world: maybe through the example of a particularly inspiring person whom one meets, or during a moment of intense community shared activity. It may come in reading spiritual literature, whether in scripture or beyond it. It may happen in moments of the Eucharist.

However it happens, we are given glimpses of the far greater light that lies beyond the material world of the senses. We believe that in some incomprehensible way the fullest revelation of the divine light, and the fullest restoration of our nature, awaits us and all the departed beyond this life. That is the ultimate and profound mystery of the love of God.

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Sermon for All Saints’, August 11 th 2024

Sometimes our lectionary gives us the story outside, alongside, just before, or just after the main action. Today’s reading from the Book of Kings comes from the aftermath of Elijah’s great confrontation with the prophet-priests of the Canaanite and Tyrian/ Phoenician God known in the Bible as Baal. The Tyrian-born Queen Jezebel tried to introduce Baal into the northern kingdom of Israel. Elijah, as you will probably remember, had challenged the priests of Baal to a contest to see who could call down fire from heaven on to an animal sacrifice. Elijah’s God obliged by sending down fire, and the assembled crowds then massacred the priests of Baal. Rather than being triumphant after this display of the apparent rightness of his theology, Elijah was driven out into the wilderness in fear for his life.

Bible commentators have explained that this story encapsulates the fact that the struggle between the deity of ancient Israel and the plurality of Gods of the near-Eastern cultures was a very long one, where the ultimate result was not certain for a very long time.

At the point that we reach in today’s reading, Elijah is having a deep crisis of confidence in his ministry and his call. “I am nothing special”, he says; “do away with me, bring to an end this ministry that has brought me nothing but misery.” Elijah will not escape from his profound depression until he reaches the holy mountain and speaks with God directly. Then – again you may recall the story – God speaks to Elijah, not in the furious power associated with the alien gods, but in sheer silence.

The story of Elijah is quite a primitive one: it shows how the Israelite God was not even universally worshipped in Israel itself. The God of Scripture was a minor provincial figure struggling to be recognized amidst the Baalim, the gods who proliferated in the culture of Canaan, Phoenicia, Aram, Ugarit, and the countries around. No wonder Elijah felt that he was a lone voice, despised and discarded by everyone else.

Yet it turns out that Elijah was mistaken. There was a significant body of people in Israel, represented by the symbolic number 7,000, who remained faithful to the God of Israel even when it was not politically wise to be so. With that wonderful psychological realism that the Bible is full of, we learn that Elijah’s despair, while entirely understandable, was in fact misplaced.

In the past week my home country of Great Britain has been in the news for all the wrong reasons. In case you have not followed all the details, let me recapitulate. On 29th July a 17-year-old boy, for no reason that anyone can discover, attacked a group of children with a knife at a summer dance class in Southport, in north-west England. Three children were killed and ten other people, eight of them children, were wounded. All the survivors have now left hospital care and will recover. It was a ghastly, inexplicable, and tragic criminal act. The perpetrator was arrested and in due course revealed to be a Welsh-born boy of Rwandan extraction. 

A further tragedy began when politically motivated troublemakers spread a rumor that the perpetrator, who, as a minor, was initially unnamed for legal reasons, was a recently arrived immigrant, that he was in Britain illegally, and that he had an Arabic name, which circulated very rapidly on social media. All of those claims were entirely false. Yet in response to those claims, far-right political groups began to riot in towns and cities across England. A great deal of damage was done, people were injured and property was destroyed or stolen. Politicians on the fringes of the right blamed government figures who had failed to “stop the boats”, which actually carry across the channel only a tiny proportion of those who enter Britain each year.

For a day or two it seemed as though the madness of crowds had taken over. An American technocrat, who really should have known better, expressed the view that Britain was inevitably sliding into civil war. 

Then quite as suddenly, sanity returned. The center-left government responded with vigorous social discipline by the police force, whom you will recall do not carry firearms. Many people were arrested and legally charged either with acts of physical assault and disorder, or with inciting violent acts of racial or religious hatred through social media – which in Britain is also a criminal offense. 

In the areas worst affected by the riots, local communities gathered to show support for, among others, Muslim congregations whose mosques had been attacked and burned. Huge numbers of people turned out to protest against racism, neo-fascism, and the victimization of immigrants. Those protests were entirely peaceful: police just cordoned off the tiny numbers of counter-protesters from the fringe right, for everyone’s safety. In the last 24 hours, there have been peaceful protests against racism and hostility to immigrants in my native Scotland, where no riots against migrants had happened in the first place. People felt the need to express their positive feelings.

It is easy, in the heat of the moment, to believe that the forces of gentleness, kindness, and inclusion are weak and lacking in support, because they rarely express themselves with shrill, screaming voices. Yet sometimes the forces of community cohesion are, in truth, more pervasive than the forces which only wish to express rage and hostility towards those who are different.

Insofar as the aftermath of these riots has seen signs of a more positive attitude, that, after a terrible series of tragic events, is comparatively speaking good news.

However, I should like to go back for a moment into the challenging time, the time when people of good will fear that they are the isolated minority in the world around them. This is the challenge of being the voice of a loving God in an often-unloving world. Here I am speaking for all of us. To be the presence of God is not the responsibility of some select few. It is something that we are all accountable for.

In the letter to the Ephesians, the writer warns the churches to try as best they can to avoid the behaviors that are destructive of community: falsehood, dishonesty, bitterness, anger, and hatred expressed in hostile words. It is very much the kind of thing that one would expect to be written to a second-generation community of followers of Jesus, whom we believe the recipients of this letter were intended to be. 

The point was that even among a people who had welcomed the loving message of the Gospel, there was still the risk that human fallibility and weakness would break through. Receiving the message of love does not immediately turn us into angels: rather, it gives us a call to support each other, and strengthen all those who share that message of love and respect for every human being. We need to gather at regular intervals, to be strengthened in believing and living out those things that we know and trust are true.

That brings us to today’s Gospel. Remember, the teachings of Jesus follow on from John’s account of Jesus’s feeding of the five thousand people who had come to hear him. There had been plenty of “signs,” John’s preferred word for miracles, to demonstrate that Jesus was something utterly special. And in this part of the Gospel, as in John’s Gospel as a whole, we read quite a lot about Jesus’s unique relationship to the Father.

You might think that the Galilean villagers who had eaten their fill out of nearly nothing, and heard Jesus’s teaching and witnessed his healings, would have grasped the idea that here indeed was someone unique. Yet the tendency to default back to ordinary human interactions is very strong, just as it was in the churches addressed in Ephesians. What people conceive of as reality – the superficial reality – kicks in.  “Come on, this is the carpenter’s boy from Nazareth. We know his family. How can he claim to have some sort of divine mission?”

Jesus’s answer, broadly interpreted, seems to be that “God has to help you to see who I am.” The whole history of Israel was of people being cared for and rescued by the direct action of God, and yet that action was never enough. Give them a few days or weeks and they would live as though God did not exist, or at least as though God could not do anything for them.

We are just as prone, as individuals, to lapse away from believing in the extraordinary gift that the life, ministry, Passion, and resurrection of Jesus is for us and for the entire world. We are human beings, and we shall always contain within us the seeds of human fallibility and going wrong.

But – and this is the crucial thing, I believe – if we gather regularly and strengthen each other, we shall not only offer a witness to the world, we shall also be refreshed and confirmed in our own belief and confidence. Just as those people, who demonstrated peacefully against hatred and exclusion after the riots, felt the need to meet together and strengthen each other in their compassionate and loving attitudes, so we need to gather to nurture our loving community spirit.

The “bread from heaven” is the certainty that no human entity can give us as individuals, that a loving God has a good purpose for a good world, and that the forces of decay, destruction and mortality do not and never will have the last word. We need this bread, and we are given it every time we gather here, in the form of bread. Christ gives it, and we share it with each other.

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Sermon for All Saints, August 4th 2024

What do we live for? There’s a nice, specific, narrow question. It may seem banal; but actually it lies at the heart of our scriptural passages today, as well as at the heart of most of the world’s systems of philosophy.

The author of the letter to the Ephesians, whom we believe to have been a second-generation follower and admirer of Paul, encourages the people to whom he writes to “lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, 2with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, 3making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.”

We are very accustomed to this kind of language – and to trying to live it. The author of the epistle probably knew, as Paul himself knew, that not all people lived in humility, gentleness, patience, bearing with each other in love. Even in the early Christian communities, and certainly not always in the church since then.

There is a difference, though, between having an ideal and failing to live up to it, versus not recognizing that ideal in the first place, or despising it as inappropriate for an ambitious, high-status person. There were some people in the ancient world, even before Christianity, who lived in humble and egalitarian communities. The people who lived at Qumran, near where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, seem to have been one such group. The so-called Therapeutae, described by the late-antique Jewish writer Philo, lived by Lake Mareotis in Egypt, close to Alexandria, and lived a life of simple contemplation.

But they were the exceptions! The ancient world was dominated by status, rank, wealth, and class distinctions. There were the free versus the unfree, the Roman citizens versus the outsiders, men versus women, the mature adults versus the young. There was a cult of grandeur, dignity, wealth, and power. The most successful form of popular entertainment was the gladiatorial games.

How far have we changed since those days? Not all that much, I fear. The abomination of slavery is gone, or in retreat, throughout most of the world; but in many ways the rich and powerful still oppress the poor and weak. Not only that: there are those who have the audacity to suggest that if people are poor, it is somehow their fault for not being energetic, clever, or determined enough.

As many of you know, I take a lot of Uber car rides to get around. One side-effect of that is that I often find myself listening to whatever the driver happens to have playing on the radio or the entertainment system. Sometimes it is an opportunity to learn the sounds of popular singers whom I otherwise never hear.

But on Friday I had a rather chilling experience. A young businessman of some kind was a guest on a radio talk-show and was talking, or rather ranting, at a young woman about how important it was to be greedy. There were “weird people,” he said, who thought that it was not important to make lots of money. If you are working in a company, he lectured the young woman, you had better hope that your boss is absolutely consumed by greed to make as much money as possible. That is the only way that your salary will get paid. At the end, this highly aggressive man asked the young woman whether she had learned something important. Rather nervously, she agreed that she had.

Hearing that exchange left me wanting to scream at the radio – never mind as a minister of the Gospel, just as a human being. What about doing the very best that one can for the good of the community? What about offering the best service, or making and selling the best goods, so that those who appreciate them will come again, and success and wealth will follow naturally?

Let me say, I did not scream at the radio. I just seethed silently in my seat, and soon the journey was over. But it left me with a profound concern for how the world and the country works. Someone who has won a secure life for themselves by honest effort and a real contribution to society, or even by honest and prudent investment, may feel both gratitude and some satisfaction at work well done or benefits honestly earned. Those who have made their wealth by deceit, fraud, overselling poor quality goods, or just exploiting or manipulating other people should have a good look in their mirrors: including some current politicians. That is just basic ethics, whether one holds any religious beliefs or not.

We who are called to be the body of Christ in the world have a much higher call than that. We live in a world where skills, talents, and strength of character are unequally shared. We also know that for all kinds of reasons, people of excellent character may find themselves unjustly disadvantaged compared to others. They may inherit generations of prejudice against them because of race, gender, or the persistent inequalities that divide one country from another. For all those reasons, we are called to share the good things of life with those who need them. We are called to be generous, not greedy.

A little note here on the side: there are those who complain every time that someone in the Christian Church raises the question of the ethics of money. Surely it is not the business of religion to question the way that economic systems work? I remember conservative politicians in 1980s England lecturing the Church of England to give “clear guidance on individual morality.” (To judge by some debates nowadays, some people think that only one branch of personal morality should be the overwhelming preoccupation of the Church.)

Well, read the prophets, and read the Gospels. Again and again, the prophets of ancient Israel denounced economic injustice and the exploitation of the poor by the wealthy. They warned those who made themselves too comfortable and neglected the needy. Jesus’s teachings and parables returned again and again to images and metaphors around money: making good and honest use of it, and above all using one’s goods to care for those who were in need.

Last week, many of us attended the ecumenical service on Essex Green, and thank you very much indeed to all those who were able to be present and did attend. With the Gospel reading describing the feeding of the five thousand, it was appropriately planned to include in the service the gathering of both funds and supplies for the Shoreline Soup Kitchen. I am delighted to pass on the news from Pastor Amy Hollis, who gave the children’s address and is also the executive director of the Soup Kitchen and Pantry, that the service gathered in 12 bags full of food (amounting to 120 pounds of food, or about 80 meals worth of food). There was also donated $1200, which translates into approximately 3600 more meals for those in need of the Soup Kitchen and Pantry’s services.

Here I should like to change gear slightly. In today’s Gospel, Jesus has fed the five thousand people who had come to hear him. He has crossed the lake and met his disciples walking on the water. Yet another crowd of people catches up with him and is mystified as to how he was back on the other side of the lake. Jesus replies “you are looking for me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves. Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you.”

The language of scripture often uses the language of oppositions – “not this, but that” when what it means would be expressed in our speech as “not just this, but also that.” Jesus was teasing those who followed him by asking whether they were looking for another free meal. Jesus also knew, better than anyone, that the hungry needed to be fed.

