The fourth and last of my Lenten addresses . . .
“Anyone who wants to be a follower of mine must renounce self; day after day he must take up his cross, and follow me” (Luke 9:23).
For me, Holy Week is about coming right up against the tragedy of the cross, really doing our best to feel it like those first disciples did, as everything gone wrong, as God’s plans subverted, as a good man, the best man, dying because we let it happen, we ran away, we maybe even helped hammer in the nails. Jesus had done his best to prepare his friends, but they will still have been horrified, terrified, crushed. I want to feel some of that this week.
For the first Christians the cross was at best a secret sign. It was an implement of death, a place of failure and rejection, and it seemed wrong to honour such a thing in any way. Now the cross has pride of place in many a church, and so it should, for it is in fact both the means of our salvation and the place at which we are convicted of sin, and we need to take both these things to heart if we are to embark on what we might call cross-shaped living.
On that first Good Friday, the disciples in their fear must have been saying something like, “It wasn’t supposed to end like this!” They didn’t know it then, but they were wrong on both counts: it was supposed to be like that, and it was not the end. Our sins crucified Jesus, but not because of his weakness and inability to prevent it, not through the subversion of his plans. Our sins crucified Jesus because he allowed it to happen. And in this event we stand convicted of our sin, but as we so stand, God in Jesus removes sin’s power to hold us and enslave us.
From this spring two things, the first of which is the transfer of slavery. Slavery was commonplace in those days; while today we find it offensive and find it hard to draw analogies from slavery, at that time it would be have been well understood and not questioned. It was simply a fact of life. And any slave bought out of his slavery would now belong to his new master. So, having been bought by the cross out of our slavery to sin and death, we now belong to the cross, and to the one who, hanging there, paid that price. And that, of course, is why the cross is marked on each of us when we are baptized, when we are brought into the Church. You can’t see it, it isn’t drawn on us in indelible ink. It’s visible only if we make it visible. But it’s there, there as the sign of who we now belong to.
The second thing is this - that we also belong to one another. There are no limits to what Jesus did on that cross; he even pleaded for those who nailed him there. At Calvary Jesus took upon himself not just the sins of his immediate disciples, not just the sins of a few favoured people, but the sin of the world. “When I am raised up,” he says, “I shall draw the whole world to myself.” Raised up on the cross, and lifted there to die; but also raised to new life on the first Easter morning. And because he lives, we too will live, and that is a promise that is open to all. Is it attained by all, received by all, understood by all? It’s not for me to second-guess the judgement that only God can make, but it is clear that I share a duty and commitment to get that good news out to whoever I can, and wherever I can, and in whatever way I can. In what looks like tragedy and failure, a victory is won, a throne is raised, and it’s for everyone to share: the triumph of love. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu famously said, we know that light is stronger than darkness, love is stronger than hate, life is stronger than death.
So, through Christ we belong to God, and in Christ we belong to one another. And I love the way the cross itself as a sign can be used to express this. The upright, connecting me and God, you and God, every person who sees it and understands and God. And the crosspiece like arms outstretched, connecting me with you, you with me, nation with nation, tribe with tribe, with no limits, with everyone welcome, everyone offered a place. Take up your cross and follow me, says Jesus. And in cross-shaped living we are called to share with the world our new and restored connection with God, and our essential connection one with another.
Monday, 26 March 2018
Tuesday, 20 March 2018
The Challenge of His Message
The third of my Lenten talks . . .
“Whatever I tell you in the dark, speak in the light; and what you hear in secret, preach from the housetops” (Matthew 10:27).
One of the issues I come across again and again in ministry is the person who says, “My faith is just between me and God.” In fact that sometimes almost seems to be the mantra of the Church of England, which I think, in my darker moments, could explain a lot. Like that other regular, “Charity begins at home”, there is virtually nothing in scripture to support it.
Though of course one does have to admit that Jesus did preach against the Pharisees and their very obvious displays of piety. Remember how they liked to stand on the street corners to pray; remember too how Jesus called them “whited sepulchres” - like the whitewashed funeral monuments that looked good on the outside but inside were full of corruption.
Jesus spoke against the Pharisees because their display was designed to draw attention to themselves. They enjoyed looking good, they liked to be noticed. In the days when churchgoing carried more status than it does these days, there were certainly elements of the Pharisee about in the good old C of E. Anthony Trollope contrasts the quiet devotion of Septimus Harding with the too obvious piety of Obadiah Slope, for example, in the fictitious city of Barchester.
But one thing Jesus clearly doesn’t tell us is that we should keep our message to ourselves. Nor does he say that we should sit back quietly and let the vicar do it all. It’s all very well to say that in these parishes we need a vicar who is out and about, and who talks to people on the street, in the shop, down the pub - amen to all of that I say, by the way - but they do need to be able to identify more Christians than just the chap, or the woman, in the funny collar.
“Ah, but they do know which of us go to church,” you might say. “Excellent, that’s a good beginning,” I might say, “but it shouldn’t be the whole story.” Now shouting from the rooftops would have been easier back in the day of Jesus, when roofs were flat and the weather was warm. What might be the equivalent today? What do people need to hear, how can our message be made relevant to people’s real lives, real questions, and how should we do it?
Dare I mention once more at this point the words Mission Action Plan? That thing we haven’t yet done? Mission: let’s not be under any misapprehensions here. Jesus is talking about doing mission, and he’s saying that we all need to be involved. So what is mission, and where does it begin? Mission is sharing God’s word, sharing God in fact, sharing Jesus - but it begins not with shouting, from rooftops or anywhere else, but with listening. Even if you’re just putting together an advertising campaign for a new washing up liquid, you need to begin with questions: “When they’re washing up, what do people want, what are they hoping for, what isn’t working, what are their anxieties?” No point in putting together a campaign that doesn’t scratch where people are itching. Or a mission.
Action: but, having listened, assessed, we do need to be doing stuff, and not just sitting on our hands. And it isn’t speaking so much as caring that gets the message across. Caring, and inviting. So it’s the right sort of action we need, and to do that, we need a . . .
Plan: I’m usually too impatient to do this well. I have previous as regards rushing into things, and acting too quickly on ideas that really needed more work. Worth remembering: even Jesus took time out - in the wilderness at the start of it all, but constantly through his ministry, too. If he needed it, what makes me think I don’t? Jesus in the wilderness faced up to the problems and temptations that might otherwise have derailed him. Jesus constantly took time to pray, and planning and prayer belong together. God needs to be part of our planning! God needs to be the centre of our planning!
“Whatever I tell you in the dark, speak in the light; and what you hear in secret, preach from the housetops” (Matthew 10:27).
One of the issues I come across again and again in ministry is the person who says, “My faith is just between me and God.” In fact that sometimes almost seems to be the mantra of the Church of England, which I think, in my darker moments, could explain a lot. Like that other regular, “Charity begins at home”, there is virtually nothing in scripture to support it.
Though of course one does have to admit that Jesus did preach against the Pharisees and their very obvious displays of piety. Remember how they liked to stand on the street corners to pray; remember too how Jesus called them “whited sepulchres” - like the whitewashed funeral monuments that looked good on the outside but inside were full of corruption.
Jesus spoke against the Pharisees because their display was designed to draw attention to themselves. They enjoyed looking good, they liked to be noticed. In the days when churchgoing carried more status than it does these days, there were certainly elements of the Pharisee about in the good old C of E. Anthony Trollope contrasts the quiet devotion of Septimus Harding with the too obvious piety of Obadiah Slope, for example, in the fictitious city of Barchester.
But one thing Jesus clearly doesn’t tell us is that we should keep our message to ourselves. Nor does he say that we should sit back quietly and let the vicar do it all. It’s all very well to say that in these parishes we need a vicar who is out and about, and who talks to people on the street, in the shop, down the pub - amen to all of that I say, by the way - but they do need to be able to identify more Christians than just the chap, or the woman, in the funny collar.
“Ah, but they do know which of us go to church,” you might say. “Excellent, that’s a good beginning,” I might say, “but it shouldn’t be the whole story.” Now shouting from the rooftops would have been easier back in the day of Jesus, when roofs were flat and the weather was warm. What might be the equivalent today? What do people need to hear, how can our message be made relevant to people’s real lives, real questions, and how should we do it?
Dare I mention once more at this point the words Mission Action Plan? That thing we haven’t yet done? Mission: let’s not be under any misapprehensions here. Jesus is talking about doing mission, and he’s saying that we all need to be involved. So what is mission, and where does it begin? Mission is sharing God’s word, sharing God in fact, sharing Jesus - but it begins not with shouting, from rooftops or anywhere else, but with listening. Even if you’re just putting together an advertising campaign for a new washing up liquid, you need to begin with questions: “When they’re washing up, what do people want, what are they hoping for, what isn’t working, what are their anxieties?” No point in putting together a campaign that doesn’t scratch where people are itching. Or a mission.
Action: but, having listened, assessed, we do need to be doing stuff, and not just sitting on our hands. And it isn’t speaking so much as caring that gets the message across. Caring, and inviting. So it’s the right sort of action we need, and to do that, we need a . . .
Plan: I’m usually too impatient to do this well. I have previous as regards rushing into things, and acting too quickly on ideas that really needed more work. Worth remembering: even Jesus took time out - in the wilderness at the start of it all, but constantly through his ministry, too. If he needed it, what makes me think I don’t? Jesus in the wilderness faced up to the problems and temptations that might otherwise have derailed him. Jesus constantly took time to pray, and planning and prayer belong together. God needs to be part of our planning! God needs to be the centre of our planning!
Saturday, 17 March 2018
Seeds
A sermon for Passion Sunday :-
Around 32,000 years ago, a squirrel in what is now Siberia buried some seeds but never came back to get them. Instead, the seeds were found by a team of scientists examining the permafrost. The scientists took the seeds back to the laboratory, and managed to prepare some of them for germination: they grew several specimens of a little white flowered plant of the pink or campion family, with the Latin name of Silene stenophylla. Those plants grew and flowered and produced their own seed, so the scientists produced viable plants from seeds 32,000 years old, to beat the previous record for the oldest seed to grow, held by a two thousand year old date palm, by an amazing thirty thousand years.
The technique of freezing seeds to keep them viable is used by several groups of scientists around the world, as one way of preserving stocks of vulnerable or rare species and varieties of plants that might otherwise die out. But 32,000 years is a lot longer than anyone might have imagined keeping seed for.
Some seeds naturally remain viable longer than others, even at normal temperatures: like the poppy seeds that germinated in the trenches of the First World War, or that suddenly grow on any disturbed ground, maybe when a new road’s being built. Expect to see poppies along the new Newtown bypass, even if it’s been years since there were any in the surrounding fields.
But for the most part, seeds more than a few seasons old aren’t going to germinate. They may well look exactly the same as a fresh and perfectly viable seed, but looks aren’t everything. The life inside is no more. I’ve got an oil palm seed I’ve had since university days, when I studied tropical crops. It looks just the same now as when I first had it, and it’s really quite a handsome seed, a bit like a tiny coconut. But it will never grow.
Keep the seed, and you lose the crop. Lose the seed, by letting it fall into the ground and hide there, and you release the life within it. Or, as Jesus said, “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains a single grain . . .”
So the wheat grain becomes a potent symbol of sacrifice, since it must surrender itself, its own identity, in order to be fruitful. But that’s what the seed, the grain, exists to do; so if the grain of wheat doesn’t fall into the ground and die, it’s been - in a sense - untrue to its calling. Jesus says: “It was for this that I came to this hour,” as he looks ahead to the cross.
We call today Passion Sunday, and the fortnight from today through to Easter Eve, Saturday week, is Passiontide. Holy Week itself begins on Palm Sunday, next Sunday, and in that week I just want to follow the events through, and to share as much as I can the agony and fear and confusion the disciples felt, as they saw Jesus taken from them, as they saw his mission come to nothing, and as their own dreams were all shattered.
But today and through the first part of Passiontide, we reflect more on the meaning of the cross than the event itself. Jesus spoke openly to his disciples about what was going to happen to him in Jerusalem. Then they couldn’t take what he was saying, but he was telling them that his death at Calvary wouldn’t be God’s plans betrayed and brought down, but God’s plans fulfilled: plans that needed the grain of wheat to fall into the ground and die.
The trigger for these words about the grain of wheat interests me. Some Greeks, some Gentiles, people who weren’t Jews, had asked to see Jesus. They came to Philip, who’d have been a Greek speaker, coming as he did from Bethsaida. And somehow the fact that these Greeks want to see him prompts Jesus to begin speaking about his death. Why should this be?
The disciples expected Jesus to be their Messiah, come to set their people, the Jewish people free, by restoring the Kingdom founded by David. So Jesus tried to tell them that he’d do greater things than that in Jerusalem. The victory he would win would free everyone from the burden of sin; from the cross he would proclaim the love of God once and for all: he was there not just to win freedom for one nation but for every nation.
In the Communion Prayer we say that Jesus died once and for all: Jesus himself said, “When I am lifted up, I shall draw all people to myself.” What was it those Greeks wanted from Jesus? We don’t even know from the reading whether they actually got to see Jesus; only that Philip and Andrew told Jesus about them. But if they did get to see him, and hear his words about a seed falling into the ground and dying, what did they make of it, I wonder?
St Paul wrote that the cross was a scandal to the Jews, and foolishness to Greeks. A scandal to the Jews, because surely no genuine Messiah could meet such a wretched and shameful death; and foolishness to Greeks, who were obsessed with the ideal of human physical perfection. Think of the Olympic Games and the others like them; look at the statues of the various Greek gods and goddesses: each of them as near to human physical perfection as any sculptor could manage. A broken and physically wrecked man dying on a cross couldn’t possibly be divine.
21st Century western culture isn’t all that different, I feel. We’re hooked on preserving our life, our youth, our looks. Just spend an evening watching the adverts instead of the programmes. And where people are interested in spirituality, it’s still more for their own sake than for the sake of the world: so they’re spiritually toned up as well as physically, and feeling better about themselves. Maybe that’s what those Greeks wanted too - something to reassure them and boost their egos.
Only Jesus could do what he did on the cross: once and for all, the one perfect priest made the one perfect sacrifice of himself. But Jesus calls us to follow him, and that means being like him, doing what he does, changing the direction of our lives so that we’re thinking and living sacrificially. For “unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains a single grain. But if it dies, it bears a rich harvest.” In those words Jesus spoke of his own mission, but he was also telling his disciples what they should be, how they - and we - should live. That we should take to heart the message of the seed.
What does it mean, to live sacrificially? What do we give up, what do we give away, and why? Plenty of people go to gyms and health spas to be rigorous and disciplined, and to get into shape; plenty of people follow diet plans or go to weight watcher clubs too. But isn’t that just about looking after our own physical selves, within the world of here and now?
I’m not knocking that, of course we should look after ourselves; but the sacrifice of Jesus is very different. What Jesus did he did entirely for others: his sacrifice is complete, it’s an act of love that holds nothing back. Lifted up on the cross, he draws the whole world to him, to the wonder of self-giving love. And his disciples are called to be as like him as we can be, living in a way that reaches out to others, living in a way that involves the death of our own selves. Doing the job that seeds are supposed to do: being fruitful.
Seeds are amazing things; they come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. Many years ago, I bought a necklace in a market in Peru on which every bead was a seed, lots of different sorts, all strung together. It looked beautiful, but of course each of those seeds was completely dead, and none could ever grow. Seeds that look good, but don’t do what seeds are supposed to do: looking good, but doing nothing - in the end, what use is that?