But there is more. If we trust the one who teaches us the will of God, he can give us the strength and the certainty to call for a better world order. We are called both to help those in urgent need, and to spread the message that it is contrary to God’s will for gross injustices and inequities to exist in this world in the first place.

We listen to Jesus, because we believe that in some extraordinary and unique way, he speaks the will of God. That gives us the confidence to say that, no, greed is not the fundamental principle of how the world works. No, it is not “weird” to say that becoming grossly rich with no concern for others is wrong. The God whose creative principle guides and rules our universe is not a god of greed and infinite acquisition, but a God of infinite generosity and limitless, sacrificial love. That is what I should have shouted at the car radio in that Uber. Maybe I will next time.

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Sermon for All Saints’ Church, June 23 rd 2024

Job is a very strange book. As you will surely remember, it tells the story of a righteous and

good man, who has also become very wealthy and secure. An adversary at God’s court dares

God to take away all his fortune and see whether he will remain devout and thankful to God.

So Job loses everything. The centre of the book consists of several very long conversations

about why misfortune occurs to those who do not deserve it. This question troubled people in

antiquity just as it does us. Equivalent texts addressing the same problem appeared in the

literatures of all the cultures of the ancient Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East.

At the end, God finally turns up and reproaches Job for his wordy complaints. Rather brutally,

we might think, God reminds Job that God created the entire universe before Job was ever

born. (God goes on for several more chapters after this reading, listing the marvels of creation

of which Job knows nothing and controls nothing.) God’s perspective is not human perspective.

The profundity of God’s management of the universe exceeds our understanding. God’s care for

the cosmos extends far beyond our preoccupation with our small part of it.

God’s power over the cosmos extends, as the Psalm reminds us, to the weather. The wind was

the most inscrutable and inexplicable force of nature to the ancients. The same word was used

for the breath that signifies life in living beings, for the wind that blows across the earth, and for

the Spirit which is how God expresses the divine nature. As we heard just a few minutes ago,

“For [God] commanded and raised the stormy wind, which lifted up the waves of the sea …

[human beings] cried to the LORD in their trouble, and he brought them out from their distress;

he made the storm be still, and the waves of the sea were hushed.”

Only in relatively recent memory have we learned to explain the winds in terms of the great

swirling fluid masses of colder and warmer air that circle around the surface of the earth as it

rotates on its axis. Only within the last twenty years has it become normal to take out one’s

phone and observe the weather in our region from the perspective of an orbiting satellite. (And

we still get the forecasts wrong.)

All this emphasis on God’s power over the weather, and the world of nature, needs to be

remembered when we reflect on the story from Mark’s Gospel. In the previous chapters Jesus

has been teaching his friends, and anyone else who came to listen, about the kingdom of God.

Put another way, Jesus has been showing how God wishes the world to work, what is God’s

plan for the human dimension to the universe. And as we heard last week, God understands

human society more as an organic growth – like a wild mustard bush growing in a field – and

much less like an intentional structure designed to be fixed and unalterable, handed down from

on high.

Jesus has been speaking about God’s plan. So far, so good: every religious teacher claimed to

do the same. But Mark goes on to show that Jesus has an absolutely unique authority to say

what he says. After the parables, Mark lists a series of extraordinary miracles, of which today’s

reading is only the first. We shall consider some of those later: but today we have the first

demonstration of Jesus’s unique authority.

Biblical commentators will tell you that the Sea of Galilee is prone to sudden outbreaks of violent

storms, and equally sudden dispersal and calm. In the days when people used to explain away

miracle stories (which was missing the point) Jesus was assumed to be a more than usually

astute observer of the weather.

But guessing what “really” happened fails to grasp the point of Mark’s story. A storm breaks out,

and as every Jewish believer knew, the weather expressed God’s power in the most obvious

way. The disciples panicked, because they know how dangerous these sudden storms can be.

Jesus was so far from being concerned that he took a nap on the cushion at the back of the

boat (literally the “headrest”, presumably the place where the fishermen normally put their

paying passengers). The disciples awakened Jesus and he instantly calmed the storm.

In the Psalm, it took prayer to God to calm the storm. All the disciples needed to do is ask Jesus

to do something about it. The point is startlingly obvious. Even more startling is that the

disciples, having seen the power of God working through Jesus’s commands, still didn’t get the

point. Mark gives the disciples a hard time over not recognizing who Jesus is and what he

means. At the same time, there is a reality about their reaction. No matter how many times and

how many ways you receive the message, it’s hard to get used to the earthly manifestation of

God walking around and eating and drinking with you every day.

Jesus told the disciples not to be so scared. They should realize that their lives and their safety

are in God’s hands, and God is not done with them. “Why are you afraid? Have you still no

faith?” They needed to have “faith” – a word which really means trusting in God’s purposes for

all of us.

The power of God over the creation was important to the ancients. It is important to us too, but

in a vitally different way.

We now understand far better than the ancients how the weather works. We also know – though

some are so rash as to deny it – that human behaviour is changing the climate. In our relentless

quest for energy to power all the machinery of our complex culture, we have taken oxygen from

the atmosphere and turned it into carbon dioxide. The subtle balance between plants which

breathe out oxygen and animals, including ourselves, who breathe out carbon dioxide has been

gradually and subtly disrupted over the past two centuries.

These days we see that weather systems are becoming more extreme. My younger daughter

works in a hydrological institute based in Louisiana. She tells me that the Gulf of Mexico is

warmer for the time of year than it has been before (warm seawater powers hurricanes).

Scientists working for the institute wanted to set out instruments on Grand Isle recently. They

could not do so, because nearly all the island was under water.

It is a theological folly of the greatest kind, when some conservatives assert – as they do – that

the world’s climate is designed by God to work in a self-balancing way, so that all will be well no

matter how recklessly and greedily human beings behave. Go on making indecent amounts of

money and burning fossil fuels, and all will be well. That, I stress, is a theological error: it is as

gross an error as if one were to say, “don’t bother to plant seeds in the ground, because we are

God’s people and God will feed us.” God’s love for humanity and the whole creation does not

mean that we are automatically protected from our own folly, recklessness, laziness or greed.

There is a second, equally important ethical point. The consequences of neglect of the created

order are very unequally distributed. Parts of the world which were already hot are getting much

hotter. In late May one area of Delhi, in India, reached 121.8 degrees Fahrenheit. In the summer

even the night times are far hotter than we would find comfortable. Islanders in already poor

islands in the Pacific are faced with the prospect that their homes will be under sea level. In

general, those who gain the most from climate irresponsibility are the one who suffer from it the

least and certainly the latest. It will catch up with all of us eventually.

There is a better way. Through the energy and wisdom of dedicated scientists, we know what

the problems are, and we know that concerted effort can alleviate the worst effects. The political

and business leadership of the developed world must recognize the reality and scale of the

problem and incorporate climate ethics, consistently and seriously, into all their planning. It

makes me weep to think that significant numbers of politicians in this country persist in

asserting, against all the known facts, that nothing is wrong.

God has a role in all of this, make no mistake. If we recognize that the universe is God’s

creation, God’s planting, God’s vineyard and garden, we are spiritually and morally bound to

care for it. But it is also in the power of God to strengthen the hands and raise the voices of

those who call for a more responsible approach to care for the world. Prayer can do much.

Sharing what we know, and expressing our values, can also help. In the end I am hopeful,

because I trust God, not to fix things while leaving us in our folly, but to teach us in time not to

be foolish with the creation.

But time is short. Paul, writing to the people of Corinth, reminded them that the time for God’s

intervention was now. “See, now is the acceptable time; see, now is the day of salvation!” Don’t

wait for the time that Isaiah prophesied in the quotation that Paul had just used. We must seize

the moment to be God’s fellow-workers in caring for the world, and especially those poor and

vulnerable human beings whom God wishes us to care for. There are plenty of voices calling for

neglect, indolence, and self-interest. God calls on us to speak the truth.

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Sermon for All Saints’ Church, May 12th 2024

Happy Mother’s Day, and blessings on all of those of you who are mothers, or who

remember your own mothers, or the mothers of your children with gratitude.

Motherhood, like – frankly – much of life, is about transitions. It is about learning to

adapt to a new state of affairs, just as you thought that you had come to terms with the

last one.

The order for Compline in our Book of Common Prayer contains a version of a much

older prayer, “that we who are wearied by the changes and chances of this life may rest

in your [God’s] eternal changelessness.” We are reassured that beyond the constant

instability and insecurity of our existence, there is a power that is eternal, both

unchanging and yet constantly able to embrace and support us in our varied

experiences, and that power is love.

The first disciples must have felt the force of sudden, unexpected change in spades.

After a short, dramatic, time of conflict in Jerusalem, they had suddenly seen their

teacher and leader dragged before an informal court, handed over to the brutal power of

the military occupier, and put to death in the most humiliating way. Then a few days later

they had to accept the unimaginable, that their friend was alive, alive in a special way

that allowed him to keep company with them, and to share food and drink after his

rising.

The opening passages of the Book of Acts say that Jesus appeared to his disciples for

forty days. That number is a biblical number, the number of years in the wilderness, the

days of Jesus’s temptation in the desert, and we need not regard it as precise. But after

a month or more – just time to get used to it? – Jesus was no longer with his followers.

He departed from them with the promise to be with them in another, new, special,

unforeseen way. Yet more adjustment. Yet more change to get one’s head around.

Last Thursday the church marked Ascension Day, one of those days which belongs to

the up-and-down way of thinking about the cosmos which we sometimes find in

traditional thinking. Carvings and stained-glass windows sometimes show Jesus literally

levitating from the earth into a cloud (sometimes just a pair of feet dangling out of the

air).

What matters is the transition: from the risen Jesus physically present, to the power of

God dwelling spiritually in the very hearts and minds of God’s people. That process we

celebrate with the Feast of Pentecost in a week’s time.

Meanwhile we have the story from our first reading, a story which appears at first so

inconsequential that it is hard to understand why it is in the Book of Acts at all. The

disciples have to find a replacement for Judas, the betrayer, to make up the number of

the twelve.

Why add to the number of those who were personally chosen by Jesus? It is usually

assumed that the twelve special followers of Jesus were chosen to represent the

historic twelve tribes of Israel, the twelve groups descended from the sons of Jacob by

his four partners. There had not been twelve tribes since the northern kingdom was

overrun by the Assyrians in 720 BCE, leaving only Judah and Benjamin remaining in the

south. Yet the symbolic meaning remained.

The disciples were going back to what they knew: anything to get their bearings back, to

appeal to the symbolism of the number twelve. They choose a slate of two candidates

and pray for God to reveal the chosen one by lot. One is chosen, called Matthias.

Neither of these two disciples is ever heard of again in canonical scripture.

Helena, the mother of Emperor Constantine, loved to dig up what were believed to be

relics of Jesus and the saints. In the 300s she claimed to have discovered the body of

St Matthias. His remains were shared between the Abbey of St Matthias in Trier,

Germany, the monastery of Santa Giustina in Padua, and Santa Maria Maggiore in

Rome. His feast day falls in two days’ time.

But spare a thought for poor old Joseph Barsabbas called Justus! Worthy, but not

chosen. In tradition he is a saint and bishop of Eleutheropolis, a city near Hebron,

founded years after his lifetime. In truth, we know nothing about him. But God knows.

In human affairs that we have to choose some people, often one person, over others.

The now-retired bishop of New York, Andy Dietsche, was elected as a nomination from

the floor, over the entire short-list of candidates for bishop, in the convention of 2011. He

once described how the trip home was one of the most solemn moments of his life. He

said that he represented the incarnation of the disappointment of all those other

candidates, and those who had supported them.

And yet we continue to pray for the spirit to guide our church into making good choices

when we seek those who will lead us in the episcopate. Next Saturday, 18 th May, two

dioceses of our church will hold election conventions, our neighbouring diocese of

Massachusetts and the diocese of Olympia in Western Washington state. They will

choose one of five and four candidates respectively. Rev. Kate Wesch, rector of our

sister church St John’s in Essex, is a candidate in Olympia. My former student Julia

Whitworth, former canon for liturgy in the cathedral in New York, is a candidate in

Massachusetts.

I commend to your prayers all those who take part in these processes, the one who will

be elected and – perhaps especially – those who will not be elected. To be worthy but

not chosen is a hard thing in human life. Thanks be to God, it does not reflect any limit

set to the love of God. Those who are called but not chosen are as honoured in the

sight of God as they serve God’s people, as those who hold exalted office.

Choosing the best or greatest was not something that was natural to Jesus. You will

remember his response to the disciples when they tried to make him select one above

the others. The greatest must be the servant of all.

Let us turn to the prayer which forms our Gospel reading for today. For the past weeks

we have been reflecting on Jesus’s “farewell discourses” from John’s Gospel. Mostly,

these are addresses to the disciples gathered for the Last Supper. They end, however,

with a long and beautiful prayer to the Father, of which this Gospel reading is a part.

I freely admit that John’s language, while beautiful, is not always entirely easy to follow.

Here the language is almost excruciatingly Johannine, full of balanced phrases and

pronoun clauses which are quite unlike the speech of Jesus recorded elsewhere. But

don’t worry about that: it is the message that is of importance.

Jesus says three fundamental things here. First, the disciples are chosen by God. God

plucked them out of their ordinary lives and brought them into the bewildering and

constantly challenging experience of fellow-travellers with Jesus. Secondly, Jesus calls

on the Father to protect them, in a way that Jesus, after he leaves this earth, will no

longer be able to do. Thirdly, he calls on God to sanctify them, to “hallow” them: the

word is the same as the prayer that God’s name may be sanctified in the Lord’s Prayer.

Jesus asks the Father to graft the disciples into the body of the beloved of God.

This will not mean that they are protected from physical harm, or exalted as holy in the

eyes of the world. It means something much better: that they will be safe and beloved in

the mind and heart of the one who is eternal and unchanging.

Whom do the disciples represent? Not, I suggest, an elite within the church. Not the

priesthood of the old order or the new. They symbolically represent the twelve tribes:

that is, all those whom God called and loved. They are the people of God, as we are

when we gather at the altar for every Eucharist.

How does this prayer translate to our present situation?

Whatever our own experience of coming to faith and finding a community, we should

think of ourselves as a gift of God to our church, and vice versa. Those around us are

gifts of God to us. Our regular presence and participation here in the church of All

Saints matters, not just for ourselves, but especially for those around us and for those

who are not here, but whom we meet every day.

To be “sanctified” means to be set apart for a higher purpose: to have something better

to do than ambition, wealth, or gratification. Essentially, we are set apart to be at the

service of others.

We do not, for the most part, need physical protection from the world, except in the

sense that the ways of the world can carry us off in directions that are unhealthy for us.

We are at risk of treating the church like another worldly club or organization or of being

judged by the world’s standards. May God keep us from thinking of the Church as we

think of the rest of the world and its standards.

And so, in the Pentecost season to come, we shall live a life which is a constant prayer,

to be mindful of how we are sanctified, set apart, and protected, to be God’s people in

the world and to each other.

That is a higher call than election to the grandest of episcopates, because it is a call that

comes directly from God, and it comes to all of us.

Amen.

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Sermon for All Saints' Easter Sunday Service, March 31, 2024

1. Bewilderment

How does one preach Easter Sunday? What can one possibly add to the most

extraordinary and unique event that lies at the very centre of our faith?

The question “what more can we say?” actually seems very appropriate when

we consider today’s Gospel reading, which comes from Mark’s Gospel. Mark is by

general consent believed to have been the first of the Gospels to be written

down. For 20 or 30 years the story of Jesus was told by face-to-face preaching and

teaching. Then the stories were committed to writing: first Mark, then following

him Matthew and Luke; and in a separate process of storytelling, John’s Gospel.

But Mark has a puzzle in it, that afflicts only that one Gospel. In the oldest

texts that we have, Mark’s Gospel ends very abruptly at chapter 16, verse 8. “So

they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized

them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”

Two days ago, I looked online at the earliest complete copy of the New

Testament on parchment, written around 300-350, which was kept for centuries

in the monastery of St Catherine’s on Mount Sinai, and is now in the British

Library (It’s a long story.) There, in the text known to scholars as “Sinaiticus”,

Mark ends with verse 8. There’s a lot of white space in the parchment below, as

though the copyist could not quite believe that this was all there was at the end

of the Gospel.

Mark’s Gospel thus contains no account of the resurrection appearances by

Jesus. It proclaims that the resurrection has happened; it has no doubt. But it just

does not tell the story of how Jesus made himself known to his friends after he

rose from the dead.

In the years after Mark was written, two different endings were composed for

Mark. In today’s insert in your bulletins, you see, and we heard, the shorter

ending. In the King James Bible and the older translations, there is a longer

ending, where the resurrection appearances are obviously condensed,

abbreviated versions of the resurrection appearances in the three other Gospels.

Do I say this to suggest that there is any doubt about the resurrection?

Absolutely not. Paul was explicit about it; so were the four evangelists. They were

unshakably certain that their teacher and Lord had risen from the tomb in the

body in which he had been laid.

Mark, I suggest, testifies to a profound truth about the resurrection in the way

that he ends his Gospel. The first, natural, inevitable response of the two Marys

and Salome was to be bewildered, astonished, and frightened. As the letter to the

Hebrews says, in a much-abused passage, “It is a fearful thing to fall into the

hands of the living God.” Never can God have felt closer at hand than in that

momentous, scary moment when God’s power over nature was demonstrated in

such an astonishing way.

We know what it is for someone to die. It is momentous, and especially if it

means the loss of a loved one, it is an awful thing. And yet it is familiar. We feel

that we understand it. We know that for all of us, our natural life on this earth

must come to its end.

Resurrection was quite different. To the devout Jews who were Jesus’s earliest

followers, the bodies of the departed would be raised again at the end of time.

That was what Martha of Bethany said to Jesus before he raised Lazarus from the

dead. Resurrection of the body was safely in the remote future. We do not need

to be confronted by the awe-inspiring power of God. Not just yet.

So the absolutely natural response, of those who loved Jesus and missed him,

was to be confused, bewildered, stricken with fear. They had not been

commemorating the resurrection every year for nearly two thousand years as we

have done. This was an utterly unique event: and we shall see just how unique it

was, as we explore Jesus’s ministry after his resurrection in the coming weeks.

2. Vindication

But the second thing about Jesus’s resurrection is that it overturns the world’s

usual order of things. Jesus was executed as a rebel, as one who had set himself

up against both the religious authorities in Jerusalem and their allied and

overlords in the Roman imperial jurisdiction. Public execution was a form of

political theatre. It demonstrated that the law, and the authorities who

administered it, had both right and power on their side. Criminals suffered as they

deserved.

Let me just say that this seems to me an entirely barbaric way for political

systems to behave. Crucifixion ended when the Roman emperors became

Christian. Public execution was rightly done away with in most of the world in the

19 th century. Where I come from, the idea of executing criminals in any way is

unthinkable. I pray, hope, and believe it may become so in this country also.

The resurrection of Jesus demonstrated, in the most powerful way possible,

that the forces of power and violence did not have the last word; more

importantly, they did not speak for God, or reflect the order of the cosmos.

Jesus’s resurrection gave the most dramatic proof imaginable that God

vindicated, God validated, God stood with, behind, above, and in the

proclamation and ministry of Jesus. Jesus’s maltreatment, suffering and passion

had seemed at the time to show that the nice guys finish last – or rather do not

finish the race at all. In the eyes of the world his mission was a catastrophic

failure.

Jesus is raised to show that the opposite is the case! The resurrection teaches

Jesus’s friends, and us, that everything that Jesus had taught, preached, and done

to show the loving purposes of God for the whole creation was absolutely true. It

was not necessary for the risen Jesus to be seen by the whole world. As Peter

preached to Cornelius in the Acts of the Apostles, “God raised him on the third

day and allowed him to appear, not to all the people but to us who were chosen

by God as witnesses, and who ate and drank with him after he rose from the

dead”.

Jesus’s rising from the dead transformed his followers. They received

overwhelming assurance that Jesus was everything that they could possibly have

believed him to be, and more. If Jesus had not been raised, it is hard to see how

the disciples could have been so transformed, so full of confidence and courage,

so willing to risk everything to take their teacher’s message to the world.

3. Call to action

And that is the third fundamental truth about the Easter message. It is not a

reassurance which allows us simply to sit back in our seats and think “that’s all

right then". Jesus’s disciples did not respond to the resurrection by going home

and returning to their cosy, predictable lives, like the Hobbits at the end of the

Lord of the Rings trilogy. They were called to action. They could not return to their

old lives even if they tried.

That is where the short ending to Mark’s Gospel, inauthentic though it is,

places the emphasis on exactly the right place. “Jesus himself sent out through

[the disciples], from east to west, the sacred and imperishable proclamation of

eternal salvation.”

Because Jesus is raised, they were called – we are called – to share the

message. The message of Jesus is as counter-cultural, as confounding to the

world’s values, as it was two thousand years ago. God does not wish us to live by

idolatrous veneration of power and wealth, but to care for those who are least

privileged, the weakest and poorest in our society. God does not only reside in

palaces or temples; God does not vindicate those who wield authority over others

and make them feel the weight of their power. God does not regard the outsider,

the migrant, or those who are different because of race, disability, sexuality, or

gender identity as inferior, but offers unconditional welcome and boundless

sacrificial love towards all.

And because Jesus was raised, and is raised still, we know that Jesus’s message

of radical, compassionate love is in very truth the principle by which the whole

universe is called to live. This is not a partisan political message; it is quite simply,

the Gospel. The Gospel is the good news, the “sacred and imperishable

proclamation.” Let us be strengthened by the blessed and wonderful news that

we celebrate this day, and go out to proclaim it, to share it, and above all to live it.

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Sermon for All Saints’ 10th March 2024

Welcome to mid-Lent. I looked through the vestments closet in our church hall on Thursday, and to my great relief discovered that there were no rose-pink altar-frontals, stoles or chasubles there. This Sunday was, traditionally, the one Sunday in Lent when the formerly rigorous restrictions – dietary and otherwise – of the season were relaxed. To celebrate that relaxation, the liturgical colour became a rose pink. I suspect that only the most dedicated (and well-endowed) Anglo-Catholic parishes still have or use those colours. I honestly cannot see myself wearing pink.

But in a different sense, let us regard this as a day to think positive thoughts. As followers of Jesus, we should be thinking positive thoughts at all times, insofar as Christ’s mission and message offers us nothing but positive messages to support us through the challenges of a difficult world.

However, today’s readings have a particularly positive, hopeful spin to them. We have readings about healing; about God protecting the people from themselves; about Jesus bringing light into the world; and about that life meaning new life, both in this world and in eternity.

John has an unusual narrative technique. Often, he enfolds passages of profound theological thought into situations of conversation and exchange. The scene of today’s Gospel passage is of Nicodemus’s first visit to Jesus. Nicodemus is a Greek name, derived from the words for “victory” and “people.” Many Jewish believers in late antiquity spoke Greek, read their Bible in Greek, and adopted aspects of Greek culture. All our Gospel writers belonged to that tradition. Nicodemus visits Jesus in secret, but later in the Gospel he will be revealed as a convinced believer and follower.

In a way that is peculiar to John, Jesus seems to look up from his earnest conversation with Nicodemus and to address us directly. He talks about his mission, in that particularly calm, all-knowing way that is characteristic of John’s Gospel. Included in this is one of the most famous sayings in the New Testament, in verse 16: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” At least 50 years ago, my grandmother back in Scotland asked me to read this verse to her in Greek. She did not know the language, but wanted to hear the words as they had been heard when the Gospel was first written.

However, before we get to the famous verse 16, there is the saying about how “Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness.” This is a story about healing, but it needs a little unpacking.

Jesus compares his passion, which in John he is fully aware of in advance, with the bronze serpent raised up by Moses in our reading from the Book of Numbers.

In the Second Book of Kings, chapter 18, which was probably written long before the present form of the first five books of Hebrew Scripture, we read that the reforming king Hezekiah “broke into pieces the copper serpent that Moses had made, for until that time the Israelites had been offering sacrifices to it; it was called Nehushtan”.

The detailed story that we heard read in the Book of Numbers, about the people complaining and being afflicted with poisonous snakes, may have been elaborated from the legend that Moses had made the bronze serpent. However, in truth serpent-gods were all over the world of the ancient Middle East, and it is possible, even somewhat likely, that the image that Hezekiah destroyed was derived from an Egyptian cult object.

Not long ago, archaeologists discovered a snake made of copper, with a gilded head, in a former Midianite shrine at Timnah, a site of copper mining in the desert near Eilat. Serpents may have been seen as emblems of healing from snakebite. Possibly the snake’s shedding of its skin was taken as a symbol of new life. Perhaps the way that snakes, as cold-blooded animals, can regain energy with dramatic speed when the sun reaches them, was taken as a symbol of healing and recovery. Serpents on poles, of course, are everywhere in the iconography of modern medicine, hospital, and ambulance services.

But in John’s Gospel, Jesus turns the serpent on a pole, which was itself an emblem of healing, into a foreshadowing of his own being raised up on the cross. Anyone who beholds Christ in this way and trusts in the power of his passion and resurrection is offered a very special kind of healing.

It is offered to everyone, but it is not received by everyone. One of the most troubling aspects of John’s Gospel is that John wrote for what was probably a small and rather embattled community, surrounded by followers of traditional Greek religion or traditional Judaism, for whom the message about Jesus Christ presented insuperable problems. That seems to be part of why we repeatedly hear the language of sharp distinctions between the “insiders” and the “outsiders” in John.

“Those who believe in [Jesus] are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God.”

The believers are the people of light; the unbelievers are the people of darkness, who are hiding their behaviour from the light of God.

I want to suggest today that we can take a more hopeful message from Jesus’s recalling of the bronze serpent story than the one that John turns it into.

The story from the Book of Numbers speaks of the people of Israel on their long trek through the wilderness. They are constantly discontented. It is hot and dry, and their food is rationed to manna and quails. (Imagine eating nothing but chicken and waffles for forty years.) Then, when things get even worse for them, they ask Moses to call on God for help, which he does.

In this story as in so many in Scripture, it is the calling that matters. Know that you are in a state of need; know that God loves you and wishes to help you; that is all that it takes. God does not ask for a prolonged period of penitential self-examination and self-recrimination by the Israelites. God does not impose a requirement of burdensome sacrifices. God needs people to turn to the real source of help, to know their need even when they do not know what to ask.