If my life is centred on me, or maybe on me and my mates, surely my life is a wasted life, however good I may look, however well-known or popular I may be. For I was surely made for more than that, because I’m made in the image of God, and so are you. In other words, we’re made to love like God, to care like God, to give of ourselves like God in Jesus Christ our crucified King. That’s the point and purpose of us, that’s what we should aim to live out and live up to, and if we do we help make the world a better place. If as disciples we take to heart the message of the seed, then the God whose love has won freedom for all in the cross of Jesus will be known and served and praised and shared.
Around 32,000 years ago, a squirrel in what is now Siberia buried some seeds but never came back to get them. Instead, the seeds were found by a team of scientists examining the permafrost. The scientists took the seeds back to the laboratory, and managed to prepare some of them for germination: they grew several specimens of a little white flowered plant of the pink or campion family, with the Latin name of Silene stenophylla. Those plants grew and flowered and produced their own seed, so the scientists produced viable plants from seeds 32,000 years old, to beat the previous record for the oldest seed to grow, held by a two thousand year old date palm, by an amazing thirty thousand years.
The technique of freezing seeds to keep them viable is used by several groups of scientists around the world, as one way of preserving stocks of vulnerable or rare species and varieties of plants that might otherwise die out. But 32,000 years is a lot longer than anyone might have imagined keeping seed for.
Some seeds naturally remain viable longer than others, even at normal temperatures: like the poppy seeds that germinated in the trenches of the First World War, or that suddenly grow on any disturbed ground, maybe when a new road’s being built. Expect to see poppies along the new Newtown bypass, even if it’s been years since there were any in the surrounding fields.
But for the most part, seeds more than a few seasons old aren’t going to germinate. They may well look exactly the same as a fresh and perfectly viable seed, but looks aren’t everything. The life inside is no more. I’ve got an oil palm seed I’ve had since university days, when I studied tropical crops. It looks just the same now as when I first had it, and it’s really quite a handsome seed, a bit like a tiny coconut. But it will never grow.
Keep the seed, and you lose the crop. Lose the seed, by letting it fall into the ground and hide there, and you release the life within it. Or, as Jesus said, “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains a single grain . . .”
So the wheat grain becomes a potent symbol of sacrifice, since it must surrender itself, its own identity, in order to be fruitful. But that’s what the seed, the grain, exists to do; so if the grain of wheat doesn’t fall into the ground and die, it’s been - in a sense - untrue to its calling. Jesus says: “It was for this that I came to this hour,” as he looks ahead to the cross.
We call today Passion Sunday, and the fortnight from today through to Easter Eve, Saturday week, is Passiontide. Holy Week itself begins on Palm Sunday, next Sunday, and in that week I just want to follow the events through, and to share as much as I can the agony and fear and confusion the disciples felt, as they saw Jesus taken from them, as they saw his mission come to nothing, and as their own dreams were all shattered.
But today and through the first part of Passiontide, we reflect more on the meaning of the cross than the event itself. Jesus spoke openly to his disciples about what was going to happen to him in Jerusalem. Then they couldn’t take what he was saying, but he was telling them that his death at Calvary wouldn’t be God’s plans betrayed and brought down, but God’s plans fulfilled: plans that needed the grain of wheat to fall into the ground and die.
The trigger for these words about the grain of wheat interests me. Some Greeks, some Gentiles, people who weren’t Jews, had asked to see Jesus. They came to Philip, who’d have been a Greek speaker, coming as he did from Bethsaida. And somehow the fact that these Greeks want to see him prompts Jesus to begin speaking about his death. Why should this be?
The disciples expected Jesus to be their Messiah, come to set their people, the Jewish people free, by restoring the Kingdom founded by David. So Jesus tried to tell them that he’d do greater things than that in Jerusalem. The victory he would win would free everyone from the burden of sin; from the cross he would proclaim the love of God once and for all: he was there not just to win freedom for one nation but for every nation.
In the Communion Prayer we say that Jesus died once and for all: Jesus himself said, “When I am lifted up, I shall draw all people to myself.” What was it those Greeks wanted from Jesus? We don’t even know from the reading whether they actually got to see Jesus; only that Philip and Andrew told Jesus about them. But if they did get to see him, and hear his words about a seed falling into the ground and dying, what did they make of it, I wonder?
St Paul wrote that the cross was a scandal to the Jews, and foolishness to Greeks. A scandal to the Jews, because surely no genuine Messiah could meet such a wretched and shameful death; and foolishness to Greeks, who were obsessed with the ideal of human physical perfection. Think of the Olympic Games and the others like them; look at the statues of the various Greek gods and goddesses: each of them as near to human physical perfection as any sculptor could manage. A broken and physically wrecked man dying on a cross couldn’t possibly be divine.
21st Century western culture isn’t all that different, I feel. We’re hooked on preserving our life, our youth, our looks. Just spend an evening watching the adverts instead of the programmes. And where people are interested in spirituality, it’s still more for their own sake than for the sake of the world: so they’re spiritually toned up as well as physically, and feeling better about themselves. Maybe that’s what those Greeks wanted too - something to reassure them and boost their egos.
Only Jesus could do what he did on the cross: once and for all, the one perfect priest made the one perfect sacrifice of himself. But Jesus calls us to follow him, and that means being like him, doing what he does, changing the direction of our lives so that we’re thinking and living sacrificially. For “unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains a single grain. But if it dies, it bears a rich harvest.” In those words Jesus spoke of his own mission, but he was also telling his disciples what they should be, how they - and we - should live. That we should take to heart the message of the seed.
What does it mean, to live sacrificially? What do we give up, what do we give away, and why? Plenty of people go to gyms and health spas to be rigorous and disciplined, and to get into shape; plenty of people follow diet plans or go to weight watcher clubs too. But isn’t that just about looking after our own physical selves, within the world of here and now?
I’m not knocking that, of course we should look after ourselves; but the sacrifice of Jesus is very different. What Jesus did he did entirely for others: his sacrifice is complete, it’s an act of love that holds nothing back. Lifted up on the cross, he draws the whole world to him, to the wonder of self-giving love. And his disciples are called to be as like him as we can be, living in a way that reaches out to others, living in a way that involves the death of our own selves. Doing the job that seeds are supposed to do: being fruitful.
Seeds are amazing things; they come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. Many years ago, I bought a necklace in a market in Peru on which every bead was a seed, lots of different sorts, all strung together. It looked beautiful, but of course each of those seeds was completely dead, and none could ever grow. Seeds that look good, but don’t do what seeds are supposed to do: looking good, but doing nothing - in the end, what use is that?
If my life is centred on me, or maybe on me and my mates, surely my life is a wasted life, however good I may look, however well-known or popular I may be. For I was surely made for more than that, because I’m made in the image of God, and so are you. In other words, we’re made to love like God, to care like God, to give of ourselves like God in Jesus Christ our crucified King. That’s the point and purpose of us, that’s what we should aim to live out and live up to, and if we do we help make the world a better place. If as disciples we take to heart the message of the seed, then the God whose love has won freedom for all in the cross of Jesus will be known and served and praised and shared.
Monday, 12 March 2018
Chiffchaffs
My "Nature Notes" column for April . . .
It’s still early March as I’m writing this, and I’m already listening out for my first chiffchaff of the year. By the time you read this, there should be plenty to hear, I hope! It is one of our commonest summer visitors, also one of the earliest to arrive, and once it gets going, it’s among the loudest, too.
Not only is it loud, it also helps identification by singing its name. To be fair, some birds seem to me to be singing chiff chiff, and others chaff chaff, but by and large you will hear two different notes - the chiff being the higher pitched note, and the chaff a bit lower. The bird will do a burst of this, generally from somewhere near the top of a tree, then fall silent for a while (actually, it may well give a softer churring sort of call during this ‘silent’ time, but it’s hard to hear unless you’re very close to), before starting up again.
The male chiffchaff will start singing as soon as he arrives, to establish a territory. Whether the female also sings, I’m not sure - in any case, the sexes are almost impossible to tell apart. Chiffchaffs are small brown and buff birds - brown head, back, wings, tail, buff throat and underparts. It’s about the size of a blue tit, and early arrivals can often be seen prospecting for spring insects through the branches, before there are too many leaves about.
Chiffchaffs and willow warblers are almost impossible to tell apart on sight, and both are very common birds. Willow warblers may be a bit plumper, and a bit more greenish and yellowish in colour, and with maybe a slightly more prominent eye stripe. Frankly, I can’t tell the difference. Fortunately, the song is totally different, willow warblers give you a falling cadence of sweet, tuneful notes, and usually from within cover rather than the top of a tree.
They also arrive later, having travelled all the way from southern Africa. Chiffchaffs winter in north Africa, or in southern Europe, and a few don’t even leave the UK, but stay in the south west of England (but this may not have been a good decision in the winter just gone!). Probably chiffchaffs get here a good two or three weeks earlier than willow warblers, and they won’t all leave until mid-October.
Almost all the work of building the nest and incubating eggs is done by the female, leaving the male to chiff and chaff somewhere overhead. The nest is ball shaped and placed in dense vegetation like bramble patches. The male sometimes feeds the hen bird while she is incubating, but not reliably, though he will help feed the chicks once they are hatched. The brood generally numbers six or seven; the little eggs have purple speckles, resulting in charming, if dubiously true, rhyme, “Chiffchaff eggs are speckled by / mother bird eating cherries” (used by Donovan in a song, I believe). Chiffchaffs are insect eaters, and happy residents of medium to large gardens, and patches of woodland - and one of my very favourite birds.
It’s still early March as I’m writing this, and I’m already listening out for my first chiffchaff of the year. By the time you read this, there should be plenty to hear, I hope! It is one of our commonest summer visitors, also one of the earliest to arrive, and once it gets going, it’s among the loudest, too.
Not only is it loud, it also helps identification by singing its name. To be fair, some birds seem to me to be singing chiff chiff, and others chaff chaff, but by and large you will hear two different notes - the chiff being the higher pitched note, and the chaff a bit lower. The bird will do a burst of this, generally from somewhere near the top of a tree, then fall silent for a while (actually, it may well give a softer churring sort of call during this ‘silent’ time, but it’s hard to hear unless you’re very close to), before starting up again.
The male chiffchaff will start singing as soon as he arrives, to establish a territory. Whether the female also sings, I’m not sure - in any case, the sexes are almost impossible to tell apart. Chiffchaffs are small brown and buff birds - brown head, back, wings, tail, buff throat and underparts. It’s about the size of a blue tit, and early arrivals can often be seen prospecting for spring insects through the branches, before there are too many leaves about.
Chiffchaffs and willow warblers are almost impossible to tell apart on sight, and both are very common birds. Willow warblers may be a bit plumper, and a bit more greenish and yellowish in colour, and with maybe a slightly more prominent eye stripe. Frankly, I can’t tell the difference. Fortunately, the song is totally different, willow warblers give you a falling cadence of sweet, tuneful notes, and usually from within cover rather than the top of a tree.
They also arrive later, having travelled all the way from southern Africa. Chiffchaffs winter in north Africa, or in southern Europe, and a few don’t even leave the UK, but stay in the south west of England (but this may not have been a good decision in the winter just gone!). Probably chiffchaffs get here a good two or three weeks earlier than willow warblers, and they won’t all leave until mid-October.
Almost all the work of building the nest and incubating eggs is done by the female, leaving the male to chiff and chaff somewhere overhead. The nest is ball shaped and placed in dense vegetation like bramble patches. The male sometimes feeds the hen bird while she is incubating, but not reliably, though he will help feed the chicks once they are hatched. The brood generally numbers six or seven; the little eggs have purple speckles, resulting in charming, if dubiously true, rhyme, “Chiffchaff eggs are speckled by / mother bird eating cherries” (used by Donovan in a song, I believe). Chiffchaffs are insect eaters, and happy residents of medium to large gardens, and patches of woodland - and one of my very favourite birds.
Sunday, 11 March 2018
Mums R Great
Mothering Sunday family address . . .
This morning we have some letters scattered around the church. Let's see what we can spell with them.
To begin with - who has got a letter 'M'?
We only need one 'M' for the moment, so the other one can wait until later. It's not hard to guess what this 'M' might stand for today, because we all know that it's Mother's Day, or Mothering Sunday. So we'll begin with an M for mother.
We'll add onto that M a letter 'U'.
Put a U next to the M and you get the initials of an organisation that's very important in our church here and in churches all over the world. The Mothers' Union. Today is a special day for the Mothers' Union because one of the main things they do is to support Christian family life. And that's exactly what we're celebrating today.
So we have M and U, so let's add on to that a letter 'S'.
Which makes SUM. Sums are about adding things up. And one of the things we do today is to add up all the things about our mothers - and other people who care about us too - that we want to celebrate and say 'thank you' for.
And now we'll add on the letter 'T'.
And that turns our word into the word MUST. Mothering is so important! And so is saying thank-you for the care and love that mothers can give. It's something we really MUST do, and it's good that we have this day to do it.
Well, that's our first word.
Perhaps we can start our second word with the same letter - 'M'.
M for mothers, M for Mothering Sunday - which isn't just about our own mums, but is also about Mothering of every kind. Some people talk about our 'Mother Church' where we learn how to live together as God's family; and the Bible even talks about God loving us and caring for us like a mother hen caring for her chicks, and hiding them under her wing.
This time our second letter is 'E'.
Which of course turns our word into ME. Whoever I am, the theme of today affects me. I may not be a mother, or I may not have a mother - but mothering is something we all do, really, and we all have done to us. Caring for each other, being cared for too. That's what should be happening in God's family, all the time.
Now for a third letter, 'G'.
That turns our word into GEM. A gem is a jewel, something precious and special and rather beautiful. Which is what mothers are. There is a Jewish proverb that says: "God couldn't be everywhere, all the time. That's why he made mothers."
Finally, we'll add two letters at once, and they are 'A' and 'R'.
And there we have our word. The world's number one supermother, Marge Simpson. I'm serious, although she is a cartoon character. If you watch the Simpsons, Marge is the one who is the focus for love and care, the one who provides and guides, the one who worries too - and, along with Lisa, most of the time the only one with any sense. A real model of motherhood, though with a rather strange hairdo.
Two words, MARGE MUST. Marge must what? Actually, they're not yet the right words. What we need to do is to swap a few letters around, and add in another 'R' which really should be ARE . . .
. . . and THEN we have the central message of today. MUMS R GREAT - that's why we send the cards, and that's why we give the flowers, and that's why we have this service here in church.
For we MUST give thanks for mothers and mothering: for this is one practical way in which God's love is revealed among us and lived out in our lives - in the caring and giving, the loving and the sacrificing (even) that is what real mothers and real mothering is all about. God is served not just by what we do in church, or in our prayers and our singing of hymns, though all these things are important - but in the caring, loving and giving way in which we live our lives, and in mothers, and mothering, and families.
This morning we have some letters scattered around the church. Let's see what we can spell with them.
To begin with - who has got a letter 'M'?
We only need one 'M' for the moment, so the other one can wait until later. It's not hard to guess what this 'M' might stand for today, because we all know that it's Mother's Day, or Mothering Sunday. So we'll begin with an M for mother.
We'll add onto that M a letter 'U'.
Put a U next to the M and you get the initials of an organisation that's very important in our church here and in churches all over the world. The Mothers' Union. Today is a special day for the Mothers' Union because one of the main things they do is to support Christian family life. And that's exactly what we're celebrating today.