When I last preached on these texts, we were in the middle of the worst months of the coronavirus pandemic. I am sure that we all remember it well, and it may be a surprise to realize that the vaccines were beginning to be available three long years ago. Preaching about healing in the midst of a pandemic of often deadly illness can easily seem paradoxical or even Pollyanna-like.

The healing of life which is revealed in Scripture sometimes means physical curing of an illness – there is no doubt of that – but it does not abolish the frailty of our physical bodies or indeed our eventual mortality. The raised Lazarus later died.

The kind of healing that is only foreshadowed and represented by Jesus’s acts of bodily healing is something both more mysterious and more fundamental. It is the healing of human life from its apparent lack of focus or meaning. Philosophers who have confronted the challenge of a life where they no longer believed in a loving God, or any God, found life to be ultimately absurd.

Twentieth-century philosophers tended to assume that they were the first people in history ever to learn to think. Yet in fact thinking people had been struggling with predicament of human life since language began. And the author of the letter to the Ephesians, probably a follower of Paul, described the rescue from absurdity in these words:

“God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ*—by grace you have been saved— and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus … For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God — not the result of works, so that no one may boast.”

The healing of life consists in the promise, made in the life and ministry of Jesus, that our life is the opposite of futile. It is profoundly important, and of infinite value, that we live our most Christ-like selves towards God and, especially, towards each other and the whole world.

And that is the final, essential point. The life healed by the Christ raised above us, who calls us to look on him and be saved, is not something for us as individuals. We are called to show this healing of life for the benefit of the whole community, the whole society.

We live in a society paralyzed and corrupted by the fear of the other, by the fear of loss, by the fear of being “invaded” by those from outside who are different. What is missing in all of this fear is the hope and trust in the loving God who loves all of us, and calls all of us to live in peace. It is, to be sure, a mighty struggle to overcome that fear, to reach out for the healing that can cure one from the toxins of racial prejudice, homophobia, misogyny, or crude and violent nationalism. There will, I fear, be some who still choose to live in the darkness of their fears. But let us so live and so pray that as many as possible may be recalled into the light and the confidence that God wishes for us.

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Sermon for All Saints’ Church, January 14th 2024

The internet, as many of us know, is a distracting thing, with an almost infinite capacity to waste our time. Used wisely, however, it can also free up our time, saving enormous amounts of time and effort that we used to spend on routine tasks.

This thought came back to me when my phone randomly re-connected me to a documentary piece on the BBC which I had first viewed several months ago. It was entitled “why are the Dutch so direct?” I stress that this was not an exercise in xenophobia: most of the speakers interviewed were either Dutch linguists or cultural commentators themselves, or people who had lived in the Netherlands. The point made was this: if a Dutch person disagrees with you, they will tend to tell you so, rather than saying “that is interesting … let me think about that”.

Well, I have many Dutch friends: in fact, I published with a Dutch publisher two years ago. I have encountered both helpful, sincere directness and straightforward rudeness, and have learned (I think) to tell them apart from each other.

The story of Nathanael from John’s Gospel reminded me of this exploration of the Dutch way of speaking. For here, Nathanael is another direct, straightforward person who says exactly what is in his mind. Nathanael may, in fact, be a symbolic person rather than a historic figure. He represents guileless, honest, forthright embodiment of Israel: he says what he thinks and doesn’t care what anyone else might feel. Hence, we hear his comment when Philip tells him that he has found the promised Messiah in Jesus of Nazareth. “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” he replies. Jesus recognizes this forthrightness, and admires it. He reveals, not for the last time, that he knows what kind of person he is dealing with, and sees the good that is in that honesty and directness. How refreshing not to meet someone who double-talks! What a relief to find someone who doesn’t try to talk Jesus into trouble!

And then, suddenly, Nathanael equally directly recognizes Jesus for who he is, with greater certainty and conviction than most people in the Gospels. Jesus finds Nathanael’s directness mildly amusing, and responds, as he so often did, with gentle sarcasm. “You think my recognizing you under a tree was amazing? You really have seen nothing yet.”

The story of Jesus and Nathanael is, like the best parts of the Bible, a story about recognizable real people, their emotions, and how they react with each other. God knows how to be present in the everyday interactions of life.

But do we recognize God in the everyday interactions of life? You wouldn’t expect the Bible to be full of stories where God conceals the divine presence, where life seems to go on its ordinary way as though God were not present.

Yet that is exactly the background to our first reading from Hebrew Scripture. The author goes out of the way to stress that this was a time when “the word of the LORD was rare in those days; visions were not widespread.” This was an ordinary time, not a crisis time. It was one of those times when life just seemed to go along as normal. In those circumstances, it was easy to assume that the everyday business of living would go on without interruption.

A few weeks ago, we heard a reading from Zephaniah which expressed a warning about those same kinds of times (though at a different period): in Zephaniah 1:12 we read about “the people who rest complacently* on their dregs, those who say in their hearts, ‘The LORD will not do good, nor will he do harm.’”

In other words, the story of the child Samuel happens in a time when it looks as though God is not paying much attention. Eli, we are told, has not restrained his children when they spoke disrespectfully about God.

And, we are also told, the impression that God is not noticing is an illusion. God is absolutely paying attention, but does not always make that attention obvious.

The sons of Eli believed that what they said about God did not matter. Some of Paul’s followers in Corinth seem to have believed that since the religious life was lived in the spirit, what they did with their bodies did not matter.

You may have found that rather bleak passage from I Corinthians a little lacking in the compassion that we hope to find in scripture. What Paul was actually saying is that we should treat the human body as just as sacred as the soul. Our whole lives, our whole being, can be part of our life of worship. Paul may not have chosen the best of words (sometimes he just didn’t – look at II Corinthians for that); but the message is in the end meant to be a positive one.

There is something of a legend among amateur historians of Puritan names that some poor children were inflicted with the name “Flee-fornication” as a reference to verse 18 of the reading that we heard. I have to say that after a few decades of working in religious history, I personally have not come across anyone so abused as to be given that as a baptismal name: though some of the slightly less bizarre ones, such as Praise-God, Fear-God, and Accepted are quite real.

God notices what we do, even when, as is our normal experience, there are no extraordinary voices of prophecy warning us against our recklessness.

There is a particularly dangerous form of assuming that God is not listening. That is the assumption that we can speak for God; that we know the will of God so perfectly, that we can decide which commands to receive and to ignore.

Some people nowadays believe that so long as they hate those things and those people whom they disapprove of – and whom they assume God also disapproves of – then they are Christians. They need not worry about caring for the needy, welcoming the stranger, showing compassionate love for the outcast, or any of the things which Jesus explicitly, repeatedly, taught by both word and example.

Let me say clearly: the Gospel is not a political slogan. It does not compress itself to fit in the small minds of human ideologies. The Gospel continually challenges us to be real, to be honest with ourselves, to be guileless and frank as Nathanael was. There is no sin that Jesus condemns so explicitly as hypocrisy. And how many times in this day and age do we hear ethical values manipulated for ideological and partisan advantage, by those who do not live by those values?

But let’s keep it real. Will God intervene as he promised to do in the story of Eli, saying “I am about to do something … that will make both ears of anyone who hears of it tingle?” Will God, as Zephaniah described, “search Jerusalem with lamps, and … punish the people who rest complacently?”

We have learned down the ages to be a little more subtle than that. Church history is littered with episodes when human beings thought that they could call on God to vindicate their warnings, and the dramatic divine intervention did not happen – or at least, did not happen in that way.

For I firmly believe that injustice ultimately brings its own recompense. Endless anger leads to futile embattlement and isolation. Those who suppose that their lives would be perfect, if only everyone they disliked were somehow done away with, are doomed to a lifetime of frustration and disappointment. The universe does not, after all, revolve around them and their prejudices.

Listening to some of today’s politicians who spend all their time ranting against wrongs which they either exaggerate or just imagine, I hope that they are putting on an act. I really do – otherwise I am so deeply sorry for them.

And conversely, I firmly believe that love builds its own spaces. Of itself love cannot conquer structural poverty, endemic inequality and prejudice, environmental destruction, or climate change. But love can build communities in which we begin to address these questions seriously and with hope. The love that makes all things possible is, quite literally, the work of the Spirit of God among us.

It will not happen immediately. You will, I am sure, recall that Martin Luther King, whom we remember at this season of the year, was hopeful but realistic. “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Those words were uttered in the National Cathedral nearly 56 years ago. There has been remarkable progress; and one of the signs of that progress is a holy impatience with the amount of justice work that still remains to be done.

That is the space where God speaks. God speaks in the call to us to recognize, and then to share, that there is a better way to live. The wonderful thing about living in the Spirit of the loving God is that it is self-reinforcing, it creates its own space, it is its own reward. We have to listen: to calm all of our own noise, and just listen, and then to respond.

“Speak, LORD, for your servant is listening.”

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Sermon for All Saints’ Ivoryton November 12 th 2023

We are rapidly approaching the end of the Church’s year and the beginning of a

new annual cycle of scripture readings with the First Sunday of Advent, which

begins on 3 rd December.

It seems as though today’s readings are already anticipating the Advent themes of

preparation, both for the celebration of the Nativity, and for the Second Coming

of Christ as foretold in our creeds.

If you are mildly uncomfortable with the language of Second Coming, please be

reassured that you are not alone: I for one also feel a little discomfort, and also a

duty to make the best use that we can of this aspect of our heritage.

Scholars believe that the First Letter to the Thessalonians, to the church at

Thessalonica in northern Greece, may have been one of the first of Paul’s

surviving letters to be written. It has been dated to the very early 50s of our era,

so less than twenty years after Jesus’s ministry.

You will all be aware, I expect, that following Paul’s life-changing encounter with

Jesus on the way to Damascus, he and the first followers of Jesus almost certainly

all expected to see Jesus return in his glory within a relatively short time. When

that message had been preached in all the communities of Paul’s mission, there

was an eager sense of anticipation. And then, as time passed, some of those who

were awaiting Jesus’s return had died. What, the churches wondered, would

become of them?

Paul wrote this dramatic foretelling of the Second Coming essentially out of a

spirit of gentle, pastoral reassurance. Don’t worry, he says: when Christ comes

again, first will come the resurrection of his deceased followers, then the

exaltation of the living followers to meet the returning Jesus.

Reassuring those who might grieve about the destiny of their friends was Paul’s

objective. But of course, with the passing of time, the focus in Christian thought

has shifted towards the second part of Paul’s foretelling, the sketch of what it will

be like for the living believers to “be caught up in the clouds together with them

to meet the Lord in the air.” This passage is one very fragmentary biblical passage

on which the whole complicated architecture of the so-called “rapture” has been

built up.

But even from almost the beginning of the church, it has been necessary to warn

people that they should not live as though this life was provisional, as though

waiting for something to happen. Live fully, the followers of Jesus were told, live

your best life by supporting and loving each other. Let the coming of Christ look

after itself.

In his later letters, Paul turned this “waiting time” into a vital theological principle.

Since the death and resurrection of Jesus, the powers of evil have been

conquered. The arc of history is not in doubt. It tends irresistibly towards God’s

loving plan for the restoration of all things in Christ. And, at the same time, while

we know that the ultimate victory of God’s plan is not in doubt, we live in a world

where that victory is not yet visible – or at least it is only partly visible. The

powers of hatred, anger, distrust and violence are still thrashing around. That was

true in the first century as much as it is true now. The challenge to people of faith

is to live into an imagined future while being realistic about living in the here and

now.

That brings us to today’s Gospel. I wonder if you find the story of the wise and

foolish bridesmaids (or as the Greek text calls them parthenoi, traditionally

rendered as “virgins”) a little bewildering?

This story, which appears only in Matthew, must have made sense to those who

heard it. Yet it is puzzling. Why is the bridegroom not at his wedding feast

already? Where is the bride, for a start? She goes unmentioned here. The

implication is that the young people of the community, if they turned up to give

the bridal party a torchlit welcome as they arrived home after the ceremony,

would be invited in for free food and drink. Incidentally, the word “parthenoi”

translated as bridesmaids in the NRSV and virgins in the KJV, had an extremely

imprecise meaning in antiquity. It could mean young people, unmarried people,

even women who had not yet given birth, as well as those who were virginal in

the sense that we understand it. At any rate, these were young people who would

be supporters of the newly married – the kind of people to whom bouquets are

thrown in our own culture.

So they need to play their part and light the couple home, or they don’t get the

free meal.

That, of course, is an extended metaphor. Jesus – or Matthew – is telling the

hearers that no matter how long we have to wait for the coming of Christ, we

must continuously live in such a way as to be prepared – morally, spiritually,

emotionally prepared – to meet with the Jesus whom we worship.

This could sound like a recipe for infinite, eternal frustration. I fear that it must be

so for some of those who take the Book of Revelation as a kind of roadmap to the

end of time, and feel dismayed when the “imminent” Second Coming fails to

materialize.

A few years ago, I read the doctrinal statement of an evangelical school called

Liberty University. At that time, students and all other members were required to

sign on to the statement that “We affirm that the return of Christ for all believers

is imminent. It will be followed by seven years of great tribulation, and then the

coming of Christ to establish His earthly kingdom for a thousand years.” In the

current doctrinal statement, which may or may not have superseded that form

(the website is not clear) this claim is absent.