So we have M and U, so let's add on to that a letter 'S'.
Which makes SUM. Sums are about adding things up. And one of the things we do today is to add up all the things about our mothers - and other people who care about us too - that we want to celebrate and say 'thank you' for.
And now we'll add on the letter 'T'.
And that turns our word into the word MUST. Mothering is so important! And so is saying thank-you for the care and love that mothers can give. It's something we really MUST do, and it's good that we have this day to do it.
Well, that's our first word.
Perhaps we can start our second word with the same letter - 'M'.
M for mothers, M for Mothering Sunday - which isn't just about our own mums, but is also about Mothering of every kind. Some people talk about our 'Mother Church' where we learn how to live together as God's family; and the Bible even talks about God loving us and caring for us like a mother hen caring for her chicks, and hiding them under her wing.
This time our second letter is 'E'.
Which of course turns our word into ME. Whoever I am, the theme of today affects me. I may not be a mother, or I may not have a mother - but mothering is something we all do, really, and we all have done to us. Caring for each other, being cared for too. That's what should be happening in God's family, all the time.
Now for a third letter, 'G'.
That turns our word into GEM. A gem is a jewel, something precious and special and rather beautiful. Which is what mothers are. There is a Jewish proverb that says: "God couldn't be everywhere, all the time. That's why he made mothers."
Finally, we'll add two letters at once, and they are 'A' and 'R'.
And there we have our word. The world's number one supermother, Marge Simpson. I'm serious, although she is a cartoon character. If you watch the Simpsons, Marge is the one who is the focus for love and care, the one who provides and guides, the one who worries too - and, along with Lisa, most of the time the only one with any sense. A real model of motherhood, though with a rather strange hairdo.
Two words, MARGE MUST. Marge must what? Actually, they're not yet the right words. What we need to do is to swap a few letters around, and add in another 'R' which really should be ARE . . .
. . . and THEN we have the central message of today. MUMS R GREAT - that's why we send the cards, and that's why we give the flowers, and that's why we have this service here in church.
For we MUST give thanks for mothers and mothering: for this is one practical way in which God's love is revealed among us and lived out in our lives - in the caring and giving, the loving and the sacrificing (even) that is what real mothers and real mothering is all about. God is served not just by what we do in church, or in our prayers and our singing of hymns, though all these things are important - but in the caring, loving and giving way in which we live our lives, and in mothers, and mothering, and families.
Moses and Mothering
A sermon for Mothering Sunday . . .
When I was still quite small myself, my baby cousin was brought to visit us, and I can remember him lying in a little carry cot made out of wicker, something I’d not seen before. My aunt told me it was called a Moses basket, and I remembered I’d been told the story in Sunday school about baby Moses floating on the river in a little basket. The same story we’ve heard this afternoon. I think my brother and I probably wondered whether we could try out our cousin's Moses basket to see whether it floated like the one in the story. But there was no water at hand, or not enough, anyway. It would of course have been an extremely naughty thing to have done, and it wouldn’t have worked anyway. In the story the basket was smeared with pitch or tar to make it watertight. Without it, the basket would have sunk.
My cousin’s Moses basket wasn’t designed to float, but just to look nice and be easy to carry. Modern Moses baskets taken down to Marton Pool or along the Montgomery Canal will not float, so don’t do it, please. But the first ever Moses basket was designed to float, and it was wedged in carefully amongst the reeds, while Moses' sister Miriam stayed close by to keep an eye on things.
That was vital, for if Pharaoh’s men had happened to see the basket, it would have been curtains for Moses. The Egyptian king had given orders that every baby boy born to a Hebrew mother had to be put to death - he’d be taken down to the river, thrown in, and left to drown. Thankfully, baby Moses had a mother and a sister who were determined he should not die. They made sure he was as safe as he could be, with Miriam there to do her best to make sure nothing bad happened. And their clever plan saved him; for it was Pharaoh's own daughter who found Moses, and she decided to keep him. She even gave him back to his own mother to wet nurse him, though of course, she didn't know that it was Moses' real mother she’d appointed.
This is I think a good reading to use on Mothering Sunday, because lots of mothering is happening in this story, not only by Moses' own mother, but also by his sister, as together they trusted God to take care of him, which he did. And Pharaoh’s daughter? She’d been tricked, I suppose, but her own mothering instincts kicked in when she saw the child. Mothering Sunday isn’t only about mothers, because mothering is done by all kinds of people in fact: people who care for others, give time to others, people ready to offer protection and help to those who can’t easily help themselves.
And there’s a message there for all of us. When we follow Jesus we follow together. We're together part of his family. Mothering, taking care of one another, is fundamental to all that we do and are as Christian people. Even if life gets difficult or dangerous, our motto as Christians should never be 'every man for himself'.
St Paul wrote about this in his letter to the Colossians; as Christians we should put on, we should clothe ourselves with, things like compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. When we do so we’re imitating our Lord, doing our best to be like him. That’s what Jesus is like, and his Church should be a caring and loving family of people who know we belong together, because together we belong to our Lord.
When my children were in Sunday school they used to sing a song called 'Magic Penny', which went something like this: "Love is something if you give it away, you'll end up having more." Well, mothering is about giving love: and we are to love one another because Jesus first loved us. If his love is in our hearts, we'll always have more than enough of it, to keep and to share.
So our Mothering Sunday today should do what it says on the tin: firstly, celebrate our mothers, but secondly, also remind us about mothering as something we should all be doing - taking care of each other, and being thoughtful and protective.
Jesus wants his Church to care for people in need, in fear, in pain; he wants us to stand firm against the uncaring and destructive forces of the world; his heart bleeds when those he loves are hurting or are badly treated. A Church that’s trying to be like him will notice when people are hurting, and will notice when people are abused, abandoned, cast adrift, damaged; for he wants us to care when other people don't, cross over and help when other folk pass by.
So little Moses bobbing in his basket among the reeds stands today for all who are vulnerable, all who are at risk, all who have little power to help themselves. I'm glad Moses had his mother and sister there to make sure something good came out of a situation that might have seemed almost hopeless, with threat and danger all around. Because they were there, what God wanted to happen did happen. The mother and sister of Moses in this story are a good example for us; like them we too need to be resourceful, active, caring, courageous, mothering people, because when we are, we are working with our Lord.
When I was still quite small myself, my baby cousin was brought to visit us, and I can remember him lying in a little carry cot made out of wicker, something I’d not seen before. My aunt told me it was called a Moses basket, and I remembered I’d been told the story in Sunday school about baby Moses floating on the river in a little basket. The same story we’ve heard this afternoon. I think my brother and I probably wondered whether we could try out our cousin's Moses basket to see whether it floated like the one in the story. But there was no water at hand, or not enough, anyway. It would of course have been an extremely naughty thing to have done, and it wouldn’t have worked anyway. In the story the basket was smeared with pitch or tar to make it watertight. Without it, the basket would have sunk.
My cousin’s Moses basket wasn’t designed to float, but just to look nice and be easy to carry. Modern Moses baskets taken down to Marton Pool or along the Montgomery Canal will not float, so don’t do it, please. But the first ever Moses basket was designed to float, and it was wedged in carefully amongst the reeds, while Moses' sister Miriam stayed close by to keep an eye on things.
That was vital, for if Pharaoh’s men had happened to see the basket, it would have been curtains for Moses. The Egyptian king had given orders that every baby boy born to a Hebrew mother had to be put to death - he’d be taken down to the river, thrown in, and left to drown. Thankfully, baby Moses had a mother and a sister who were determined he should not die. They made sure he was as safe as he could be, with Miriam there to do her best to make sure nothing bad happened. And their clever plan saved him; for it was Pharaoh's own daughter who found Moses, and she decided to keep him. She even gave him back to his own mother to wet nurse him, though of course, she didn't know that it was Moses' real mother she’d appointed.
This is I think a good reading to use on Mothering Sunday, because lots of mothering is happening in this story, not only by Moses' own mother, but also by his sister, as together they trusted God to take care of him, which he did. And Pharaoh’s daughter? She’d been tricked, I suppose, but her own mothering instincts kicked in when she saw the child. Mothering Sunday isn’t only about mothers, because mothering is done by all kinds of people in fact: people who care for others, give time to others, people ready to offer protection and help to those who can’t easily help themselves.
And there’s a message there for all of us. When we follow Jesus we follow together. We're together part of his family. Mothering, taking care of one another, is fundamental to all that we do and are as Christian people. Even if life gets difficult or dangerous, our motto as Christians should never be 'every man for himself'.
St Paul wrote about this in his letter to the Colossians; as Christians we should put on, we should clothe ourselves with, things like compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. When we do so we’re imitating our Lord, doing our best to be like him. That’s what Jesus is like, and his Church should be a caring and loving family of people who know we belong together, because together we belong to our Lord.
When my children were in Sunday school they used to sing a song called 'Magic Penny', which went something like this: "Love is something if you give it away, you'll end up having more." Well, mothering is about giving love: and we are to love one another because Jesus first loved us. If his love is in our hearts, we'll always have more than enough of it, to keep and to share.
So our Mothering Sunday today should do what it says on the tin: firstly, celebrate our mothers, but secondly, also remind us about mothering as something we should all be doing - taking care of each other, and being thoughtful and protective.
Jesus wants his Church to care for people in need, in fear, in pain; he wants us to stand firm against the uncaring and destructive forces of the world; his heart bleeds when those he loves are hurting or are badly treated. A Church that’s trying to be like him will notice when people are hurting, and will notice when people are abused, abandoned, cast adrift, damaged; for he wants us to care when other people don't, cross over and help when other folk pass by.
So little Moses bobbing in his basket among the reeds stands today for all who are vulnerable, all who are at risk, all who have little power to help themselves. I'm glad Moses had his mother and sister there to make sure something good came out of a situation that might have seemed almost hopeless, with threat and danger all around. Because they were there, what God wanted to happen did happen. The mother and sister of Moses in this story are a good example for us; like them we too need to be resourceful, active, caring, courageous, mothering people, because when we are, we are working with our Lord.
God so loved the world
A sermon for Lent IV :-
God so loved the world . . . in those five words is the foundation of my faith, I think. For it’s the existence and the experience of love that enables me to see point and purpose in human life, in my life; this is what makes us more than mere mechanicals. St Paul expressed it superbly in that tremendous thirteenth chapter of the his first letter to Corinth: nothing we can do, nothing we can achieve, nothing we can give has any meaning or value without love. And if, as Paul tells us, love stands above all else, then love must be the divine nature of God himself; a God who is anything less than all loving cannot be God - or that’s how it seems to me.
I was being told the other day that the reason why our churches are not very full is simple - I’m not preaching the right message. Well, certainly I could be a better and more persuasive preacher than I am - but the right message? I think for the man who was instructing me (yes, I think that’s what he was doing) the right message would contain rather more fire and brimstone than I usually manage to include. I think he might prefer his sort of preacher to speak less about love and more about keeping the rules. I think the sort of church he would like to see would be completely clear about who is in, and who is out.
The fact is, I can’t be that sure. Does love keep to the rules? Wasn’t it the Pharisees and the Priests in the Temple who were all about the rules, who were so sure about who was in and who was out? Jesus says this: “It was not to judge the world that God sent his Son into the world, but that through him the world might be saved.” Not just some people, note, but the world.
In John’s Gospel, whenever Jesus speaks about being lifted up, we must think of the cross. It is on the cross that Jesus will be lifted up, so that all can see him. Most who see him there will despise him and spit on him, or else turn their heads away in shame. Even his own disciples will run for cover. Yet here is where the glory of God is revealed, for it is the glory of love.
In our Gospel reading for next Sunday Jesus will speak again about being lifted up. He says, “When I am lifted up I will draw all people to myself.” All people. That’s not to say that Jesus isn’t absolutely clear about the ways in which we go wrong, the things about us that deny God’s love, the things about us that subvert that love. Last week’s Gospel heard him saying, “If you follow me you must deny yourself.” Change is required of us, and there’s no doubt that a church that strives to be like Jesus must hate sin; but at the same time that it hates the sin, it must also love the sinner - for God meets us in our sin not with condemnation but compassion, not with rejection but forgiveness.
Now here’s the thing. Jesus holds back nothing when he gives himself on the cross. This is love in its most complete and purest form. Love is a wonderful thing when we experience it, but - well, but, there’s always a but. We hold back, keep a bit for ourselves, try perhaps to manipulate the situation, or maybe our love gets soured by jealousy or grievance. There is no holding back at Calvary: Jesus takes upon himself all that condemns any one of us to death, all our sin - without limit. We are forgiven, you and I. Before anything else, we are forgiven.
The mission message of the church can never be: “Sign up with us, come to church, and we will organise forgiveness for you, once you're with us, your sins will be forgiven.” It can only be, “Your sins have been forgiven. Come and recognise that forgiveness, receive that forgiveness, come to church to join us as we say thank you for all that Jesus has already done."
Everyone is forgiven. The power of every sin is broken. But of course, not everyone is ready to recognise and receive that forgiveness. Not everyone even believes they are in need of it; in fact, these days the public definition of sin is no narrowed down and trivialised that if I decide to speak about sin to, say, parents bringing their child to be christened, I first have to carefully define it and explain it before they really even know what I’m talking about.
A doctor may prescribe medicine, but if the patient refuses to believe that he or she needs it, no good will come of the prescription. Or to give a different example, I’m reminded of the rabbit which we once had, and one night my brother forgot to close the door of his hutch after feeding him. Next morning he realised what he’d done and rushed out to what he expected would be an empty hutch, but so far as we could tell the rabbit hadn’t even bothered to look outside, let alone go there. The hutch was comfy and warm and he had food. Yes, he was in prison, but he didn’t realise it, he didn’t recognise it - and thankfully we had no foxes around.
Jesus also says, “The light has come into the world, but people preferred the darkness.” Forgiveness is on offer, but to accept forgiveness you must first recognise that there are things about you that need to be forgiven; and then you must also be prepared not to do those things again, to cut them out of your life. To change, and to live in a new way. That’s a fair step to take, and some of the most famous Christian thinkers and writers and speakers on mission have themselves had to hit rock bottom before they were prepared to accept the truth about themselves and the truth about Christ.
What was that truth? Something about the shortage of love in their own lives; something too about the light of love that we see in Jesus. Bright lights are not always comfortable: they disturb us, they show up stuff we’d rather keep hidden, they force a response. But also this: that even when they had been at their most degraded, in the darkest places of their lives, the furthest away from home and safety, they were already forgiven, their sins were already discounted, for they were already loved.
Everyone we see this week, God already loves them; everyone we see this week, Jesus died for that man, that woman, that child. No-one is ruled out, God’s love has no limits. That’s the only starting place I know for the mission and ministry I have.
God so loved the world . . . in those five words is the foundation of my faith, I think. For it’s the existence and the experience of love that enables me to see point and purpose in human life, in my life; this is what makes us more than mere mechanicals. St Paul expressed it superbly in that tremendous thirteenth chapter of the his first letter to Corinth: nothing we can do, nothing we can achieve, nothing we can give has any meaning or value without love. And if, as Paul tells us, love stands above all else, then love must be the divine nature of God himself; a God who is anything less than all loving cannot be God - or that’s how it seems to me.
I was being told the other day that the reason why our churches are not very full is simple - I’m not preaching the right message. Well, certainly I could be a better and more persuasive preacher than I am - but the right message? I think for the man who was instructing me (yes, I think that’s what he was doing) the right message would contain rather more fire and brimstone than I usually manage to include. I think he might prefer his sort of preacher to speak less about love and more about keeping the rules. I think the sort of church he would like to see would be completely clear about who is in, and who is out.
The fact is, I can’t be that sure. Does love keep to the rules? Wasn’t it the Pharisees and the Priests in the Temple who were all about the rules, who were so sure about who was in and who was out? Jesus says this: “It was not to judge the world that God sent his Son into the world, but that through him the world might be saved.” Not just some people, note, but the world.
In John’s Gospel, whenever Jesus speaks about being lifted up, we must think of the cross. It is on the cross that Jesus will be lifted up, so that all can see him. Most who see him there will despise him and spit on him, or else turn their heads away in shame. Even his own disciples will run for cover. Yet here is where the glory of God is revealed, for it is the glory of love.
In our Gospel reading for next Sunday Jesus will speak again about being lifted up. He says, “When I am lifted up I will draw all people to myself.” All people. That’s not to say that Jesus isn’t absolutely clear about the ways in which we go wrong, the things about us that deny God’s love, the things about us that subvert that love. Last week’s Gospel heard him saying, “If you follow me you must deny yourself.” Change is required of us, and there’s no doubt that a church that strives to be like Jesus must hate sin; but at the same time that it hates the sin, it must also love the sinner - for God meets us in our sin not with condemnation but compassion, not with rejection but forgiveness.
Now here’s the thing. Jesus holds back nothing when he gives himself on the cross. This is love in its most complete and purest form. Love is a wonderful thing when we experience it, but - well, but, there’s always a but. We hold back, keep a bit for ourselves, try perhaps to manipulate the situation, or maybe our love gets soured by jealousy or grievance. There is no holding back at Calvary: Jesus takes upon himself all that condemns any one of us to death, all our sin - without limit. We are forgiven, you and I. Before anything else, we are forgiven.
The mission message of the church can never be: “Sign up with us, come to church, and we will organise forgiveness for you, once you're with us, your sins will be forgiven.” It can only be, “Your sins have been forgiven. Come and recognise that forgiveness, receive that forgiveness, come to church to join us as we say thank you for all that Jesus has already done."
Everyone is forgiven. The power of every sin is broken. But of course, not everyone is ready to recognise and receive that forgiveness. Not everyone even believes they are in need of it; in fact, these days the public definition of sin is no narrowed down and trivialised that if I decide to speak about sin to, say, parents bringing their child to be christened, I first have to carefully define it and explain it before they really even know what I’m talking about.
A doctor may prescribe medicine, but if the patient refuses to believe that he or she needs it, no good will come of the prescription. Or to give a different example, I’m reminded of the rabbit which we once had, and one night my brother forgot to close the door of his hutch after feeding him. Next morning he realised what he’d done and rushed out to what he expected would be an empty hutch, but so far as we could tell the rabbit hadn’t even bothered to look outside, let alone go there. The hutch was comfy and warm and he had food. Yes, he was in prison, but he didn’t realise it, he didn’t recognise it - and thankfully we had no foxes around.
Jesus also says, “The light has come into the world, but people preferred the darkness.” Forgiveness is on offer, but to accept forgiveness you must first recognise that there are things about you that need to be forgiven; and then you must also be prepared not to do those things again, to cut them out of your life. To change, and to live in a new way. That’s a fair step to take, and some of the most famous Christian thinkers and writers and speakers on mission have themselves had to hit rock bottom before they were prepared to accept the truth about themselves and the truth about Christ.
What was that truth? Something about the shortage of love in their own lives; something too about the light of love that we see in Jesus. Bright lights are not always comfortable: they disturb us, they show up stuff we’d rather keep hidden, they force a response. But also this: that even when they had been at their most degraded, in the darkest places of their lives, the furthest away from home and safety, they were already forgiven, their sins were already discounted, for they were already loved.
Everyone we see this week, God already loves them; everyone we see this week, Jesus died for that man, that woman, that child. No-one is ruled out, God’s love has no limits. That’s the only starting place I know for the mission and ministry I have.
Tuesday, 6 March 2018
Imitating Christ
The second of my Lent homilies, to be given tomorrow . . .
“A disciple is not greater than his teacher, but everyone who is perfectly trained will be like his teacher” (Luke 6:40).
There is both warning and promise in these words. Someone once asked, “What is the difference between God and the Vicar of Buslingthorpe?” And the answer was, “God doesn’t think he’s the Vicar of Buslingthorpe!” The warning is not to get above ourselves. However well we learn, by the end of our lives we’re still learners, still disciples, still with more to discern and discover. The mark of the disciple of Christ should always be humility.
But our challenge is to grow to be like our teacher. "My child, to the degree that you can leave yourself behind, to that degree will you be able to enter into me," says our Lord as expressed in the devotional classic “The Imitation of Christ”, written by Thomas a Kempis in the early 15th century and never out of print since. The imitation of Christ is our highest calling, and Thomas a Kempis wrote his book as a devotional guide for those who, within community, were seeking (to borrow words from St Paul) to grow into the full stature of Christ.
To be forgetful of self is very rightly the first step in this. An important corrective note, though. That doesn’t mean to treat yourself badly, or to hold yourself as of no account. If anything, deciding to follow Christ is a journey of discovery of ourselves as valuable and lovely and loved. If I am to love all of God’s creation, then I must love myself too: but as Christ loves me, and with a critical love that shares his vision of the things that need changing, correcting, improving.
Nor is it necessarily a matter of being ascetic and solemn and not enjoying the world. We are, after all, following a man who it seems enjoyed a good party. We are allowed, no, we are instructed, I think, to love the world God has made and given into our care, to delight in it, and to enjoy it.
So the journey of the disciple should be a happy journey. The same Greek word that translates as blessed (makarios) can also translate as happy. Not a facile, surface happiness, but a deep joy that sustains us in hard times as well as when the road is smooth and easy.
To imitate, to grow like someone, you must also study them. The Gospels are our guide, and the other writings of the New Testament, as we seek to know Jesus better, and to know what it really is that he means and asks of us when he says, “Follow me.” When we read thoroughly rather than selectively and focusing on the nice bits, we will find some difficult and challenging things. So it’s good to have help as we study. That’s one reason why Bible study groups can take you so much further than just looking at the scripture on your own. But we can also be helped by Thomas a Kempis and his more modern equivalents: people who set out to guide and help the Christian pilgrim, and also the stories of people we think of as saints, or honour for their piety.
Imitation on stage or screen comes in two forms, I think. One is the imitation of the impressionist, like Rory Bremner or John Culshaw or Tracy Ullman. These can be very good, and they take a lot of work, but it’s surface stuff, looking and sounding like the person but not serious, maybe raising a laugh by getting the person to do or say something they never would in real life. The second is the serious actor playing a part, and maybe seeming to really become that person as they do so. Gary Oldman as Winston Churchill, maybe. I think it was Colin Firth who said of a part he played something like, “You can only really do it if you take that person to heart.” Discipleship is more than acting, even acting at that level, but the same thing applies: “You can only really do it if you take that person to heart.”
“A disciple is not greater than his teacher, but everyone who is perfectly trained will be like his teacher” (Luke 6:40).
There is both warning and promise in these words. Someone once asked, “What is the difference between God and the Vicar of Buslingthorpe?” And the answer was, “God doesn’t think he’s the Vicar of Buslingthorpe!” The warning is not to get above ourselves. However well we learn, by the end of our lives we’re still learners, still disciples, still with more to discern and discover. The mark of the disciple of Christ should always be humility.
But our challenge is to grow to be like our teacher. "My child, to the degree that you can leave yourself behind, to that degree will you be able to enter into me," says our Lord as expressed in the devotional classic “The Imitation of Christ”, written by Thomas a Kempis in the early 15th century and never out of print since. The imitation of Christ is our highest calling, and Thomas a Kempis wrote his book as a devotional guide for those who, within community, were seeking (to borrow words from St Paul) to grow into the full stature of Christ.
To be forgetful of self is very rightly the first step in this. An important corrective note, though. That doesn’t mean to treat yourself badly, or to hold yourself as of no account. If anything, deciding to follow Christ is a journey of discovery of ourselves as valuable and lovely and loved. If I am to love all of God’s creation, then I must love myself too: but as Christ loves me, and with a critical love that shares his vision of the things that need changing, correcting, improving.
Nor is it necessarily a matter of being ascetic and solemn and not enjoying the world. We are, after all, following a man who it seems enjoyed a good party. We are allowed, no, we are instructed, I think, to love the world God has made and given into our care, to delight in it, and to enjoy it.
So the journey of the disciple should be a happy journey. The same Greek word that translates as blessed (makarios) can also translate as happy. Not a facile, surface happiness, but a deep joy that sustains us in hard times as well as when the road is smooth and easy.
To imitate, to grow like someone, you must also study them. The Gospels are our guide, and the other writings of the New Testament, as we seek to know Jesus better, and to know what it really is that he means and asks of us when he says, “Follow me.” When we read thoroughly rather than selectively and focusing on the nice bits, we will find some difficult and challenging things. So it’s good to have help as we study. That’s one reason why Bible study groups can take you so much further than just looking at the scripture on your own. But we can also be helped by Thomas a Kempis and his more modern equivalents: people who set out to guide and help the Christian pilgrim, and also the stories of people we think of as saints, or honour for their piety.
Imitation on stage or screen comes in two forms, I think. One is the imitation of the impressionist, like Rory Bremner or John Culshaw or Tracy Ullman. These can be very good, and they take a lot of work, but it’s surface stuff, looking and sounding like the person but not serious, maybe raising a laugh by getting the person to do or say something they never would in real life. The second is the serious actor playing a part, and maybe seeming to really become that person as they do so. Gary Oldman as Winston Churchill, maybe. I think it was Colin Firth who said of a part he played something like, “You can only really do it if you take that person to heart.” Discipleship is more than acting, even acting at that level, but the same thing applies: “You can only really do it if you take that person to heart.”
Comfortable and Uncomfortable Words
My Lent 3 Sermon . . .
The sentences from scripture used as a preface to the Prayer of Confession in the old Book of Common Prayer communion service are called the “Comfortable Words”. I would begin by saying, “Hear what comfortable words our Saviour Christ saith unto all that truly turn to him.” There are indeed many comfortable words in scripture and especially in the Gospels, but in contrast, today’s story from John’s Gospel is decidedly uncomfortable. If someone came into the cathedral while I was on duty there and behaved like Jesus did that day in the Temple, I’d probably have called the police. What we title the cleansing of the temple is quite a violent episode. Jesus doesn’t mess about as he throws out the money changers, the dealers in pigeons, and all the rest of them.
Why did he do it? He was I think being deliberately provocative, and his actions were a fulfilment of what the Prophet Malachi had said God’s servant would do. But in fact Jesus was surely genuinely and deeply angry at what he found going on in his Father’s house. The pictures of Jesus in my old Sunday School Bible are very comfortable and comforting, but here’s a different picture of Jesus. A more difficult image of an angry Jesus, violently angry in fact, as he makes a whip of cords and physically drives the traders out. 'Zeal for my father's house has consumed me' was the Bible quote his disciples recalled. This is Jesus apparently consumed and overcome by anger: not a staged event, but an outpouring of passion.
Would Jesus be just as angry to see our Cathedral gift shop, or the notelets on sale at the back of church here? I hope not, and in fact I don’t think so. It wasn’t trading in the temple as such that he was opposed to. When I was at Minsterley we had a fair trade stall at the back of church, and I’m sure Jesus didn’t mind that at all: he surely liked us having a stall that promote justice and fairness. It was in fact the lack of justice and fairness in the temple that made Jesus so angry that day: the deliberate abuse and exploitation of poor pilgrims who’d maybe travelled miles to worship in the house of God within the city of God.
For this is the deal that faced a pilgrim arriving at the Temple. To offer sacrifice, you had to buy beasts from the temple farms. To pay tribute, you had to put a temple coin on the plate, so you’d need to exchange your everyday coinage for the Temple’s own money. So the temple had a monopoly, and they or their franchisees could charge whatever price they liked. And they did. Here under the arches of the house of the God of justice and righteousness, the people of God were being treated unjustly. No wonder Jesus was so angry.
What can we learn from this story? How might it apply to us? Well, the first thing I draw out of this story is this: every single person who passes through the door of this or any church, old or young, rich or poor, regular attender or occasional visitor - each one is precious to God. Everyone matters. Reading the story of the cleansing of the Temple, you can see there were insiders there and outsiders. Pilgrims - like Jesus himself - who’d travelled from places like Galilee up to the north were definitely outsiders, so there’d have been a lot to make them feel out of place. To be new or a visitor to any church can be difficult: you don't know the ropes, what to sing, when to stand, all of that. But it's the job of the insiders, if you like, to ease the way and provide a welcome. That wasn’t happening in the temple: the priestly insiders were in fact adding burdens and making things harder.
So I’m reminded that welcome is one area in which every church has to test itself. Does how we do what we do match up? Does the quality of our welcome witness to the welcome offered by our Lord? Does our concern for one another reflect his care for us? Or are we falling short of what could and should be as his people?
The second thing I draw from the story is that it could in fact happen anywhere. The temple was the holiest place, in which the finest Biblical scholars met and debated. I’m sure there was no deliberate policy to exploit the poor and make things tough for pilgrims. It had sort of just happened. That’s how that works, if we don’t take care. Over the years standards slip, abuses go uncorrected. Little things go unnoticed - a bit like that odd noise in your car engine that at first you ignore and then later you don’t even notice - until suddenly something blows up and it doesn't work any more.
So it’s always good to do some spring cleaning - now and again to really root about through the dark and dusty corners, and get below the surface. We might be surprised how much dirt and dust has built up. That’s what Lent is: spring cleaning time for Christians - both as individuals and as church communities. And the cleansing of the temple reminds me how even the holiest of places needs a good clean through from time to time - because you don't always notice how things get slack, and problems can build up where no-one notices.
So the third thing I take from this story is that while many of his words are comfortable words, Jesus can isn’t always a comfortable presence. In the Temple that day he was a decidedly uncomfortable presence. Jesus stirs things up and challenges complacency; Jesus stands against all that is unjust and unfair. For we know that Jesus is always the lover of people, and in any organisation, including churches, it can happen that people find themselves serving the system, when the system is supposed to be serving them.
Many years ago, a senior cleric speaking to a clergy conference I attended suggested to us that the choice before every church is between an uncomfortable life and a comfortable death. Those words have stayed with me. An uncomfortable life, versus a comfortable death. Bob Jackson, who was Archdeacon of Walsall. He told us that in his experience it’s the uncomfortable churches that are growing. These are churches that are looking forward, open to what’s new, open to change. It’s uncomfortable when new people come in, with different ideas, different needs. But when a church opts for comfort rather than change it may also be opting to fade away and die; that’s tough but it’s true. Living things are always changing.
Now Lent is by tradition a time when we accept a bit of discomfort. We may well have given up some of the things that comfort us (in my case, cakes). But as we know, there’s more to Lent than giving things up, there’s stuff we get on with too; spring cleaning, throwing out the bad stuff. Now’s the time to check the scruffy corners of our lives, to get the rubbish cleared, and as we do this to be looking outwards rather than inwards, and forwards rather than backwards - and that’s challenging and uncomfortable, but it is where Jesus is calling us to be. He wants disciples, people who learn from him and copy him and follow him: people who put into practice in our own lives what we have seen and learnt in him. Not just the comfortable words, but the uncomfortable and challenging too.