I am not here in the business of criticizing the faith of others (though I definitely

disagree with some of the very narrow and unloving ethical principles which they

derive from that faith). What I want to do here is to suggest to us that waiting,

with an air of frustration, for the signs of the Second Coming is missing the point,

and it is missing something absolutely wonderful.

Jesus, and Paul, seem to be saying by their acts and their teachings, that we

should live our lives in the confident faith that Jesus has conquered the forces of

evil in the world. With that confidence, we are called to trust, absolutely, that

doing the best we can, being the most loving people that we can be, is absolutely

and eternally worth it.

It would be so easy to be the opposite, would it not? If you wish to look for

reasons to be discouraged and pessimistic, there is plenty of raw material out

there.

Across the world, there are peoples who utterly refuse to allow their neighbours

who are different to live in peace alongside them. And as a result, everyone

suffers. We see that in Ukraine, and we see it in Gaza. The consequences of that

refusal, in the seeds and the fruits of hatred and violence, make it very difficult for

anyone in those tormented situations to rise above the hate and to seek peace.

And in our own countries – yours and mine – politicians and media figures do the

most they can to arouse fear and hatred of those coming into the country from

outside, who are in some way seen as threats to the traditional way of life of our

host countries. Is our way of life were so fragile, so unattractive to a minority who

came to live with us, that it could not withstand being shared with others?

The Gospel calls us to do much, much better than fear and distrust. And the most

vitally important thing about that, is that the same Gospel tells us that it is always,

eternally, worth doing much, much better. To live by the principles of sacrificial

love, of limitlessly including and welcoming those who are different, is not a naïve

and pointless waste of time. It is living into the incoming kingdom of God.

Remember how our Gospel begins: “Then the kingdom of heaven will be like

this.” Endless readiness, endless preparation for a better world, means living as

though that better world is already here – and knowing that, in a sense, it already

is.

We are not called to frustration that Christ is not here yet. We are called to

rejoicing, welcoming, embracing the possibilities that our life in the foretaste of

the kingdom of God brings us.

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September 17, 2023: Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost Readings

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Sermon for All Saints’ Ivoryton, October 8th 2023

One of the problems about writing sermons for every week in this Pentecost

season is that sometimes one unintentionally steals material from future weeks.

Two weeks ago, on 24th September, you may recall that I preached on the parable

of the laborers in the vineyard.

I tried then to explain what vineyards meant to Jesus’s hearers. Vineyards were a

familiar metaphor in the prophets and the Psalms for the people of Israel, as they

are here. That sermon quoted the celebrated “song of the vineyard” from Isaiah 5.

My original text also included a quotation from Psalm 80, but I left that out, in

order not to overload the text with scripture passages.

Two weeks later, our readings for today include – of course – Isaiah chapter 5 and

Psalm 80, with their very powerful “vineyard” passages. Oh dear, I have already

used at least one of those texts. Repetition is always a risk in preaching sermons,

but I don’t want to repeat myself any more than can be avoided.

However, if one looks closely, there is a subtle and very important difference

between the “vineyard” passages in Hebrew Scripture and those in the teachings

of Jesus. I wonder if we noticed that?

In Isaiah, it is the vineyard itself – the people of Israel – who have failed to

produce good results as God expected. For that reason, the vineyard is

threatened with devastation. In Psalm 80, the vineyard is already desolate,

despite all the care that God lavished on it: it has been overrun by outsiders and

laid waste.

As is usually the case in Hebrew Scripture, the relationship between God and the

people is conceived of in terms of the governance of the whole people, and the

protection of the whole people from their enemies. The vineyard, we might say, is

a political concept.

Now look at the way that Jesus uses the metaphor of the vineyard. In all the

vineyard images which have been grouped together in this part of Matthew’s

Gospel, the vines and the grapes themselves do not seem to be the problem. They

are growing and yielding their produce just fine.

Jesus’s issue is rather with the people who work in the vineyard. Those who begin

to work early feel superior to those who are called later. One son refuses to work

there and changes his mind; another offers to work but does not. In today’s

Gospel passage, the resident workers refuse to respect the prophets and the

Messiah when they come in the name of the owner of the vineyard, who is God.

The problem, Jesus seems to be saying, lies not with the people collectively, but

with those who are entrusted with the care of their spiritual life. The problem

that Jesus identifies, again and again, is the sense of religious entitlement.

As I suggested last week, one group which more than any other embodied

religious entitlement is the high priestly caste of Judaea. The high priests probably

still looked back to their ancestors among the Hasmonaean priest-kings of the

centuries just before Herod. However, the issue here is not with a particular

group of people – certainly not Jewish believers as a whole, and maybe not even

with the high priests as a whole – but with an attitude, the attitude that “God

owes me, and the rest of you should see that”.

Let us move sideways for a moment, and look at the passage from Paul’s letter to

the Church at Philippi. Paul was powerfully aware of just how religious he was. In

the reading that we heard, he stressed that not only his membership among the

people of Israel, but his impeccable conduct as a devout practitioner of his

tradition, entitled him to be regarded as a loyal follower of the God of Israel.

And shockingly, in a way, Paul sets all those things aside. Let us be clear: Paul does

not renounce his Jewishness. There is absolutely no reason to think that he lived a

life that was any less devout according to the Law, after Jesus Christ made himself

known to Paul and changed Paul’s life. Nor does Paul suggest that sincere Jewish

believers should be any less Jewish. What he does argue, repeatedly and in many

different ways in different letters, is that what matters is faith in Christ. Faith in

Jesus the Messiah is what really transforms. All one’s sense of one’s own religious

excellence withers away, like dry leaves in autumn, in the light of Jesus’s

presence.

Jesus, also, speaks a great deal about faith. Sometimes people show such

outstanding faith that Jesus exclaims in approval. Sometimes they lack sufficient

faith when they should display it.

Jesus repeatedly praises the faith of those on the margins of religious

respectability. In Matthew chapter 8 a Roman centurion, desperately worried

about the life of a beloved servant, shows greater faith than the people of Israel.

In the following chapter a woman with continuous menstrual flow, impure

according to the Levitical code, is healed by her faith, even though she has

“contaminated” Jesus by touching his garment. In chapter 15, a woman from

Syrian Phoenicia calls insistently on Jesus to help her daughter and will not be

refused, even though she is an alien.

In each case these people brought, not their sense of entitlement – for they had

none – but their acute sense of need to Jesus. It was not even that they turned to

Jesus first: the woman with hemorrhages turned to Jesus in despair after all else

had failed. But even faith born of desperation was still faith, and could be far

more sincere, than the attitude of those who believed that they had the God

thing worked out and pinned down.

Just as a reminder, it is not just the religious elite who fail to show faith. The

disciples themselves, repeatedly in Matthew, lack trust in Jesus even after they

have been travelling with him for months and have seen all that he has done.

Peter starts to sink into the Sea of Galilee when walking on the water because his

faith wavers. The disciples cannot cure the epileptic in chapter 17 because of their

lack of faith.

For us, these passages convey a lesson which is quite a paradox, and needs to be

thought about carefully.

We are most at risk of lacking faith when we are at our most religious.

That is, if we ever feel that our regular religious practice, our prayer, our

attendance in and participation in church life, our regular receiving of the

sacrament, that these things of themselves put us in a good place with God, then

we have misunderstood what the Christian life is about.

Prayer, life in community, and the sacraments are all good and blessed things, and

please do not suppose that I am suggesting that we do any less of them. You all

know better than that. But these good and blessed things help to sustain, nurture,

and protect faith. That is why they matter: not to replace faith, but to support it.

Sometimes we shall be like the centurion or the Syrophoenician woman, where

our clamor for help in our extreme need blocks out everything else. But we do not

need to become outsiders to experience such need.

When I was growing up, there was much use made of the New English Bible, a

translation – in some ways more of a paraphrase of Scripture – which had been

exhaustively worked over by teams of scholars from the middle 1940s to the

1960s. It has largely fallen from favor since the NRSV, closer to the King James

version but modernized in respect of both language and scholarship, has become

available.

However, NEB has one moment of brilliance, where it translates the first

beatitude as “How blest are those who know their need of God; the kingdom of

Heaven is theirs”. That translation of the text traditionally rendered as “blessed

are the poor in spirit” has stuck with me down the years, and I feel there is

inspiration in it.

The vital point in that beatitude is that the “spiritually poor”, those who know

that they are not sufficient of themselves, but need God’s help, are already

welcomed within God’s realm. They do not have to aspire or struggle for anything:

the very fact that they acknowledge their need is all that God asks.

There will be times of crisis and challenge when we are compelled to

acknowledge our need of God, because of the struggles that confront us. When

we are in deep distress, we cry out for help, and God is present with us whether

we feel it or not. The challenge to faith is to keep that sense of our dependence

on our loving God when things are going well, and we may feel tempted to be

self-sufficient.

If we receive the Christ who comes to us through faith, and place our hope and

trust in that expression of divine love, then that, in itself, will make us “a people that 

produces the fruits of the kingdom.”

Submitted by the Reverend Doctor Euan Cameron

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Sermon for All Saints’ Ivoryton, August 27 th 2023

Who do we all think Jesus is?

Matthew’s Gospel quotes “the people” giving answers to the question which fall

in line with Jewish tradition. Jesus must occupy a place in the sequence of the

prophets. There seems to be a belief that prophetic figures may be resurrected,

or reappear in the form of another person, or like Elijah, simply reappear after

being carried up into heaven.

But Peter then says, blurts out almost, that Jesus is the Messiah, the one anointed

of God to save the people. The “Messiah” is also a profoundly Jewish concept,

built into Jewish cosmology and beliefs about the final goal of history. But to

make that claim means that Jesus occupies a unique place in the history of Israel.

He is more than just a resuscitated or reappearing prophet.

But we have to make our own answer, from our own tradition and experience.

One of the problems about this question, for me as a historian of the Church, is

that for a very long time Christian thinkers were preoccupied (and some still are)

with a different question. They have asked, instead:

What do we think Jesus is? What kind of being is he / was he?

Down the ages many and various answers have been proposed and argued for as

answers to this question.

Trying to make sense of the proposed answers brings us into a subject area called

metaphysics. Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy which tries to make rational

sense of statements about what it means for something to exist, especially

regarding spiritual existence.

Please note: there is not, in ancient Christianity, much of an impulse to say “it is a

mystery beyond our understanding, and we should believe without thinking too

hard”. On the contrary, the history of the Church is that people did think through,

maybe over-think, these questions, and often argued bitterly over the answers.

Some early movements could not accept the idea that Jesus had a material

existence. Physical body was nasty, smelly, and unpleasant, and a philosophical

person wanted to live in the spirit. Hence a “heresy” arose, known as Docetism,

which claimed that Jesus only “seemed” to have a physical body, but that in

reality he could not have eaten and drunk, been maltreated by the Romans, been

crucified and died. This idea did terrible violence to the idea of incarnation.

That “heresy” was discredited fairly early in late antiquity. Thereafter, the

majority view was that Jesus was both fully human, and also fully divine. The next

bitterly divisive question was how the divine Jesus and the human Jesus related

one to another. Various answers were proposed, and angrily debated, in the early

Christian centuries.

One idea, associated with Nestorius of Constantiople, was that Jesus had two

distinct and separable natures, divine and human.

In violent reaction against Nestorius, another group argued that Jesus had one

single nature, which in some way contained divine and human aspects. These

believers became known as “Miaphysites” which means “people who believe in

one nature.”

In the year 451 a Church Council held at Chalcedon, in an area which is now an

outer suburb of Istanbul, adopted a formula whereby Jesus had two natures,

which were indivisibly linked, but were nonetheless separate and should not be

confused with one another. The formula of Chalcedon was accepted by the main

Eastern Orthodox Churches and throughout the West, but was (and still is)

rejected by the Coptic, Armenian, Syrian, and Ethiopian churches.

Perhaps absurdly, perhaps terrifyingly, these differences in understanding Jesus’s

natures still keep these “Miaphysite” churches separate from the rest of Eastern

Christianity. A few years ago, a highly educated physician who was also a Coptic

Orthodox Christian explained how important those divisions were to him.

Then, about a hundred years ago, an enormously influential German Protestant

theologian called Adolf Harnack said that this obsession with the metaphysics of

Jesus’s being had, in fact, been a terrible distraction and a mistake. It drew people

away from what Jesus taught to an unhealthy preoccupation with what Jesus

was.

In some modern Western traditions, there is a tendency to go to the opposite

extreme. Some radical progressive Christians stress not only the humanity, but

the political engagement of the human Jesus. In this way of thinking, Jesus was a

friend and supporter of the oppressed poor in Roman-dominated Galilee and

Judaea. He identified with those who were desperately poor, and proposed a set

of values and a way of life that was subtly (and sometimes not subtly) critical of

the imperial structures of the time. “Empire-critical” analysis is extremely popular

at the moment among New Testament scholars. (I sometimes wonder if it is

dangerous if I express skepticism about it to my Union colleagues.)