The sentences from scripture used as a preface to the Prayer of Confession in the old Book of Common Prayer communion service are called the “Comfortable Words”. I would begin by saying, “Hear what comfortable words our Saviour Christ saith unto all that truly turn to him.” There are indeed many comfortable words in scripture and especially in the Gospels, but in contrast, today’s story from John’s Gospel is decidedly uncomfortable. If someone came into the cathedral while I was on duty there and behaved like Jesus did that day in the Temple, I’d probably have called the police. What we title the cleansing of the temple is quite a violent episode. Jesus doesn’t mess about as he throws out the money changers, the dealers in pigeons, and all the rest of them.
Why did he do it? He was I think being deliberately provocative, and his actions were a fulfilment of what the Prophet Malachi had said God’s servant would do. But in fact Jesus was surely genuinely and deeply angry at what he found going on in his Father’s house. The pictures of Jesus in my old Sunday School Bible are very comfortable and comforting, but here’s a different picture of Jesus. A more difficult image of an angry Jesus, violently angry in fact, as he makes a whip of cords and physically drives the traders out. 'Zeal for my father's house has consumed me' was the Bible quote his disciples recalled. This is Jesus apparently consumed and overcome by anger: not a staged event, but an outpouring of passion.
Would Jesus be just as angry to see our Cathedral gift shop, or the notelets on sale at the back of church here? I hope not, and in fact I don’t think so. It wasn’t trading in the temple as such that he was opposed to. When I was at Minsterley we had a fair trade stall at the back of church, and I’m sure Jesus didn’t mind that at all: he surely liked us having a stall that promote justice and fairness. It was in fact the lack of justice and fairness in the temple that made Jesus so angry that day: the deliberate abuse and exploitation of poor pilgrims who’d maybe travelled miles to worship in the house of God within the city of God.
For this is the deal that faced a pilgrim arriving at the Temple. To offer sacrifice, you had to buy beasts from the temple farms. To pay tribute, you had to put a temple coin on the plate, so you’d need to exchange your everyday coinage for the Temple’s own money. So the temple had a monopoly, and they or their franchisees could charge whatever price they liked. And they did. Here under the arches of the house of the God of justice and righteousness, the people of God were being treated unjustly. No wonder Jesus was so angry.
What can we learn from this story? How might it apply to us? Well, the first thing I draw out of this story is this: every single person who passes through the door of this or any church, old or young, rich or poor, regular attender or occasional visitor - each one is precious to God. Everyone matters. Reading the story of the cleansing of the Temple, you can see there were insiders there and outsiders. Pilgrims - like Jesus himself - who’d travelled from places like Galilee up to the north were definitely outsiders, so there’d have been a lot to make them feel out of place. To be new or a visitor to any church can be difficult: you don't know the ropes, what to sing, when to stand, all of that. But it's the job of the insiders, if you like, to ease the way and provide a welcome. That wasn’t happening in the temple: the priestly insiders were in fact adding burdens and making things harder.
So I’m reminded that welcome is one area in which every church has to test itself. Does how we do what we do match up? Does the quality of our welcome witness to the welcome offered by our Lord? Does our concern for one another reflect his care for us? Or are we falling short of what could and should be as his people?
The second thing I draw from the story is that it could in fact happen anywhere. The temple was the holiest place, in which the finest Biblical scholars met and debated. I’m sure there was no deliberate policy to exploit the poor and make things tough for pilgrims. It had sort of just happened. That’s how that works, if we don’t take care. Over the years standards slip, abuses go uncorrected. Little things go unnoticed - a bit like that odd noise in your car engine that at first you ignore and then later you don’t even notice - until suddenly something blows up and it doesn't work any more.
So it’s always good to do some spring cleaning - now and again to really root about through the dark and dusty corners, and get below the surface. We might be surprised how much dirt and dust has built up. That’s what Lent is: spring cleaning time for Christians - both as individuals and as church communities. And the cleansing of the temple reminds me how even the holiest of places needs a good clean through from time to time - because you don't always notice how things get slack, and problems can build up where no-one notices.
So the third thing I take from this story is that while many of his words are comfortable words, Jesus can isn’t always a comfortable presence. In the Temple that day he was a decidedly uncomfortable presence. Jesus stirs things up and challenges complacency; Jesus stands against all that is unjust and unfair. For we know that Jesus is always the lover of people, and in any organisation, including churches, it can happen that people find themselves serving the system, when the system is supposed to be serving them.
Many years ago, a senior cleric speaking to a clergy conference I attended suggested to us that the choice before every church is between an uncomfortable life and a comfortable death. Those words have stayed with me. An uncomfortable life, versus a comfortable death. Bob Jackson, who was Archdeacon of Walsall. He told us that in his experience it’s the uncomfortable churches that are growing. These are churches that are looking forward, open to what’s new, open to change. It’s uncomfortable when new people come in, with different ideas, different needs. But when a church opts for comfort rather than change it may also be opting to fade away and die; that’s tough but it’s true. Living things are always changing.
Now Lent is by tradition a time when we accept a bit of discomfort. We may well have given up some of the things that comfort us (in my case, cakes). But as we know, there’s more to Lent than giving things up, there’s stuff we get on with too; spring cleaning, throwing out the bad stuff. Now’s the time to check the scruffy corners of our lives, to get the rubbish cleared, and as we do this to be looking outwards rather than inwards, and forwards rather than backwards - and that’s challenging and uncomfortable, but it is where Jesus is calling us to be. He wants disciples, people who learn from him and copy him and follow him: people who put into practice in our own lives what we have seen and learnt in him. Not just the comfortable words, but the uncomfortable and challenging too.
Tuesday, 27 February 2018
Tree Creeper
A tree creeper in our garden today feeding on the ground under the feeders and in the undergrowth nearby. Its movements along the paving slabs under our feeders were just as mouse-like as when it's climbing the trunk of a tree - jerky, so that it almost seems to be in one place, then another, without seeing the movement between the two.
It was snowing steadily, and I'm reminded that on the only other occasion when I've watched a tree creeper foraging and feeding on the ground it was also snowing.
It was snowing steadily, and I'm reminded that on the only other occasion when I've watched a tree creeper foraging and feeding on the ground it was also snowing.
Saturday, 24 February 2018
A Sermon for the 2nd Sunday in Lent
There was a story in my paper last week about South Korea; not the Winter Olympics, but about people there choosing to be sent to prison for a week or so: a secure establishment, into which they’re processed as prisoners, given a prison uniform, locked into a cell with basic facilities, and kept pretty much in isolation. Yes, it’s another crazy Asian idea, designed to deal with the stresses and strains of work and daily life: it is, I suppose, a kind of retreat, though it sounds a bit tougher than most of the retreats I’ve been on.
One of the particular features of the prison environment for these guys in Korea is that all electronic devices are removed from the them as they’re checked in. That must be tough! The other day at a family party I glanced across at my sister and three of her daughters; there they were sitting together but each one busily tapping at a mobile. I was about to make a mildly disparaging remark when I looked round to see that my wife and daughter were doing exactly the same. These days, wherever we are, and whatever we do, we have media on tap. I don’t really understand streaming and stuff, but - given the right number of megabytes at your disposal - you can have pretty much anything or everything that Hollywood or Bollywood or Abbey Road or Muscle Shoals or Broadway have ever produced, right there at your fingertips. Maybe these days - with so much media on tap - we’re less able to cope with being alone than any of our forebears.
But I think it’s every bit as important as ever it was, that we take time to be alone. And retreats, fasting, even a prison cell in Korea, can help us to do this: to think things out for ourselves, to remake contact with the real self behind our public face, to discover our own perspective, make up our own mind, and choose our own way, rather than having all of that formed for us. Fasting is good for me, however I choose to do it; I used to think of Lent as a chore, but now I regard it as a blessing.
These days we mostly think of fasting purely in terms of food. Many modern diets use the word fasting, like the one where you fast until six pm and then just have a light meal to end the day, on two or three days each week. That one works quite well, by the way, in my experience. But really, fasting is a whole lifestyle change, and it has less to do with food than with time.
Time: these days we have lots of spare time, and lots of choice as to how we spend it. Religion, or I should say churchgoing, is seen as one spare time occupation among many, and it’s easily crowded out by the others. Despite all my best efforts, church doesn’t seem to compete as entertainment. Should it be competing though? If churchgoing is a spare time occupation, what does that say about how we relate with God?
In my childhood days, while not everyone gave things up for Lent, I always felt that everyone thought they ought to. The fast of Lent was part of our culture and tradition, like Ramadan within the Muslim community. Some time ago, a Muslim colleague was asking me some rather searching questions about how I kept Lent. I muttered something about giving up chocolate and reading the Archbishop of Canterbury’s designated Lent book. He shook his head gently and said, “And you’re a minister!”
But then again, to fast in an overly serious and ostentatious way isn’t necessarily good. Jesus didn’t seem to think so: we read of him condemning the Pharisees because they liked to pray on the street corners, where people can see them pray, and they would make their faces unsightly with ash so everyone would know what they were doing. So as one of our Ash Wednesday readings we have Jesus saying we should fast in secret, so that only God will know we’re doing it. Old Testament prophets complained that though the people were keeping all the feasts and the fasts, their lives didn’t match up to what God really wanted. Micah tells us how to be: “Do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God.”
However we keep the fast, we shouldn’t be doing it just to tick some kind of religious box. God doesn’t want us to fast, or at least not just for the sake of fasting. Our fasting should be purposeful. Prophets of old pointed out that fasting without thinking about why you do it just makes people bad tempered and grumpy, without changing their hearts one bit. The fast of Lent isn’t about how we get through these forty odd days, it’s about what we’re going to do with the rest of our life.
Even spending a week in a Korean gaol probably means that at the end of the time, though you might come out feeling healthier, de-stressed, and more truly yourself, once you’ve gone straight back into the tyranny of work, of the media, of the mobile phone, of the rat race, you’ll be back to square one in no time. I think it’s likely to be a very temporary fix.
A temporary fix because those who do it aren’t wanting or expecting anything more: it’s a break from the rush and tumble, but that’s still the life they choose to live. I think Lent has a different challenge from that. Lent encourages us to make faith and belief central rather than spare-time in our lives. Like Abraham, whose whole life was changed by the promise God made him, even though he found it hard to believe to begin with. Like Jesus, who tells those who go with him they must take up their cross to do it.
Peter tried to shout Jesus down when he told them about the suffering and death that lay ahead for him in Jerusalem. I imagine the others felt the same: their Lord was the Messiah, God’s chosen one, and Jesus was saying sounded to Peter like defeatist talk, like giving up before he started, as though all these plans that surely must work because God was behind it all, would instead fall apart and come to nothing. “You mustn’t say such things!” he protested.
No, Jesus tells him, your way is the way of the world. What Jesus is doing is not the way of the world, as he heads for Jerusalem. There’s nothing short-termist or superficial here, nothing that just looks good on the outside. In fact, the events themselves, when we reach them, will look to Peter and the others like the most dreadful loss, their teacher completely and utterly destroyed. Their hopes destroyed with him.
But Jesus has not gone to Jerusalem to secure the temporary release of some people from the rule of the Roman Emperor; He is going there to take on death and defeat it once and for all, to lift from our shoulders the deadening impact of sin. Love without limits and life without limits, is what the cross stands for.
I quite enjoyed that story from Korea. I wouldn’t want to do the same: I’ve spent one night of my life in a police cell, and I’m in no rush to repeat the experience. But in reality all of life is a prison; to be earthbound is to be unfree - as the words spoken on Ash Wednesday remind us: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” But those words are followed by these: “Repent and believe the Gospel.” Like Abraham, we have been given a promise, and it’s the promise of the cross. “Take up your cross and come with me,” says Jesus. Anything else is a temporary fix at best, and even religion is no more than a temporary fix if we keep it as just a spare time hobby. Those fierce prophets of old told the truth when they said, “Unless you do it with your whole heart it’s not worth doing at all.” But Jesus says this to us, and makes this promise: my cross is life and light: live in me, and I will live in you. Amen.
One of the particular features of the prison environment for these guys in Korea is that all electronic devices are removed from the them as they’re checked in. That must be tough! The other day at a family party I glanced across at my sister and three of her daughters; there they were sitting together but each one busily tapping at a mobile. I was about to make a mildly disparaging remark when I looked round to see that my wife and daughter were doing exactly the same. These days, wherever we are, and whatever we do, we have media on tap. I don’t really understand streaming and stuff, but - given the right number of megabytes at your disposal - you can have pretty much anything or everything that Hollywood or Bollywood or Abbey Road or Muscle Shoals or Broadway have ever produced, right there at your fingertips. Maybe these days - with so much media on tap - we’re less able to cope with being alone than any of our forebears.
But I think it’s every bit as important as ever it was, that we take time to be alone. And retreats, fasting, even a prison cell in Korea, can help us to do this: to think things out for ourselves, to remake contact with the real self behind our public face, to discover our own perspective, make up our own mind, and choose our own way, rather than having all of that formed for us. Fasting is good for me, however I choose to do it; I used to think of Lent as a chore, but now I regard it as a blessing.
These days we mostly think of fasting purely in terms of food. Many modern diets use the word fasting, like the one where you fast until six pm and then just have a light meal to end the day, on two or three days each week. That one works quite well, by the way, in my experience. But really, fasting is a whole lifestyle change, and it has less to do with food than with time.
Time: these days we have lots of spare time, and lots of choice as to how we spend it. Religion, or I should say churchgoing, is seen as one spare time occupation among many, and it’s easily crowded out by the others. Despite all my best efforts, church doesn’t seem to compete as entertainment. Should it be competing though? If churchgoing is a spare time occupation, what does that say about how we relate with God?
In my childhood days, while not everyone gave things up for Lent, I always felt that everyone thought they ought to. The fast of Lent was part of our culture and tradition, like Ramadan within the Muslim community. Some time ago, a Muslim colleague was asking me some rather searching questions about how I kept Lent. I muttered something about giving up chocolate and reading the Archbishop of Canterbury’s designated Lent book. He shook his head gently and said, “And you’re a minister!”
But then again, to fast in an overly serious and ostentatious way isn’t necessarily good. Jesus didn’t seem to think so: we read of him condemning the Pharisees because they liked to pray on the street corners, where people can see them pray, and they would make their faces unsightly with ash so everyone would know what they were doing. So as one of our Ash Wednesday readings we have Jesus saying we should fast in secret, so that only God will know we’re doing it. Old Testament prophets complained that though the people were keeping all the feasts and the fasts, their lives didn’t match up to what God really wanted. Micah tells us how to be: “Do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God.”
However we keep the fast, we shouldn’t be doing it just to tick some kind of religious box. God doesn’t want us to fast, or at least not just for the sake of fasting. Our fasting should be purposeful. Prophets of old pointed out that fasting without thinking about why you do it just makes people bad tempered and grumpy, without changing their hearts one bit. The fast of Lent isn’t about how we get through these forty odd days, it’s about what we’re going to do with the rest of our life.
Even spending a week in a Korean gaol probably means that at the end of the time, though you might come out feeling healthier, de-stressed, and more truly yourself, once you’ve gone straight back into the tyranny of work, of the media, of the mobile phone, of the rat race, you’ll be back to square one in no time. I think it’s likely to be a very temporary fix.
A temporary fix because those who do it aren’t wanting or expecting anything more: it’s a break from the rush and tumble, but that’s still the life they choose to live. I think Lent has a different challenge from that. Lent encourages us to make faith and belief central rather than spare-time in our lives. Like Abraham, whose whole life was changed by the promise God made him, even though he found it hard to believe to begin with. Like Jesus, who tells those who go with him they must take up their cross to do it.
Peter tried to shout Jesus down when he told them about the suffering and death that lay ahead for him in Jerusalem. I imagine the others felt the same: their Lord was the Messiah, God’s chosen one, and Jesus was saying sounded to Peter like defeatist talk, like giving up before he started, as though all these plans that surely must work because God was behind it all, would instead fall apart and come to nothing. “You mustn’t say such things!” he protested.
No, Jesus tells him, your way is the way of the world. What Jesus is doing is not the way of the world, as he heads for Jerusalem. There’s nothing short-termist or superficial here, nothing that just looks good on the outside. In fact, the events themselves, when we reach them, will look to Peter and the others like the most dreadful loss, their teacher completely and utterly destroyed. Their hopes destroyed with him.
But Jesus has not gone to Jerusalem to secure the temporary release of some people from the rule of the Roman Emperor; He is going there to take on death and defeat it once and for all, to lift from our shoulders the deadening impact of sin. Love without limits and life without limits, is what the cross stands for.
I quite enjoyed that story from Korea. I wouldn’t want to do the same: I’ve spent one night of my life in a police cell, and I’m in no rush to repeat the experience. But in reality all of life is a prison; to be earthbound is to be unfree - as the words spoken on Ash Wednesday remind us: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” But those words are followed by these: “Repent and believe the Gospel.” Like Abraham, we have been given a promise, and it’s the promise of the cross. “Take up your cross and come with me,” says Jesus. Anything else is a temporary fix at best, and even religion is no more than a temporary fix if we keep it as just a spare time hobby. Those fierce prophets of old told the truth when they said, “Unless you do it with your whole heart it’s not worth doing at all.” But Jesus says this to us, and makes this promise: my cross is life and light: live in me, and I will live in you. Amen.
Tuesday, 20 February 2018
Being a Disciple: "Jesus Comes First"
The first of my series of four Lenten talks after Compline . . .
“If anyone comes to me and does not place me above his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26).
This is a very hard piece of scripture, and the original Greek can be translated more harshly than the version we’ve just heard, for the literal words have Jesus saying, “Anyone who does not hate his father and mother, et cetera”. But the Aramaic language and thought pattern that Jesus would probably have taught and spoken in didn’t use comparatives in the way we do: the idea of liking one thing more than another, or placing one thing above another, would always be expressed in terms of hating the one thing and loving the other. Even so, it’s a tough ask. Jesus says, “Place me above all those things, all those people that society, community, even the bones of your own body, insist should come first.”
And we know and have heard so many sad stories of cults and sects where adherents are brainwashed into abandoning their families, and erecting a barrier against those who were once their closest friends. It’s the stuff of many a TV drama, and one of the ways in which religion is often portrayed as a negative force.
And yet it does need to be true. We do need to put Jesus first. The great teacher, artist and philanthropist John Ruskin wrote, “He who gives God second place in his life gives him no place.” Again, hard words, and of course we all do it, in fact, and often with every good intention. I’m reminded somehow of the arrow prayer that goes, “Lord, thou knowest I must be busy this day. If I should forget thee, do not thou forget me.”
Putting Jesus first is hard; and our failure to do this should be the beginning of every confession, I think. But when Jesus says, “Follow me,” he means it to be a full-time occupation, and a serious journey. But here’s the point. Here’s what makes what I’m saying different from the divisive and exclusive cults that do so much damage to the vulnerable. Jesus calls us to put him first, to serve him, to do his will - but where does he then send us to do this, and how do we do it? One or two of us may be called to some special work. A few may even enter monasteries or become hermits.
But most of us he sends right back to where we are, into our own home situations, into our own communities, back to our own friends. To work with him there to make his name known and his love felt in the everyday of our own lives. True discipleship doesn’t separate us from our loved ones, it sustains, enriches and enhances our love for them, as we share and show Christ’s love for them.
A story, not from Christianity but from Hinduism, but the moral is apt. In the early morning, before the sun has yet risen, a young man rises from his bed, dresses in simple robes, and prepares to leave his home. He can hear the sleeping sounds of his wife and children, but knows he must leave them. It is time, he has decided, to heed the call of God he has heard for so long. Quietly, he opens the door, steps out and onto the still dark highway, and starts on his journey.
Back in the house, where his wife and children still sleep, God sighs. “Why is it that so many people who dream of finding me and serving me leave the place where I am in order to search for me?”
“If anyone comes to me and does not place me above his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26).
This is a very hard piece of scripture, and the original Greek can be translated more harshly than the version we’ve just heard, for the literal words have Jesus saying, “Anyone who does not hate his father and mother, et cetera”. But the Aramaic language and thought pattern that Jesus would probably have taught and spoken in didn’t use comparatives in the way we do: the idea of liking one thing more than another, or placing one thing above another, would always be expressed in terms of hating the one thing and loving the other. Even so, it’s a tough ask. Jesus says, “Place me above all those things, all those people that society, community, even the bones of your own body, insist should come first.”
And we know and have heard so many sad stories of cults and sects where adherents are brainwashed into abandoning their families, and erecting a barrier against those who were once their closest friends. It’s the stuff of many a TV drama, and one of the ways in which religion is often portrayed as a negative force.
And yet it does need to be true. We do need to put Jesus first. The great teacher, artist and philanthropist John Ruskin wrote, “He who gives God second place in his life gives him no place.” Again, hard words, and of course we all do it, in fact, and often with every good intention. I’m reminded somehow of the arrow prayer that goes, “Lord, thou knowest I must be busy this day. If I should forget thee, do not thou forget me.”
Putting Jesus first is hard; and our failure to do this should be the beginning of every confession, I think. But when Jesus says, “Follow me,” he means it to be a full-time occupation, and a serious journey. But here’s the point. Here’s what makes what I’m saying different from the divisive and exclusive cults that do so much damage to the vulnerable. Jesus calls us to put him first, to serve him, to do his will - but where does he then send us to do this, and how do we do it? One or two of us may be called to some special work. A few may even enter monasteries or become hermits.
But most of us he sends right back to where we are, into our own home situations, into our own communities, back to our own friends. To work with him there to make his name known and his love felt in the everyday of our own lives. True discipleship doesn’t separate us from our loved ones, it sustains, enriches and enhances our love for them, as we share and show Christ’s love for them.
A story, not from Christianity but from Hinduism, but the moral is apt. In the early morning, before the sun has yet risen, a young man rises from his bed, dresses in simple robes, and prepares to leave his home. He can hear the sleeping sounds of his wife and children, but knows he must leave them. It is time, he has decided, to heed the call of God he has heard for so long. Quietly, he opens the door, steps out and onto the still dark highway, and starts on his journey.
Back in the house, where his wife and children still sleep, God sighs. “Why is it that so many people who dream of finding me and serving me leave the place where I am in order to search for me?”
Monday, 19 February 2018
Wilderness
My first sermon of Lent 2018 :-
Who am I? I recall a man in a film, asking just that question in the first reel. I have no memory of what the film was, or frankly even whether it was actually any good, just this opening scene where this guy’s woken up after having been laid out by some kind of blow to the head. But it was a serious and important question: he no longer knew his own name, or indeed anything about himself. The film followed the events in which he began to piece together his past, and in so doing began to rediscover himself.
We do know who we are, pretty much. If we happen to catch our reflection in a shop window while out shopping in town, we can recognise who it is we’re looking at. Only the more intelligent among our animal cousins seem to be able to do the same: apes, monkeys, elephants perhaps. My brother’s dog had had some sort of bad experience involving a large black dog when very young, and as a result really hated large black dogs. What he didn’t realise was that he himself was a large black dog, so when he saw his own reflection in a mirror he recognised it only as yet another nasty big black dog out to get him, and reacted accordingly. That wouldn’t happen to us, not recognising our own selves in a mirror - or if it did, people would say we’d lost our mind.
Knowing who we are is fundamental to being human. We know what we look like. We're all ears suddenly if we hear someone mention our name. We know the stats: our date of birth, our family histories, who our friends are, what we do for a living, probably our sort code and bank account number, certainly our phone number and postcode. But how well do we really know ourselves? How able are we really to see ourselves as others see us? More to the point, how able are we to see ourselves as God sees us? And anyway, what things really define us as who we are? What we own, or the clothes we choose to wear? The kind of home we live in, or where we take our holidays? The sort of company we keep, or whether our job or profession is high in status?
Today, as Lent begins, we think about Jesus going into the wilderness. In Mark’s firm and forceful language, Jesus is driven into the wilderness by the Spirit. He needed to be there, this was something that had to be done before his ministry could begin. In the wilderness he would wrestle with questions about identity and purpose. This was the place to confront things, to sort things out, to get the focus and the balance right. In other words, the wilderness was a place for self-assessment, self-understanding, and to tackle the big issues of recognition, purpose, call.
Recognition, self understanding: I’ve known of people who have had multiple personalities - a major psychological disorder in which, in a very real sense, the person no longer knows who he or she is. Fortunately, that is a rare and unusual condition; but in a sense it’s an extreme form of something that’s true for all of us: we are all in a way more than one person. How I’m defined depends on who’s doing the defining, what the situation is, and what my role is in that situation. I’m one person at home, but not quite the same person at work; as a father, a son, a brother, a friend, a colleague, I play different roles; as a consumer, a voter, an earner, a contributor, I’m judged, perceived, measured and valued in different ways, and subjected to different pressures.
Do you remember 'The Office' on TV? I was never a great fan, but I did see it from time to time. As a sitcom it illustrated and to a degree satirised what happens when people who’d probably behave quite differently in other areas of their lives are required to conform to the very particular norms, conditions, expectations and customs that operate within the rather tightly confined network of people that is an office community. Maybe one reason why I didn’t watch it much was that I’ve worked in offices, and often it felt a bit too near the truth to be entirely comfortable. I’d sit there squirming in shared embarrassment at some of the antics of David Brent, as he tried to cope with it, to manipulate what little power he had and look good within the norms of office life.
Jesus went to the wilderness to separate himself from those whose expectations and assumptions would, throughout his ministry, place conflicting and confusing pressures on him; his task out there was to discover who he really was, as opposed to what other people might say he should be. To do that he needed to be on his own in his Father's presence. Only then could he identify and deal with the voices that would try and drag him off course. He needed to be away from the hustle and bustle of a world in which we're so often denied the freedom to be our real selves because the system forces to conform and fit in, now with this, now with that.
As we keep Lent we recall that time of testing and sorting out. If Jesus needed to do it, we surely do as well. As Lent begins, my question is: “Who am I?” How well do I really know myself? How can I separate what I’m supposed to be, and what I’m supposed to do, as a disciple of Christ, from the myriad different demands on me, the myriad different images of self to which I’m asked to conform?
I read a while back about a parish priest somewhere who decided that he and his church folk should give up everything for Lent. I don’t mean sweets, chocolate, booze, and fags. They gave up all the churchy things they did: the committees, organisations, clubs; even the Mothers' Union stopped meeting, even the choir ceased to practise. Instead, they spent time reading, studying the Bible, and just waiting on God. By the end of Lent they hoped to be able to see more clearly which of all the things everyone was so busy at really needed to be done, and which were just a waste of their time and energy.
He and his congregation had chosen a quite radical way to make prayerful spaces in their lives in which to focus on the stuff that really mattered, what God was calling out of them, what God was wanting them to be and to do as his church. And in the process the vicar had a real sense of rediscovering himself, and gaining a fresh insight into who he was to God, and how God could use him.
I’m not sure I’d manage to do what he did. It must have taken some courage, and I’m sure some people didn't understand what was being done. I’d be afraid people would label me as lazy and uncaring and disloyal. But if couldn’t do all of it, maybe I should do some of it. To give things up for Lent is really only worthwhile in a spiritual sense if it’s part of a wilderness project. You give things up to make space to take things on, and to do things better, and to rearrange the priorities in our lives.
So I need to be asking: what can I do this Lent to make sure I’m praying more, reading more, and for that matter probably also resting more? I need more silence and stillness in my life - for all of us, modern life is generally too noisy. God speaks with a still small voice, we need to be quiet if we’re to hear it. He doesn't force his way in, he waits for us to open the door to him.
So who am I? Who am I this Lent? I hope I can find out - out of all the hundred thousand different ways of being me that the world pushes, tugs, cajoles, tempts, harangues me into taking on - which is the real me, how can I find and fix and identify the me God wants, the me God is calling? I hope I can make the time and space I need this Lent to discover myself, to draw closer to God, and to prepare myself to worship and praise him not just in the hour on a Sunday but in everything I do. This is a precious resource for us, this season of Lent, as the forty days in the wilderness was for Jesus: God is calling us now to learn his ways, to share his love, and to serve him better.
Who am I? I recall a man in a film, asking just that question in the first reel. I have no memory of what the film was, or frankly even whether it was actually any good, just this opening scene where this guy’s woken up after having been laid out by some kind of blow to the head. But it was a serious and important question: he no longer knew his own name, or indeed anything about himself. The film followed the events in which he began to piece together his past, and in so doing began to rediscover himself.
We do know who we are, pretty much. If we happen to catch our reflection in a shop window while out shopping in town, we can recognise who it is we’re looking at. Only the more intelligent among our animal cousins seem to be able to do the same: apes, monkeys, elephants perhaps. My brother’s dog had had some sort of bad experience involving a large black dog when very young, and as a result really hated large black dogs. What he didn’t realise was that he himself was a large black dog, so when he saw his own reflection in a mirror he recognised it only as yet another nasty big black dog out to get him, and reacted accordingly. That wouldn’t happen to us, not recognising our own selves in a mirror - or if it did, people would say we’d lost our mind.
Knowing who we are is fundamental to being human. We know what we look like. We're all ears suddenly if we hear someone mention our name. We know the stats: our date of birth, our family histories, who our friends are, what we do for a living, probably our sort code and bank account number, certainly our phone number and postcode. But how well do we really know ourselves? How able are we really to see ourselves as others see us? More to the point, how able are we to see ourselves as God sees us? And anyway, what things really define us as who we are? What we own, or the clothes we choose to wear? The kind of home we live in, or where we take our holidays? The sort of company we keep, or whether our job or profession is high in status?
Today, as Lent begins, we think about Jesus going into the wilderness. In Mark’s firm and forceful language, Jesus is driven into the wilderness by the Spirit. He needed to be there, this was something that had to be done before his ministry could begin. In the wilderness he would wrestle with questions about identity and purpose. This was the place to confront things, to sort things out, to get the focus and the balance right. In other words, the wilderness was a place for self-assessment, self-understanding, and to tackle the big issues of recognition, purpose, call.
Recognition, self understanding: I’ve known of people who have had multiple personalities - a major psychological disorder in which, in a very real sense, the person no longer knows who he or she is. Fortunately, that is a rare and unusual condition; but in a sense it’s an extreme form of something that’s true for all of us: we are all in a way more than one person. How I’m defined depends on who’s doing the defining, what the situation is, and what my role is in that situation. I’m one person at home, but not quite the same person at work; as a father, a son, a brother, a friend, a colleague, I play different roles; as a consumer, a voter, an earner, a contributor, I’m judged, perceived, measured and valued in different ways, and subjected to different pressures.