My problem with this way of thinking is that focusing on the material, political

Jesus involves setting aside, not only the whole history of the Church after the

early decades post-Pentecost: it also involves setting aside most of the New

Testament. There were plenty of political-economic rebels against Rome in the

first two centuries of our era, and we know who they were. Nothing about their

movements lived after them. Jesus was mysteriously and vitally different.

However, it is a legitimate question whether we have been asking the wrong

question, “what” was Jesus, rather than the question he asked Peter and the

other disciples, “who do you say that I am”?

Who is the person, Jesus? The oldest Gospel, that of Mark, begins with the very

blunt statement “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.”

(Confusingly, some early manuscripts do not have the words “son of God”, but

many scholars believe that the words are nevertheless authentic.)

Most of us would, I think, say that in Jesus we are given a unique insight into the

mind and purposes of a God who is, otherwise, utterly beyond our limited

understanding. That is the message and the wonder of incarnation.

At one and the same time, Jesus brings good news, and in a sense is the good

news. He invites us to trust in the message which he brings, and to believe in who

he is.

We need always to hold these things – Jesus’s message and his core being – in

balance. The first three Gospels (especially) tell us a great deal about what Jesus

taught and did. The Fourth Gospel and all the writings of Paul focus more on the

meaning of who Jesus was, and what his ministry achieved. Yet there is plenty of

overlap: one aspect never entirely pushes out the other.

Jesus as a teacher makes claims that are, to the wisdom of the world, wildly

implausible and contrary to our expectations (think of the Beatitudes)

He says that those who suffer – not just from poverty or oppression, but

also from grief, loss, or lack of confidence – have a special place in the love

of God and can trust in that divine love for them.

 He says that the forces of power – of money, of state-sponsored violence,

of the arrogance of those in authority, of the terrifying entitlement which

sucks people into its orbit and exploits them – may seem to rule the world,

but in the last analysis they do not.

 He says that those who hold positions of religious prestige may not be

those who are closest to God, especially if they make their religious status a

matter of outward show.

How is Jesus in a position to make these counter-cultural and frankly implausible

claims? Because of who he is, shown by his ministry, his speaking “with

authority”, and the conviction, that grew among his friends after his post-

resurrection appearances, that he occupied a unique place in the very being of

God.

Nowadays many of us would not wish to argue that faith in Jesus is the only valid

revelation of God, but would affirm the divine insights of other traditions as well.

How does a more inclusive, interfaith approach affect our understanding of Jesus?

The revelation of Jesus can be added to the other ways that God has made God’s

nature known. It needs not to be rigorously exclusive; but for us who are called to

the Christian way, it will be for us the best and highest way that God is revealed.

In the end, let me offer a very Episcopalian answer. To the extent that we feel

that liturgical repetition of the creed of the Council of Nicea expresses our beliefs,

let us feel fully justified in holding on to that. And if one embraces, in addition,

one’s own personal set of questions? Let us trust that Jesus welcomes and

cherishes the fact that we actually care enough, to try to answer that same

question that Peter answered nearly two thousand years ago.

Who do you say that I am?

submitted by the Reverend Doctor Euan Cameron

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Sermon for August 6th, 2023: Feast of the Transfiguration

Why are we celebrating this commemoration on this date? Most years, we mark the Sunday of the Transfiguration at the end of the Epiphany season before the Sunday in Lent, where in a sense it “belongs” in the way that we tell the story of Jesus’s journey towards his Passion.

Essentially, we mark this day because there has been a historic commemoration of the Transfiguration at this time for many centuries. In the Western Church, the Feast of the Transfiguration was definitely assigned to 6th August in 1456. Pope Callixtus III elevated it to a Feast day in that year, when the news arrived that the Ottoman siege of Belgrade had been lifted by the Hungarian Janos Hunyadi. This was just a few years after the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans. There was a real fear in the West that all Christendom might be overrun, so any setbacks to that advance were seen as providential (however problematic we might find that attitude).

It was not a strong tradition in the early history of the Church of England, but was reintroduced to Anglicanism by the 1892 revision of the Book of Common Prayer of the Episcopal Church, and remains there.

It is only celebrated on a Sunday if 6th August happens to fall on a Sunday, otherwise it would be marked in the daily office. According to the BCP, three feasts, appointed on fixed days, take precedence of a Sunday: The Holy Name, The Presentation, The Transfiguration.

So, it is a special day in the way that we organize our worship life.

Right, that’s the liturgical geekery out of the way.

From the time of Origen in the 3rd century, the Transfiguration is believed to have taken place on Mount Tabor, a 1,900 foot mountain in the plain of Jezreel 11 miles west of the Sea of Galilee. There are Franciscan and Orthodox monasteries on its summit.

Four accounts of the experience survive in Scripture: three in the Synoptic Gospels and one in the letter of Peter which we just heard. Our Gospel account for today comes from Luke. Each Gospel includes slightly different details and emphases although the basic story is the same.

Let us focus on the essential message first. By even the standards of Scripture, the event we know as the transfiguration (a Latin word invented to express the Greek word metamorphosis) was an extraordinary experience. Jesus was still in the midst of his Galilean ministry, though according to some accounts he

was reaching the end of that phase and beginning to turn his attention to Jerusalem.

This miraculous event, we are told, gave divine witness to Jesus’s unique status as the beloved son of God. Jesus is transformed – Luke’s Gospel does not say “transfigured” or “metamorphosed” but rather “became different” and glows with his own internal light.

The contrast with Moses’s appearance on the mountain when he received the Law is deliberate and emphatic. Moses’s face shone because he had been in the presence of God, and the glow on his face was so extreme that it was uncomfortable for people to look upon.

(Forgive a little digression. For centuries the passage in Exodus about Moses’s face “shining” was mistranslated in the Latin Bible used in the Western Church. The Hebrew word that our bibles translate as “shining” can be read two different ways in Hebrew. Jerome, the 4th-century translator of the Latin Bible, read it in the other possible way in verses 29 and 35, as “horned” rather than “shining”. That is why, in many medieval and Renaissance works of art – including a famous sculpture by Michelangelo –Moses is shown with little horns on his head.)

Back to the point. Moses shone with reflected light; in contrast, the glow that came from Jesus came from within. God was present, but the divine light issued from the body of the incarnate Jesus himself.

Let’s not waste time thinking how this was supposed to happen, or what the apostles and evangelists might “really” have seen. As always, focus on the meaning of the story.

Jesus embodies the power of God within his very self. And he appears accompanied by Moses, who represents the tradition of the Law, and Elijah, who represents the tradition of the prophets. In Luke’s Gospel, and only there, we read that the Moses and Elijah also appeared “in glory”.

The message is familiar. As the Gospels keep saying, Jesus taught that he was the fulfilment and culmination of the Hebrew tradition.

This insight is then confirmed by a heavenly voice. The principal other point at which such a voice is recorded is at the time of Jesus’s baptism by John the Baptist, where we read in 3:17:

“And a voice from heaven said, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.’”

Only in John’s Gospel do we read of divine voices at other points in the story of Jesus. In the first three Gospels, God speaks and identifies Jesus as God’s own, at two critical moments in Jesus’s mission. Even so, the disciples are confused about who he really is; the rest of the world is reluctant or disbelieving.

Jesus is revealed in glory only to a select few, and even they don’t quite understand what is happening. In his ordinary ministry, Jesus teaches and heals, and calls on people to learn and draw their own conclusions. The transfiguration is there as a reassurance, but it does not take away the daily struggle of mission and proclamation.

The Gospels are true to our experience. We may experience moments of sudden enlightenment which reassure us of God’s loving presence in our lives. Those moments may come in encounter with the Bible, with the sacraments, with each other, or indeed with the creation. There are many ways in which we can be made to “glow” with the reflected light of God’s presence. But those moments do not last, and they are not meant to last. Some Christians try to stay on the mountain top: mystics and saints who have spent long lives in prayer and contemplation. Jesus prayed, profoundly and often; but he also descended from his secret places of prayer to teach, to challenge, to confront evil forces.

Blazing light can be – as it was in these Gospel stories – a symbol of the powerful presence of a loving God. It can also be morally neutral: uncountable stars across the universe blaze with light, because it is their physical nature to do so. And sometimes, blazing light can signify destruction. 72 years ago on this day, the first of two atomic bombs exploded over Japan, in attacks which brought about the surrender of an otherwise stubbornly resolute military regime.

It is not our task here to reflect on the morality of the use of these terrible weapons. At multiple times in our lifetime, these weapons came dangerously close to destroying life on our world. You and I have spent quite a lot of our lives on what, in purely human terms, has felt like a knife-edge.

And a loving God took human form, and embodied forever the sacrificial love that God shows towards all creation. That cannot change.

But as we descend from the mountain into the messy realities of life, we must always struggle to share the message of love with those who are reluctant, confused, or stubborn. There are a lot of false Messiahs out there. Some of the greatest tragedies of the past century or so arose when would-be-leaders persuaded other human beings to join a movement based on the hatred of one group of people for another – on aggressive division and difference. We see just how fallible humanity is, when so many people trust their identities and their security to utterly unworthy leader-figures.

The real threat to life lies not in our weapons of destruction in themselves (though they are bad enough) but in the shaky quality of those who might use them. Frail egos and needy self-images, among those in power, can all too easily sacrifice human life to their own self-importance.

As people of faith, of hope, and of love, we must speak, and above all we must act, so as to dissuade those around us from the reckless pursuit of security at the expense of others. We must live as though the love of God encompasses everyone, and threatens no-one. We must pray, work, and live for a more equal sharing of resources, care for the creation, and the breaking down of barriers between one people and another.

It is not easy. It was not easy for the apostles and the early Church. But the experience of Jesus transfigured, glowing with his own and God’s light, reassured them, and it is there to reassure us. As the author of 2 Peter wrote, “we have the prophetic message more fully confirmed … be attentive to this as

to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.”

Submitted by the Reverend Doctor Euan Cameron

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Sermon for July 30th 2023, Ninth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 12)

We have now reached the stage in Matthew’s account of Jesus’s teaching where Jesus describes, in a series of compact and rather graphic images, the “kingdom of heaven” (which other evangelists, and Matthew himself at times, also call the “kingdom of God”.) There is no real difference between these two expressions: speaking of “heaven” when one means “God and God’s realm” was a bit like referring to “the White House” as an entity, when one means the office of the President.

But that introduces our first problem. Kings: I have one and mostly, you don’t (save for any Commonwealth passport-holders, or citizens of the European constitutional monarchies amongst us). The image of “king” can be at least as problematical, if not more so, than the image of “father”, given that the world’s experience of kings has not always, or even very much, been a good one. And relating to the imagery of kingship, when your whole political culture rests on repudiating that idea, may seem really quite a challenge.

Yet we persistently assign the title of “king” to Jesus, even though when his followers tried to make him a king in the conventional sense, Jesus ducked and dodged. Being accused of aspiring to kingship in the Roman Empire put one’s life in imminent danger.

The term “kingdom of God” was already known to some late ancient Jewish teachers and rabbis, and even in Scripture itself. According to the Wisdom of Solomon chapter 10, personified Wisdom showed a righteous man “the kingdom of God”. However, while scholars have been able to trace divine kingship in the writings of the time before Jesus, there is no doubt that Jesus, (i) used the expression “the kingdom” of heaven, or of God, far more often than anyone before him; and (ii) that he completely transformed its meaning into something very personal and very special.

Let’s take a moment to reflect on what “kingship” would have meant for the Jewish people of Jesus’s time. First, kingship was something which the Jewish people had been given, and had lost. Above all it was the kingship of David, who was believed to have created a unified and expanded Israel by his military skill; and of his son Solomon, the one of legendary wisdom and discernment, and the founder of the Temple. Then it had all gone wrong: the kingdom had been divided, and one half was picked off by the Assyrians and the other a century or so later by the Babylonians. Ever since then the royal rulers of Judaea had been outsiders.

Kingship also meant priesthood. In a particular sense the king was the intermediary between the people and their God. In the later history of Judaea there had been a kind of overlap between political and religious leadership in the persons of the Hasmonean high priests. 

Then there was the kingship of the Messiah. For many Jewish believers, kingship was tied up with their hope and expectation that God would give the people a powerful and godly leader who would restore kingship, autonomy, self-government and respect to the people and the nation.

When people heard the expression “the kingdom of God”, it was almost impossible for them not to think of a worldly, political restoration of the nation, either within time, or at the end of history through God’s direct action.

That was a huge burden of expectation for Jesus to take on through his preaching; and yet, rather than avoiding it entirely because of the persistent risk of being misunderstood, he embraced the talk of the “kingdom” and transformed it.

For John the Baptist, and Jesus after him, the “kingdom” was breaking into the world. It was close; it was near at hand; it was waiting to be discovered; it was, in a sense, already among us. It just needed to be recognized.

And in parables, as I have suggested many times, Jesus intends to provoke thought, to challenge, to use powerful and often bewildering imagery to make people reflect, to get them out of their familiar thought-spaces.

What message do our Gospel passages send about the kingdom?

God’s new order seems insignificant in itself, but when it establishes itself in a place where it can grow, it will grow spectacularly, and have influence far beyond itself.

God’s new order is of unimaginable worth; the person who discovers it will feel that it exceeds in value anything else that they own.

God’s new order welcomes everyone, although, sadly, it seems that not everyone will have the grace to receive it.