Do you remember 'The Office' on TV? I was never a great fan, but I did see it from time to time. As a sitcom it illustrated and to a degree satirised what happens when people who’d probably behave quite differently in other areas of their lives are required to conform to the very particular norms, conditions, expectations and customs that operate within the rather tightly confined network of people that is an office community. Maybe one reason why I didn’t watch it much was that I’ve worked in offices, and often it felt a bit too near the truth to be entirely comfortable. I’d sit there squirming in shared embarrassment at some of the antics of David Brent, as he tried to cope with it, to manipulate what little power he had and look good within the norms of office life.
Jesus went to the wilderness to separate himself from those whose expectations and assumptions would, throughout his ministry, place conflicting and confusing pressures on him; his task out there was to discover who he really was, as opposed to what other people might say he should be. To do that he needed to be on his own in his Father's presence. Only then could he identify and deal with the voices that would try and drag him off course. He needed to be away from the hustle and bustle of a world in which we're so often denied the freedom to be our real selves because the system forces to conform and fit in, now with this, now with that.
As we keep Lent we recall that time of testing and sorting out. If Jesus needed to do it, we surely do as well. As Lent begins, my question is: “Who am I?” How well do I really know myself? How can I separate what I’m supposed to be, and what I’m supposed to do, as a disciple of Christ, from the myriad different demands on me, the myriad different images of self to which I’m asked to conform?
I read a while back about a parish priest somewhere who decided that he and his church folk should give up everything for Lent. I don’t mean sweets, chocolate, booze, and fags. They gave up all the churchy things they did: the committees, organisations, clubs; even the Mothers' Union stopped meeting, even the choir ceased to practise. Instead, they spent time reading, studying the Bible, and just waiting on God. By the end of Lent they hoped to be able to see more clearly which of all the things everyone was so busy at really needed to be done, and which were just a waste of their time and energy.
He and his congregation had chosen a quite radical way to make prayerful spaces in their lives in which to focus on the stuff that really mattered, what God was calling out of them, what God was wanting them to be and to do as his church. And in the process the vicar had a real sense of rediscovering himself, and gaining a fresh insight into who he was to God, and how God could use him.
I’m not sure I’d manage to do what he did. It must have taken some courage, and I’m sure some people didn't understand what was being done. I’d be afraid people would label me as lazy and uncaring and disloyal. But if couldn’t do all of it, maybe I should do some of it. To give things up for Lent is really only worthwhile in a spiritual sense if it’s part of a wilderness project. You give things up to make space to take things on, and to do things better, and to rearrange the priorities in our lives.
So I need to be asking: what can I do this Lent to make sure I’m praying more, reading more, and for that matter probably also resting more? I need more silence and stillness in my life - for all of us, modern life is generally too noisy. God speaks with a still small voice, we need to be quiet if we’re to hear it. He doesn't force his way in, he waits for us to open the door to him.
So who am I? Who am I this Lent? I hope I can find out - out of all the hundred thousand different ways of being me that the world pushes, tugs, cajoles, tempts, harangues me into taking on - which is the real me, how can I find and fix and identify the me God wants, the me God is calling? I hope I can make the time and space I need this Lent to discover myself, to draw closer to God, and to prepare myself to worship and praise him not just in the hour on a Sunday but in everything I do. This is a precious resource for us, this season of Lent, as the forty days in the wilderness was for Jesus: God is calling us now to learn his ways, to share his love, and to serve him better.
Saturday, 10 February 2018
Transfiguration
Sermon to be preached at St Mary's, Trelystan, on the Long Mountain.
It’s a different world up here. There’s a lot more weather up here than there is down below, for a start. The snow settles more readily, and stays around longer. Mountains and hilltops generally are isolated almost by definition. If people are up there it’s because they’ve chosen to be, or have to be. There’s no passing trade. That’s part of what makes this church special. It would be a great place to come to for a quiet day, for a time of recuperation, a time to change tack, to draw breath, and maybe to pray more deeply and with greater feeling than we can manage down at sea level. From the cartoon image of the holy man seated on his slab of rock somewhere in the Himalayas to the reality of pilgrim sites of many faiths in many parts of the world, mountains are held in high regard as places of prayer and stillness, places close to heaven.
Jesus regularly escaped from the busy streets and lanes where so many people wanted a part of him, to pray in the stillness of the hills. The crowds that followed him everywhere must have left him hardly able even to catch his breath, let alone pray. And he needed to pray. Think of that, by the way. If Jesus himself needed to pray, how come for many of us prayer becomes an optional extra, or the spiritual equivalent of the fire button behind the glass, to be broken into and used only in dire emergency?
Today’s Gospel begins with Jesus going up a mountain to pray, not just to take time away from the crowds, but to make himself ready for what was coming next. He had set his face towards Jerusalem, and he knew what awaited him there. His disciples didn’t. They imagined an easy victory for God’s Messiah, and thrones for everyone. But Jesus knew that the victory he would win would cost everything he had to give.
So he climbed the mountain to pray, taking with him the inner circle of his disciples, Peter, James and John. The mountain on which these events probably took place – Mount Hermon - is these days topped by church buildings, and reached via a steep and winding road. Tourists and pilgrims travel up it in Mercedes taxis driven like the wind by fiercely moustached Bedouin taxi-drivers, who hold the franchise. Having ascended that way, I have to say it lacks the spiritual impact of a gentle walk into the clouds. But there are peaceful corners in which to sit quietly and pray, once you’re there.
But when I read today’s Gospel, my imagination does not take me to the Mount Tabor I visited in the Holy Land, it takes me to Cadair Idris. One slightly snowy day in November, twenty years ago now perhaps, I took time out from a clergy retreat at Abergynolwyn to climb as far as I could up Cadair before the fading light forced me back down. That day I had the mountain to myself except for a buzzard or two; the clouds were backlit by the late autumn sun, and that great sweep of ridge above me was magnificent. It was a real spiritual high, and that’s why I can’t help but imagine Peter and the others kneeling on Welsh moor-grass and heather, as they shield their eyes from the transfigured brightness of their Lord.
“It’s good that we’re here,” says Peter. But they couldn’t stay there. They had just a momentary glimpse of glory – clouds, by the way, almost always stand for both mystery and glory in the Bible – just one moment of being almost blinded by the light. Then their blinking eyes see that their Lord the same as he was before, with robes and sandals stained with the dust and grime of the road they must rejoin. For it’s time to get on with the journey.
The disciples go with Jesus back down the hill, back into the real world. Was what they’d seen just an illusion? I prefer to think that for a moment they’d seen through the veil that mostly blinds us, a bit of the glory that’s really always there, a glimpse of their Lord as he truly and always is. Research suggests that many people, maybe even most people, are prepared to admit to having what we might call ‘spiritual experiences’: moments when everything seemed brighter, clearer, holier than normal, moments when something was suddenly understood, times when heart and soul were suddenly lifted. Often people have felt that sort of thing on a mountain, and that doesn’t surprise me one bit. But such experiences are only momentary; we can’t stay there, and we can’t live only for those extraordinary times. We can’t stay on the mountain-top, for there’s a world down there, and that’s where we’re supposed to be, that’s where we’re called to be.
Christian witness and pilgrimage may include such special experiences from time to time, but that’s not what we’re really about. What matters is the love we share along life’s dusty road, the care we offer in the muddle and grime of every day. Spiritual highs are wonderful not for themselves but because they help us get on with living and loving down at ground level. For a moment the disciples saw Jesus transfigured and talking with Elijah and Moses, the two great heroes of the faith. And they were talking about where he was going next, and what he was going there to do. The road at the bottom of the hill would take Jesus to Jerusalem, and to Calvary. And the glory Peter and the others glimpsed up there would be revealed once and for all there: on a Friday in Jerusalem, and on a different hill, as the man who had travelled there to lay down his life in love to save the world, hung and died on a cross.
It’s a different world up here. There’s a lot more weather up here than there is down below, for a start. The snow settles more readily, and stays around longer. Mountains and hilltops generally are isolated almost by definition. If people are up there it’s because they’ve chosen to be, or have to be. There’s no passing trade. That’s part of what makes this church special. It would be a great place to come to for a quiet day, for a time of recuperation, a time to change tack, to draw breath, and maybe to pray more deeply and with greater feeling than we can manage down at sea level. From the cartoon image of the holy man seated on his slab of rock somewhere in the Himalayas to the reality of pilgrim sites of many faiths in many parts of the world, mountains are held in high regard as places of prayer and stillness, places close to heaven.
Jesus regularly escaped from the busy streets and lanes where so many people wanted a part of him, to pray in the stillness of the hills. The crowds that followed him everywhere must have left him hardly able even to catch his breath, let alone pray. And he needed to pray. Think of that, by the way. If Jesus himself needed to pray, how come for many of us prayer becomes an optional extra, or the spiritual equivalent of the fire button behind the glass, to be broken into and used only in dire emergency?
Today’s Gospel begins with Jesus going up a mountain to pray, not just to take time away from the crowds, but to make himself ready for what was coming next. He had set his face towards Jerusalem, and he knew what awaited him there. His disciples didn’t. They imagined an easy victory for God’s Messiah, and thrones for everyone. But Jesus knew that the victory he would win would cost everything he had to give.
So he climbed the mountain to pray, taking with him the inner circle of his disciples, Peter, James and John. The mountain on which these events probably took place – Mount Hermon - is these days topped by church buildings, and reached via a steep and winding road. Tourists and pilgrims travel up it in Mercedes taxis driven like the wind by fiercely moustached Bedouin taxi-drivers, who hold the franchise. Having ascended that way, I have to say it lacks the spiritual impact of a gentle walk into the clouds. But there are peaceful corners in which to sit quietly and pray, once you’re there.
But when I read today’s Gospel, my imagination does not take me to the Mount Tabor I visited in the Holy Land, it takes me to Cadair Idris. One slightly snowy day in November, twenty years ago now perhaps, I took time out from a clergy retreat at Abergynolwyn to climb as far as I could up Cadair before the fading light forced me back down. That day I had the mountain to myself except for a buzzard or two; the clouds were backlit by the late autumn sun, and that great sweep of ridge above me was magnificent. It was a real spiritual high, and that’s why I can’t help but imagine Peter and the others kneeling on Welsh moor-grass and heather, as they shield their eyes from the transfigured brightness of their Lord.
“It’s good that we’re here,” says Peter. But they couldn’t stay there. They had just a momentary glimpse of glory – clouds, by the way, almost always stand for both mystery and glory in the Bible – just one moment of being almost blinded by the light. Then their blinking eyes see that their Lord the same as he was before, with robes and sandals stained with the dust and grime of the road they must rejoin. For it’s time to get on with the journey.
The disciples go with Jesus back down the hill, back into the real world. Was what they’d seen just an illusion? I prefer to think that for a moment they’d seen through the veil that mostly blinds us, a bit of the glory that’s really always there, a glimpse of their Lord as he truly and always is. Research suggests that many people, maybe even most people, are prepared to admit to having what we might call ‘spiritual experiences’: moments when everything seemed brighter, clearer, holier than normal, moments when something was suddenly understood, times when heart and soul were suddenly lifted. Often people have felt that sort of thing on a mountain, and that doesn’t surprise me one bit. But such experiences are only momentary; we can’t stay there, and we can’t live only for those extraordinary times. We can’t stay on the mountain-top, for there’s a world down there, and that’s where we’re supposed to be, that’s where we’re called to be.
Christian witness and pilgrimage may include such special experiences from time to time, but that’s not what we’re really about. What matters is the love we share along life’s dusty road, the care we offer in the muddle and grime of every day. Spiritual highs are wonderful not for themselves but because they help us get on with living and loving down at ground level. For a moment the disciples saw Jesus transfigured and talking with Elijah and Moses, the two great heroes of the faith. And they were talking about where he was going next, and what he was going there to do. The road at the bottom of the hill would take Jesus to Jerusalem, and to Calvary. And the glory Peter and the others glimpsed up there would be revealed once and for all there: on a Friday in Jerusalem, and on a different hill, as the man who had travelled there to lay down his life in love to save the world, hung and died on a cross.
Saturday, 3 February 2018
Cae Post and Hullcoins . . . a sermon
I was sad to hear about the decision to close the Cae Post recycling depot at Trewern. This is a time when arguably we need to be doing more and more recycling rather than less. For Cae Post losing their kerbside contract with Powys County Council was clearly a major blow. I do recognise the financial constraints under which our councils have to operate these days, but I still think that that was a significantly wrong decision.
I remember visiting Cae Post many years ago. One of the younger members of my then church, a lad with some mild learning difficulties, had got a job there, and someone I sang with was involved in management, and showed me round. I have to say that the amount of rubbish thrown out by the average person, family, household these days is truly staggering. You only realise that when you see so much of it all piled up together. At Cae Post recyclable items were sorted and baled for transfer elsewhere, and this created employment opportunities for people who might have struggled to find work elsewhere. So that for me made Cae Post a resource that shouldn’t be judged - nor should it stand or fall - on strictly financial terms.
In my spare time I pick litter. I don’t go out as often as I should, but as the days get a bit longer I aim do at least one pick per week. Not much of what I pick gets recycled, sadly, nor does much of what’s put into litter bins in street. That’s not financially viable, so it ends up as landfill. We invented money, but now money dictates how we live. Money can close down community projects, and it can even help poison our planet.
That planet is our theme today. It’s the only one we have, and although we might dream of travelling to others, and doing that looks straightforward enough on Star Trek, the reality is that if we don’t look after this planet we’ve nowhere else to go. And we share this planet with other living things, that aren’t just there for us to enjoy, but by their health or otherwise provide an indicator of our own health and our own future.
“In the beginning was the Word, and the word was with God, and the Word was God.” John’s great inspiration was to identify Jesus Christ as the creative word spoken by God by which - in Genesis, chapter one - all that is made was made. We are the product of that spoken word, and we human beings in particular are by that word made in the image of God. By that we mean that we are sentient, aware, creative. We know things, we can interpret, plan, invent, love. We can imagine the future. Unlike other living things, we know about life and death.
Being made in God’s image, we’ve no excuse not to be God-like ourselves in our care for what he made. Now we may think we’re being God-like in the way we dominate the world, bridge mighty rivers, raise up high buildings, flash messages instantly from continent to continent, or use giant machines to gouge out forests and quarry the earth - or for that matter, to build weapons that, if once used, could lay the whole world waste.
But there’s nothing God-like about that. That’s just throwing our weight around. God’s Word enters what he has made, becomes part of the human story, to show us what being “made in the image of God” really requires of us. The Kims and Trumps of our world may crow about the size of the nuclear buttons they can press, but what’s far more God-like is to put our arm around the shoulder of a grieving mother, or to feed a hungry child, or to wait and watch beside a hospital bed. When we light lights, when we restore balance, when we give time, when we care.
I was driving not long ago in what seemed like the middle of nowhere, a quiet lane miles from anywhere, when I came across a council truck. Two men were loading onto it what looked like most of a kitchen, dumped into a hedge bank in the countryside. I couldn’t help but reflect that if half the effort that must have gone into taking all that stuff out there in order to dump it miles from any place had instead been spent on doing something charitable, our world could be so much nicer.
Easy for me to say. Maybe harder to do. I know I take the easy option or make the selfish decision far too often. That’s one of the reasons why we Christian folk are supposed to take time to pray. Not in order to present God with our list of wants and instructions, but to re-tune ourselves into his creative will, and to re-awaken that bit of us that is made in his blest and loving image. The Christian challenge is to be like Jesus, which is what Jesus asks of us when he says, “Follow me.” He doesn’t just mean ‘trail along behind me’, but listen, watch, take note, see what I do - and now go, and do the same.