God’s new order does not supersede or replace God’s former promises, but it does build on them. Teachers trained for the kingdom of heaven bring from their treasure what is new and what is old.

Here Jesus is preaching about nothing less than his own mission and his own message. The “kingdom of heaven” is what the world looks like, when it lives in the way that God intends for it to do.

That means that there are some questions that are not worth asking about the kingdom of God, because seeking answers to them leads one off in the wrong direction.

Don’t ask “where is it?” because it is not some institutional structure which has a headquarters and borders.

Don’t ask “when is it coming?” because it will not come with pomp and ceremony, like the procession of a worldly monarch, and attract everyone’s attention. It will grow silently and unnoticed.

Don’t ask “who is included?” because it is not the special property of any one group of people.

But do ask “how will it transform my life, and how can I (and more importantly, we) be ready to receive it?”

Because it rests on images and parables, there are plenty of sincere people around who try for one reason or another to reduce the kingdom of God to something easier to comprehend.

There are still those who believe that Jesus was fundamentally an insurrectionary leader seeking to free the people of Judaea from Roman imperial control. Even those who do not buy entirely into the Jesus-as-zealot interpretation still make a great deal of what they call “empire-critical” interpretations of scripture. In this view, Jesus’s kingship was an intentional challenge to the Roman emperors who claimed to be divine beings (Vespasian’s “O dear, I think I’m becoming a god!”)

In a different way, an earnest and sincere Lutheran student submitted a dissertation in which she proposed with, I thought, rather too much confidence, that Jesus’s kingdom was a sort of agricultural collective, where the poor of the land could live self-sufficiently away, from the demands of the wealthy landowning classes.

Now, there is nothing wrong in criticizing the lust for power that suffuses so much of the world’s politics, or in seeking to help the poor to lead decent and self-sufficient lives, away from the demands of those who would oppress them. But these good things will ultimately happen, if we first understand how to grow into the kingdom of God.

Jesus’s kingdom does not necessarily entail subverting or destroying the existing political order, nor does it mean escaping to a utopian community outside the normal social order.

It means something bolder: transforming from within the societies we all live in. It means, among many things, being the tiny amount of yeast which transforms the flour in the whole large loaf that is human life.

The kingdom exists in and alongside the social systems and structures that the world lives by. It is something which happens when faithful people gather together and live for each other. When we meet together in the name and in the service of Jesus Christ, we become a part of the kingdom. We become

some of the yeast in the dough.

Finally, the kingdom is a gift, not an achievement. It is the work of the God who took human form and lived among us. The kingdom is the living embodiment of that continuing gift and blessing. So we don’t design a kingdom for God all by ourselves. We receive it as a gift of grace. We proclaim it, we live for it, we make it visible through the love that we show to each other and a needy, hurting world.

Submitted by the Reverend Doctor Euan Cameron

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Sermon for All Saints, July 2nd 2023, Fifth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 8)

As we were last week, so this week we are exploring a part of Matthew’s Gospel where Jesus is preparing his disciples to go on mission journeys. Chapter 10 is entirely devoted to mission, though the chapters which follow do not really tell us what happened after the disciples went on their way. Rather, the Gospel turns to various memorable sayings of Jesus and stories of healing.

The message seems to be that Matthew appended the sayings about preparing for mission to the story of Jesus choosing the twelve apostles. Then he folded in all the advice and promises that were intended, principally, for those who were spreading the good news of Jesus in the latter decades of the first century.

And last week, as you will remember, the news was discouraging, if not downright threatening. The sharing of Jesus’s message would bring conflict, even conflict among those who were most closely linked by family ties. 

This week, we hear the other side of the story. For those who are willing to listen, to receive, to embrace and to support the message of the Gospel, there will be a reward.

But Jesus – or Matthew – makes a deliberate connection with the experience of those who spoke for God in the time of ancient Israel. “Whoever welcomes a prophet in the name of a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward”. 

When we link that saying to the story of Jeremiah that we have also heard over the last few weeks, that statement starts to sound alarmingly ambiguous. What was Jeremiah’s reward for being a prophet? In last week’s reading we heard that Jeremiah was put in the stocks for foretelling the triumph of Babylon over Judah. In this week’s reading, Jeremiah finds himself in a prophesying contest with a rival prophet called Hananiah. More on that in a minute.

Even outside the Bible, the idea that one might prophesy future events and be destined to be rejected, ignored, or disbelieved was a well-known myth. In the ancient Greek tragic drama Agamemnon, written by the Athenian poet Aeschylus, Cassandra, the daughter of the last king and queen of Troy, was loved by the god Apollo. Apollo promised her that she would become a prophetess if she would become his lover. Cassandra agreed to the deal, received the gift of prophecy but decided that she would reject the god’s advances. (Greek drama could be surprisingly feminist at times.) Apollo then, unable to withdraw the gift of prophecy, added the curse that Cassandra would always foretell the truth, but that no-one would ever believe her. She then wanders through the play, and accurately predicts the events of the Trojan War, and no-one believes her.

Prophecy, in both Greek and Hebrew traditions, can be a curse.

Let’s return to Jeremiah for the moment. Just before the passage that we heard read (which makes little sense, by the way, unless you know what comes before it) one of Jeremiah’s rivals, a prophet called Hananiah, has told the people:

‘Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: I have broken the yoke of the king of Babylon. 3Within two years I will bring back to this place all the vessels of the Lord’s house, which King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon took away from this place and carried to Babylon. 4I will also bring back to this place King Jeconiah son of Jehoiakim of Judah, and all the exiles from Judah who went to Babylon, says the Lord, for I will break the yoke of the king of Babylon.’

In the reading that we just heard, Jeremiah is in effect responds to Hananiah by saying “I wish this were all true – but it isn’t”.

Jeremiah is put in the typically ungracious position of having to tell the people “this prophet just gave you good news – but he is wrong.” Jeremiah looked at the greatly increasing power of the empire of Babylon and said “we cannot resist this.”

People tend to receive the predictions that suit them better. 

Who are our unheeded prophets today? … Certainly, there are plenty of folk around, including many politicians, who openly reject the idea that our natural world will become dangerously degraded if we do not change our ways of living. There are many more who pay lip-service to the idea that we must change our ways, but are very reluctant to make real changes. 

Yet the prophecies of Hananiah and Jeremiah were based on supernatural visions. The foretellings of our unheeded prophets today are based on real evidence, real calculations, real scientific endeavour. Stubborn resistance to believe in visible, natural threats is if anything much worse than the refusal to believe in supernatural ones. Yet the same mentality applies: it isn’t convenient for us, so we prefer to believe something that is more convenient, that affirms what we want to believe and suits our life choices.

But there is another side to this series of texts.

Suppose that things happen the other way around? What is the reward for recognizing a prophet? What is the reward for supporting those who speak truth?

In the next chapter of Jeremiah (chapter 29 – which we shall not be reading next week!), the prophet says, in effect, yes, you are being carried off to Babylon, and you will remain there for seventy years. However, in a way, it will be okay. Go with it. You can marry and raise families, invest in the land, build communities just as you did back in Judah; and make the places where you live as your own, and pray for them

In a similar way, in Jesus’s preaching, those who hear the words of the apostles and respond to them with generosity and support, will be rewarded in the same way as those who took the risks of going out on mission.

Yes, there will be disagreement and conflict, but that is because some people will actually receive the Gospel. And those who receive the apostles will be regarded as those who have received Jesus. 

This is an extraordinarily generous promise, but it is also extraordinarily hopeful. It is saying, in effect, that the Gospel is massively contagious: that listening to those who speak the Word is rewarded far beyond the intrinsic worth of such an act.

So what is the reward for listening to a prophet in the right way?

The reward is a relationship with God and with God’s community: not just, or even particularly, a personal encounter with the loving principle at the heart of existence; but rather fellowship, mutual support, living together in the way that God intended people to live. 

As we saw last week, that means a community of welcome and affirmation – even when that calls us to cast aside the exclusiveness that makes us wish only to be with our own kind.

The message needs to be spread. Part of our life as a community must consist of looking always outwards, to see where we can be of help to the wider community, and how we can draw the wider community into our orbit, and vice versa.

That is why it is a wonderful thing that we are making our presence felt, in whatever way we can, through things like Tuesday’s bake sale and drinks tables for those participating in the July 4th events in Ivoryton. It is why we must lose no opportunity both to build up our own common life, and to make that life known to others around us. Not only should we explore whether we can make our outreach, through electronic and other media more effective, as a church; we should also explore how, individually, we can make the place that All Saints plays in our lives known to those around us. 

We are called to say what Jesus was saying. So much reward, so much fulfillment and support, is offered so readily, so willingly, for those who accept the invitation. The reward so far exceeds the gift of support, however modest it may be. That in turn, encourages us who have received the Gospel to go out and share it. 

Submitted by the Revd. Dr. Euan Cameron

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Sermon for All Saints, 25th June 2023, Fourth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 7)

I should like to begin by talking a little bit about Jeremiah, from whose prophecies our first reading today was chosen. In the readings for this Pentecost season, we are following the “track” of readings where there is some kind of relationship between the themes of the Old Testament reading (especially) and the Gospel.

The book of Jeremiah contains a rich, poetic, but also rather disorderly and confusing collection of religious poetry and prophecy inspired by the conflict in Judah in the early 6th century BCE. This conflict was generated by the competing influences of Egypt and Babylon over the kingdom of Judah, which eventually led to the conquest of Jerusalem and the deportation of many of its people to Babylon after 587. 

The figure we know as “Jeremiah” was constantly foretelling bad news; and this made some of his political and religious rivals extremely uncomfortable and upset.

Just before the passage that we heard read, the text reports that Pashhur son of Immer, who was chief officer in the Temple, hearing what Jeremiah prophesied, struck the prophet, and put him in the stocks in the upper Benjamin Gate of the Temple. (How very New England …)

This episode leads to the poem which forms the basis of the first reading. Jeremiah complains that he cannot restrain himself from uttering prophecies, but whatever he says always gets him into trouble. What on earth is he to do? Jeremiah is constantly put in the position of being the unwelcome messenger who is punished for his message.

In our Gospel reading, Jesus is trying to equip his missionaries with the mental preparation required for their missions. He warns them of the challenges that they will face. They cannot expect to arouse any less hostility than Jesus himself has done. This advice in Matthew, of course, is directed not just at the disciples/apostles but those who come after. We might say it is directed at us.

Jesus tells his followers to be explicit about his teaching – proclaim it from the rooftops – but be ready for trouble as a consequence.

To illustrate the conflict which his teaching will arouse, Jesus quotes a passage from the prophecies of Micah, where Micah talks about family conflict and broken relationships among those who are the closest of kin. The prophet stresses that, in a time of crisis, one cannot rely on the solidity of human relationships, only on God. Matthew is, by the way, the only one to place this quotation in the mouth of Jesus.

Why is today’s message so threatening and so full of dire warnings? We are accustomed to think of Jesus’s message as one of love, peace, compassion, and forgiveness. What is there not to like, as one might put it?

Sadly, human nature in worldly societies does not always live readily and willingly by the principles of compassion for one another, and justice for the oppressed. If that were so, we might expect that there would not be oppressed and outcast people in the first place …

It is a regrettable fact that people fear each other. It is a deplorable fact that, in response to such fear, people seek to define themselves over and against other fellow human beings. It is a disgraceful fact that some people use that fear and that search for identity to build up political movements, which harness the fear and alienation that is around us to build up their own power, to exercise oppression and even lead to conflict.

Lest we think that these problems are something outside these walls, a problem for the wicked world, we must remember that we see this trend also within the Church itself.

Members of our own Anglican communion habitually stir up antagonism against other fellow-Christians, most commonly these days over issues of gender justice and sexuality. These are issues where Jesus had very little or nothing to say, and where the results of such hostile campaigning – exclusion and inequity – run directly contrary to Jesus’s life and example.

In the wider community, we see the Christian faith used, misused, exploited to stir up essentially cultural and political hatreds over partisan politics, extremist positions on reproductive rights and, again, sexuality and gender issues. 

There are people in the leadership of religious communities who will seek to maintain identity and keep control by stoking fear and hatred. Honestly, I do not know what is the mixture of sincere ideological commitment and a desire simply to maintain power and control that is at work in such people. Some, no doubt, sincerely but mistakenly, believe that their religious identity is bound up with excluding those who are “other”. Some will use it as a means to stay ahead.

The prophets, and especially Jesus himself, wanted to break this cycle of fear and oppression by calling on people to trust God, and in God to trust one another. 

But if people stop fearing and hating those who are in some way different from themselves, then the power of the leaders of hatred will be broken: so those who derive their passion, their self-belief, their sense of purpose from division and hatred will resent the call to step aside from fear and distrust.

The call to love, care for the oppressed, and do justice will make some people angry.

What on earth can we do about this?

Look at the disciples whom Jesus chose: ordinary fisher folk certainly, but also tax-collectors and zealots; and a significant number of women who, while not recorded among the apostles, were a vital part of Jesus’s support group and his teaching circle, even at the very beginning. He showed compassion to everyone, from Roman soldiers to Jewish religious leaders, who came to him in desperate concern for their loved ones. Human vulnerability drew forth a loving and caring response.

Jesus set an example of embracing difference and celebrating the breadth of human diversity.

We need, as Presiding Bishop Michael Curry proposed some years back, to show that the way of love is simply a better way to live; that embracing the complicated, messy, and glorious diversity and difference between people is actually a more joyful, stronger, better way to live in God’s love than any of the alternatives.

We cannot keep saying this too often: it is more loving, and simply more fun, to be open to the breadth of human difference than to hide fearfully among those whom we think are most like ourselves. Let us open our arms in love. It will annoy the living daylights out of those who manipulate and exploit human fear. And God willing, who knows whether it might win some of such people over to a better way?

Submitted by the Revd. Dr. Euan Cameron

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Sermon for All Saints, 11th June 2023, Second Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 5)

Welcome to the season after Pentecost. It goes by the somewhat unkind name of “ordinary time”: the time between the great seasons where we recall and, in a sense, re-enact the most important moments of the life of Jesus. Now we listen to the teachings of Jesus in Scripture, and to the passages of the Hebrew Bible which Jesus and the evangelists most quoted. We hear the interpretation of Jesus’s meaning in the writings of Paul and the other writers of letters to the churches. Ordinary time is actually very special and very precious.

For the three or four years of his public ministry, Jesus taught everyone who would listen, across Galilee and Judaea. He taught, as many of the Jewish rabbis before him and after him had done, by telling thought-provoking stories. He invited his hearers to think. He called on them to reappraise their traditions in the light of the stories that he told. And he taught about himself by his acts of healing.

The Gospels echoed the teaching style of Jesus by telling stories about Jesus – turning his life and ministry into a series of narratives which had multiple layers of meaning and which repay hearing again and again. 

As we know, the first three Gospels especially share much material. Sometimes they use the same precise words as each other; sometimes they re-worked the stories in their own way, to suit their particular emphases about Jesus.

In today’s Gospel by Matthew, we hear of the calling of the tax-farmer, called Matthew here and Levi in Mark and Luke. Jesus’s call to him provokes a dispute with the religiously earnest, because Jesus seeks out and enjoys the table-company of moral outcasts.

Then Matthew folds in to the same event two related miracles of healing: the raising of the daughter of the leader of the synagogue, and the curing of the women who had suffered from continuous bloody discharge for twelve years. 

In Mark’s and Luke’s accounts, these two stories are told in quite separate parts of the Gospels. The calling of Levi appears in Mark 2 and Luke 5; the healing of the young girl and the afflicted woman appears in Mark 5 and Luke 8. Yet Matthew runs them together as a single event. Why?

Most unusually, Matthew tells the story in a rather compressed way, without the psychological details which make the stories in Mark and Luke so memorable. What is going on here, and what message is Matthew trying to share by the particular way that he presents these remembered incidents? One possible explanation takes us into some sensitive issues about how Matthew tells the Jesus story.

The running theme through Matthew’s Gospel is that Jesus taught the correct way to understand the faith of the Hebrew Scriptures. Matthew belongs to an age when there was a controversy, not between some people called “Christians” and some people called “Jews”, but between two understandings of the historic Jewish faith. There were those who expected the Messiah, and believed that they should prepare for the Messiah’s coming by ever more strict observance of the law of Israel. Then there were those who believed that the Messiah had already come, in Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus had fulfilled and completed the Law, and the best way to follow the Law was to trust in the teachings and ministry of Jesus.

In the story of Jesus at table with the tax-collectors, Matthew adds to Jesus’s saying about calling sinners rather than the righteous, a quotation from Hosea 6:6, which Matthew renders in the Greek translation of the text, as “I want mercy and not sacrifice”. The correct understanding of the Law and the Prophets, says Matthew, is to call those who have gone astray back into the way of God. Purity is not achieved by excluding the impure, but by showing love to them.

Then a “ruler”, whom Mark called explicitly a “ruler of the synagogue” comes to Jesus to ask mercy for his daughter, who is “on the point of death” in Mark, but actually deceased in Matthew. The religious leader of the community shows faith in the power of Jesus to heal, in the most apparently hopeless case. 

And then, folded into the story of the mortally sick daughter, is the tale of the woman suffering from a continuous discharge of blood. According to Leviticus 15:19, “When a woman has a discharge of blood that is her regular discharge from her body, she shall be in her impurity for seven days, and whoever touches her shall be unclean until the evening.”

Those who took every detail of the ceremonial law seriously – as some devout Jews did at the time – regarded the uncleanness associated with blood as so serious that even accidental contact caused ritual impurity in the one who touched a woman in this perfectly normal condition. The woman touched Jesus in secret, because she was continuously unclean and could not even think of touching a religious figure. 

Jesus responds by not worrying about the law. He praises the woman’s faith, and reassures her that she is healed. Jesus is as incapable of contracting ritual impurity from the woman as he is incapable of being morally corrupted by bad company. He places mercy and compassion above all else.

Trust in the loving power of Jesus takes priority over the details of the Law, and those who are true to the faith of Israel will get that point. That, I suggest, is what Matthew is saying.

Matthew’s message poses some problems. As the Christian faith became more and more cultivated by Greek and Roman peoples who knew less and less about Jesus’s Jewish belief, the Gospels were read in the light of the increasingly bitter disparagement and hostility which the ascendant Christian movement showed towards the continuing Jewish community that did not accept Jesus as Messiah. The horrors generated by that hostility haunt us still.

So how are we to prepare ourselves to listen to Matthew, through the remainder of the liturgical year through to the last Sunday before Advent?

There is a positive way to read Matthew. First, Matthew teaches that there is no hierarchy or order of seniority in those who love and trust the God revealed in Jesus. Tax-gatherers, who profited by exploiting the licences that Rome gave them to raise money, were morally shut out from the community as collaborators and abusers. Here they receive the same mercy as the leader of the synagogue, because they are both open to Jesus’s offer to help. The woman with the continuous discharge of blood suffers from the double disability of living with gender injustice, the disdain shown to women’s natural physiology, and the particular oppression of her condition. Yet she is healed before the religious leader’s daughter – though both are healed. 

These people place absolute trust in Jesus to do what seems, by all ordinary standards, impossible. They do not brag about their conformity to the law, or show entitlement. Some do not have that choice. 

Trusting in the loving power of God does not come naturally to us. In everyday life, we believe that we can protect ourselves by being organized, prudent, responsible. We live as though our security depends on our own efforts. We should probably regard just living by trust as rather feckless – and it might indeed be so, if we applied nothing but trust to paying the bills, the mortgage or the rent.

However, we are called to live by a faith that is, essentially, trust in that which we cannot see and cannot control. We live in hope that our world may be redeemed and rescued from its many layers of injustice: the exploitation of the poor, racial prejudice, the gross economic injustices that divide one part of the world from another, the seemingly incurable abuse of natural resources which is already disrupting our climate, our oceans, and the most vulnerable communities of the world. In these areas we can certainly do small practical things to help. But we also have to trust, and believe, that the world can do better than it is right now. 

Mercy – care and concern shown to those who have few resources, or none – is, as Hosea said, a responsibility that comes to us from the very nature of God, and is explicitly proclaimed in the life and ministry of God incarnate in Jesus Christ. By living mercifully, we are also showing, in a practical way, that we believe and trust that God’s plan for the world is more powerful than those things that cause hurt and injury to others.

Submitted by the Revd. Dr. Euan Cameron

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Sermon for All Saints, 4th June 2023, Trinity Sunday

We have reached Trinity Sunday, the Sunday which usually marks the end of the movable season that begins with Ash Wednesday and takes us through the re-telling of Jesus’s temptations, ministry, confrontation with Jerusalem, his Passion, death, resurrection, and ascension. 

“The Trinity”, as a doctrine of faith, has been something with which the Church has tormented itself down the centuries (along with the doctrine of the natures of Christ, with which the Trinity is always connected). It is also something which incumbents have traditionally assigned to their curates or even lay readers …

The Creed of the Council of Nicea, which we shall soon recite to each other, was, in its first form, written to confirm the (temporary) victory of one theological faction in the Church over another, in debates over their understandings of the Trinity. Down the centuries, people have been exiled, imprisoned, and worst of all, even put to death because of disagreements over the Trinity. The reformed churches of New England divided themselves only some two hundred years ago into those which held Trinitarian or Unitarian ideas of God.

Yet we should never imagine that the Trinity was something “invented” just to cause trouble in the Church. Christians only began even to talk about “the Trinity” some 150 years after the ministry of Jesus. It was, initially, not a “thing”, let alone a “dogma”, so much as just a way of speaking about the fundamental elements of the faith. 

We see that in our scriptural passages for today. When Paul concluded his second letter to the Corinthians, he ended this rather angry and reproachful letter with a beautiful blessing, which we know as “the Grace” and still use regularly today. It was natural for Paul to wish that the grace that came through Christ, the love that God shows us constantly, and the companionship which we have in the Spirit, should in all their fullness be with the congregation whom he scolded, but deeply loved. 

When Matthew quoted Jesus reminding his followers to baptize in “the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit”, Matthew did not think that he was writing a “Trinitarian formula”: no such idea existed at that time. Matthew was remembering that when Jesus himself was baptized, in the third chapter of his Gospel, the Son was baptized, the Father spoke, and the Spirit descended upon the Son. This three-fold form of words expressed the key elements in the story of the baptism.

Speaking of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit arose because it was the natural, maybe inevitable way to try to express the activity and the presence of God. It was something to which the whole story of the Gospels led up. The story of Jesus could not be told, as John’s Gospel expressed with special clarity, without speaking of the relationship between the Father and the Son. The life of the Church could not be described apart from the presence and action of the divine Spirit. 

When Trinity Sunday comes around, we recapitulate the whole story of God’s loving purposes for us, and express in this idea – the name of which we barely understand – fundamental insights about how the world is, what our life means, and how we are bound together in community.

None of these insights are self-evident; all of them in some measure or other challenge, even contradict, the evidence of how the world seems at face value to be. That is why they are so precious.

We understand God as creator. No greater disservice is done to faith when people turn the beautiful belief in creation into so-called “creationism”, a variety of cobbled-together theories which claim to challenge what science tells us about the cosmic order and how it came to be. When we thank God as creator, we express the belief that the apparently random bringing-together of atoms and molecules that built our universe was made, at a whole other level, to nurture us, to inspire us with awe, to delight us with its sublime beauty, and to call us to love and cherish it. That divine beauty and love at work in the worlds around us should move us to treat our share of God’s creation with care and respect, to understand it, help it to sustain itself, and not exploit it to destruction.

And we understand God as uniquely revealed in the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth. Now, to try to define exactly how the divine nature was and is present in Jesus has, like the Trinity itself, been a source of debate and conflict in the churches for centuries. In the beleaguered churches of the East, there are still unreconciled differences between Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox (yes, those are two different things) over how to define Jesus’s nature. 

Yet what matters is where Jesus’s teaching leads us, and what his ministry of reconciliation means. Let us celebrate that, and remember what an astonishing idea the incarnation really is. In ages past, philosophers imagined for themselves divine natures which were abstract, remote, idealized, inaccessible to humanity. Only by a spiritual life of merciless self-discipline, rising above one’s human nature, could one even get vaguely close to such a principle. This was the god of the philosophers.

And in Jesus of Nazareth, we have one who has come among us as a friend, a table-companion, and as he himself stressed, as one who serves. The divine comes among us, in familiar friendship and in sacrificial self-giving. We are not called to rise above our humanity, because God has embraced that humanity and taken it into the divine nature. That in turn means that in every human being – those who are different, those who are flawed in many ways, those who are imperfect – we are called to see the image of the God who took our flesh, and made it sacred and holy.

And at one and the same time, Jesus is both unique, and also, he spreads and shares among us the unique closeness that exists between himself and the creating and sustaining God. To express that spreading and sharing, we use the language of the Holy Spirit, as the Gospels and epistles did from the beginning. 

Some Christian writers and thinkers in the past have, as imperfect and contentious minds tend to do, debated over the Holy Spirit and its relationship to the Trinity. To this day, the churches of the West disagree with the Orthodox of the East as to whether the Spirit “proceeds” from the Father only or both the Father and the Son. That dispute is embodied, alas, in the fact that in the West we read a slightly different Nicene Creed from our Orthodox siblings.

And yet again, the mistake lies surely in asking what the thing “is”, rather than what it means for us, what it does for us. In one of his more inspired moments, Augustine theorized that the Spirit was the name for the love that bound the Father and the Son together. But it is surely more than that. In our traditional understanding, the Spirit is with us in all the good things that we do together. 

At special times – such as ordinations – we in our communities pray with particular earnestness for God’s spirit to come among us. But it is surely there with us before we know to pray for it. When we gather in fellowship, especially but not only when we gather for the Eucharist, the communion which is both expressed as the Spirit and is the Spirit’s gift, is with us.

So if anyone who asks questions of the faith proposes the Trinity to you as a uniquely difficult or perplexing idea in Christianity, do not be apologetic. We worship God as Trinity, because that is the only way that makes sense. It is the only way to express the creating, sustaining, reconciling and inspiring work of God, which we feel every time we gather together as the people of God. 

But please, don’t try to explain what the Trinity “is”. Say only that it speaks of all the ways that God is at work in our world, in our communities and in our hearts. 

Submitted by the Revd. Doctor Euan Cameron