So what does it mean for me, for you, to be like Jesus, where we are? This is the Divine Word by whom all things were created. We too are called to be creative, lovingly creative, in the way we balance and prioritise and live our lives.
Hull was in the news last week, mostly because of the Banksy mural that appeared on a disused bridge. Hull was our city of culture last year, of course. But Hull was also more quietly in the news last week because of Hullcoin. You know about Bitcoin? Well, Hullcoin is a virtual currency that’s designed to reward people who volunteer. They can be given Hullcoins in return for their voluntary work, and at shops and businesses involved in the scheme their Hullcoins can buy them money off the usual price of things. Not everyone needs this, of course - but some volunteers are themselves poorly off, maybe they help out because being unemployed they’ve got time on their hands. It’s a nice thank-you, and a recognition of the way in which we depend on each other, if where we live is to be a balanced and healthy place.
Our world here is I think a poorer place for the loss of Cae Post. Maybe that couldn’t be helped. But we’ll be poorer still if we lose what Cae Post stood for: care for the environment allied with care in the community, care for one another. We’ve just this one planet, which we’ve borrowed from our children; we’ve no second home. We can’t afford the luxury of poisoning our own well.
I remember visiting Cae Post many years ago. One of the younger members of my then church, a lad with some mild learning difficulties, had got a job there, and someone I sang with was involved in management, and showed me round. I have to say that the amount of rubbish thrown out by the average person, family, household these days is truly staggering. You only realise that when you see so much of it all piled up together. At Cae Post recyclable items were sorted and baled for transfer elsewhere, and this created employment opportunities for people who might have struggled to find work elsewhere. So that for me made Cae Post a resource that shouldn’t be judged - nor should it stand or fall - on strictly financial terms.
In my spare time I pick litter. I don’t go out as often as I should, but as the days get a bit longer I aim do at least one pick per week. Not much of what I pick gets recycled, sadly, nor does much of what’s put into litter bins in street. That’s not financially viable, so it ends up as landfill. We invented money, but now money dictates how we live. Money can close down community projects, and it can even help poison our planet.
That planet is our theme today. It’s the only one we have, and although we might dream of travelling to others, and doing that looks straightforward enough on Star Trek, the reality is that if we don’t look after this planet we’ve nowhere else to go. And we share this planet with other living things, that aren’t just there for us to enjoy, but by their health or otherwise provide an indicator of our own health and our own future.
“In the beginning was the Word, and the word was with God, and the Word was God.” John’s great inspiration was to identify Jesus Christ as the creative word spoken by God by which - in Genesis, chapter one - all that is made was made. We are the product of that spoken word, and we human beings in particular are by that word made in the image of God. By that we mean that we are sentient, aware, creative. We know things, we can interpret, plan, invent, love. We can imagine the future. Unlike other living things, we know about life and death.
Being made in God’s image, we’ve no excuse not to be God-like ourselves in our care for what he made. Now we may think we’re being God-like in the way we dominate the world, bridge mighty rivers, raise up high buildings, flash messages instantly from continent to continent, or use giant machines to gouge out forests and quarry the earth - or for that matter, to build weapons that, if once used, could lay the whole world waste.
But there’s nothing God-like about that. That’s just throwing our weight around. God’s Word enters what he has made, becomes part of the human story, to show us what being “made in the image of God” really requires of us. The Kims and Trumps of our world may crow about the size of the nuclear buttons they can press, but what’s far more God-like is to put our arm around the shoulder of a grieving mother, or to feed a hungry child, or to wait and watch beside a hospital bed. When we light lights, when we restore balance, when we give time, when we care.
I was driving not long ago in what seemed like the middle of nowhere, a quiet lane miles from anywhere, when I came across a council truck. Two men were loading onto it what looked like most of a kitchen, dumped into a hedge bank in the countryside. I couldn’t help but reflect that if half the effort that must have gone into taking all that stuff out there in order to dump it miles from any place had instead been spent on doing something charitable, our world could be so much nicer.
Easy for me to say. Maybe harder to do. I know I take the easy option or make the selfish decision far too often. That’s one of the reasons why we Christian folk are supposed to take time to pray. Not in order to present God with our list of wants and instructions, but to re-tune ourselves into his creative will, and to re-awaken that bit of us that is made in his blest and loving image. The Christian challenge is to be like Jesus, which is what Jesus asks of us when he says, “Follow me.” He doesn’t just mean ‘trail along behind me’, but listen, watch, take note, see what I do - and now go, and do the same.
So what does it mean for me, for you, to be like Jesus, where we are? This is the Divine Word by whom all things were created. We too are called to be creative, lovingly creative, in the way we balance and prioritise and live our lives.
Hull was in the news last week, mostly because of the Banksy mural that appeared on a disused bridge. Hull was our city of culture last year, of course. But Hull was also more quietly in the news last week because of Hullcoin. You know about Bitcoin? Well, Hullcoin is a virtual currency that’s designed to reward people who volunteer. They can be given Hullcoins in return for their voluntary work, and at shops and businesses involved in the scheme their Hullcoins can buy them money off the usual price of things. Not everyone needs this, of course - but some volunteers are themselves poorly off, maybe they help out because being unemployed they’ve got time on their hands. It’s a nice thank-you, and a recognition of the way in which we depend on each other, if where we live is to be a balanced and healthy place.
Our world here is I think a poorer place for the loss of Cae Post. Maybe that couldn’t be helped. But we’ll be poorer still if we lose what Cae Post stood for: care for the environment allied with care in the community, care for one another. We’ve just this one planet, which we’ve borrowed from our children; we’ve no second home. We can’t afford the luxury of poisoning our own well.
Saturday, 27 January 2018
Candlemas
It’s better to light one candle than to curse the darkness. That, I believe, is a Chinese proverb, and the gist of it is that we should never just sit about moaning about the things we don’t like. Maybe we don’t think there’s much we can do, but we can always get on and do something: and each single small candle starts to make the world a brighter and better place.
We don't often light candles these days just to get light, although most winters we have a few breaks in our power supply. And I’m always careful to have some candles in and know where they are, just in case. But what we mostly do is to light candles at times of celebration. We put them on birthday cakes, or on the table when a couple, or a family, or a group of friends meet for a special meal. We like to light candles as part of the decorations when we want a place to look special: real candles on our Christmas tree when I was little, battery operated LED ones on our tree these days.
And of course we light candles in church. The candles we light on the altar are there to draw our attention to the holy table, and to make it the focus of our worship. As we break bread and pour wine and share these things together, our candles help mark the fact that this is a celebration initiated and given and shared by our Lord himself, and that he is present as we meet at his table.
Candles are also a sign of prayer; whenever I do a day’s chaplaincy at our cathedral I light a candle or two by the shrine of St Thomas, and take some time to remember people for whom I want to pray. Lots and lots of our visitors and pilgrims do the same. We don’t need to - our prayers are just as valid, and will be just as much heard by God, without candles being lit; but somehow we find it helps us to do it.
Partly that’s just because we’re doing something, expressing our inner emotion in a practical action; but candles also speak of the presence of God, and Jesus is hailed as the light of the world. In the Book of Genesis chapter 1, the story of Creation, light is the first thing God makes; the first creative act is to roll back the darkness, and everything else follows. So our candles in church can remind us that God is always looking to change darkness into light, and always close to us; when we meet to worship him, or kneel to pray, he’s not far away, he is as close as our own breathing. We don’t need to shout for him to hear us, we only need to whisper our prayers.
Candlemas really happens next Friday, but we’re encouraged to keep it in place of the last Sunday of the Epiphany season, which is today. Candlemas is the popular name for the feast day known as the Presentation of Christ in the Temple. It’s the story told in the evensong canticle the Nunc Dimmittis: Old Simeon in the Temple sees the baby Jesus in the arms of his mother, and he knows straight away that his long wait is over. This is the child through whom God's salvation will be worked for his people; this is the child born to be a light to the gentiles, given not only for the salvation of his own people, but as good news for all the world.
Simeon sees a small child in his mother's arms, as his parents come to the temple to do what the law requires. He sees a very tiny light, like a single candle flame in a great big dark room. But he knows it is the true light; and however big and scary the darkness may be, once one small candle is lit then it's not really dark any more. Simeon and Anna the prophetess recognised that day a new and special light, a flame to bring light to every dark place, to change everything.
It’s better to light one candle than to curse the darkness. Often we can feel weak and vulnerable as we look at the world and hear the news. Especially at this still dark time of the year. What can we do, when so much seems so bad? What can we do against the mountains of greed, intolerance, racial violence and hatred, poverty, terrorism, and the gradual hardening of hearts into selfishness that so much these days seems to encourage? People get anxiety overload, and our natural desire to give and to help gets paralysed. And maybe we deal with how that feels by looking back wistfully to half remembered, half imagined past days when everything was nicer and simpler.
But we won’t find the child Simeon rejoiced to see back in the rose-tinted past. He is always striding out ahead of us, and calling us on: “Follow me,” he says to each of us. Light your one personal candle and follow me. And though one small candle may not seem very much, the little light Simeon saw at that first Candlemas is a light to shine for ever, a love that will never be extinguished, and our light is lit from him. Jesus told his disciples that they must shine as lights in the world to the glory of God, and we use those words at holy baptism when we give a candle to a newly baptized child. Being lights is fundamental to our calling as Christian people, whether we’re big and many or small and few.
Most of what Jesus says in the Gospels is directed to the small and few, by the way. Don't be afraid, little flock, he said to his friends. Don't be afraid to be seen to be mine; don't worry that you seem so very small. After all, once you’ve lit your one candle you can light others from it. One candle is a small light, but put them together and they become great. The darkness that seems so strong is forced back and conquered.
The lights went out in the cathedral one day when I was on duty there - I think they were doing some electrical checks, and Hereford is quite a bright cathedral during daylight hours, so it didn’t much matter. What I did observe though is just how bright the rows of votive candles were, all together - a lot of them had been lit that morning. Your light and mine, and others besides, can change the world, if the light that first lights us is the light of Christ, the light with which God first pushed back the dark of chaos, and began his work of creation.
To be a Christian is to be part of God’s creative process. Paul speaks about the Christian community as “having the mind of Christ.” Yes, we have the mind of Christ and the light of Christ: a light to change and transform the world. Candlemas is the traditional very end of the Christmas and Epiphany season. We’ll move on this year to just two Sundays of Ordinary Time - celebrating God’s creation (next week) and thinking of Jesus transfigured on the mountain (the week after), before we enter Lent and turn our faces towards the cross and on to Easter.
As the year moves on, we move on from celebration to action: from candles lit to brighten our Christmas celebration, to candles lighting candles lighting candles as we seek to take what Simeon saw in this little child - God’s promise of love and peace and justice and healing - out into all the world. Mission, in other words. We surely want mission, don’t we? Well, I do. I want this flame to lighten and enrich and change more and more hearts and lives, and I know that that begins here, in me; and in you, too. As candles burn for Jesus here on this Candlemas Day, may they burn also in our hearts. And may we, small as we are, be ready to say yes to being part of his work, witnesses to the world of the love born among us, the light no darkness can quench.
We don't often light candles these days just to get light, although most winters we have a few breaks in our power supply. And I’m always careful to have some candles in and know where they are, just in case. But what we mostly do is to light candles at times of celebration. We put them on birthday cakes, or on the table when a couple, or a family, or a group of friends meet for a special meal. We like to light candles as part of the decorations when we want a place to look special: real candles on our Christmas tree when I was little, battery operated LED ones on our tree these days.
And of course we light candles in church. The candles we light on the altar are there to draw our attention to the holy table, and to make it the focus of our worship. As we break bread and pour wine and share these things together, our candles help mark the fact that this is a celebration initiated and given and shared by our Lord himself, and that he is present as we meet at his table.
Candles are also a sign of prayer; whenever I do a day’s chaplaincy at our cathedral I light a candle or two by the shrine of St Thomas, and take some time to remember people for whom I want to pray. Lots and lots of our visitors and pilgrims do the same. We don’t need to - our prayers are just as valid, and will be just as much heard by God, without candles being lit; but somehow we find it helps us to do it.
Partly that’s just because we’re doing something, expressing our inner emotion in a practical action; but candles also speak of the presence of God, and Jesus is hailed as the light of the world. In the Book of Genesis chapter 1, the story of Creation, light is the first thing God makes; the first creative act is to roll back the darkness, and everything else follows. So our candles in church can remind us that God is always looking to change darkness into light, and always close to us; when we meet to worship him, or kneel to pray, he’s not far away, he is as close as our own breathing. We don’t need to shout for him to hear us, we only need to whisper our prayers.
Candlemas really happens next Friday, but we’re encouraged to keep it in place of the last Sunday of the Epiphany season, which is today. Candlemas is the popular name for the feast day known as the Presentation of Christ in the Temple. It’s the story told in the evensong canticle the Nunc Dimmittis: Old Simeon in the Temple sees the baby Jesus in the arms of his mother, and he knows straight away that his long wait is over. This is the child through whom God's salvation will be worked for his people; this is the child born to be a light to the gentiles, given not only for the salvation of his own people, but as good news for all the world.
Simeon sees a small child in his mother's arms, as his parents come to the temple to do what the law requires. He sees a very tiny light, like a single candle flame in a great big dark room. But he knows it is the true light; and however big and scary the darkness may be, once one small candle is lit then it's not really dark any more. Simeon and Anna the prophetess recognised that day a new and special light, a flame to bring light to every dark place, to change everything.
It’s better to light one candle than to curse the darkness. Often we can feel weak and vulnerable as we look at the world and hear the news. Especially at this still dark time of the year. What can we do, when so much seems so bad? What can we do against the mountains of greed, intolerance, racial violence and hatred, poverty, terrorism, and the gradual hardening of hearts into selfishness that so much these days seems to encourage? People get anxiety overload, and our natural desire to give and to help gets paralysed. And maybe we deal with how that feels by looking back wistfully to half remembered, half imagined past days when everything was nicer and simpler.
But we won’t find the child Simeon rejoiced to see back in the rose-tinted past. He is always striding out ahead of us, and calling us on: “Follow me,” he says to each of us. Light your one personal candle and follow me. And though one small candle may not seem very much, the little light Simeon saw at that first Candlemas is a light to shine for ever, a love that will never be extinguished, and our light is lit from him. Jesus told his disciples that they must shine as lights in the world to the glory of God, and we use those words at holy baptism when we give a candle to a newly baptized child. Being lights is fundamental to our calling as Christian people, whether we’re big and many or small and few.
Most of what Jesus says in the Gospels is directed to the small and few, by the way. Don't be afraid, little flock, he said to his friends. Don't be afraid to be seen to be mine; don't worry that you seem so very small. After all, once you’ve lit your one candle you can light others from it. One candle is a small light, but put them together and they become great. The darkness that seems so strong is forced back and conquered.
The lights went out in the cathedral one day when I was on duty there - I think they were doing some electrical checks, and Hereford is quite a bright cathedral during daylight hours, so it didn’t much matter. What I did observe though is just how bright the rows of votive candles were, all together - a lot of them had been lit that morning. Your light and mine, and others besides, can change the world, if the light that first lights us is the light of Christ, the light with which God first pushed back the dark of chaos, and began his work of creation.
To be a Christian is to be part of God’s creative process. Paul speaks about the Christian community as “having the mind of Christ.” Yes, we have the mind of Christ and the light of Christ: a light to change and transform the world. Candlemas is the traditional very end of the Christmas and Epiphany season. We’ll move on this year to just two Sundays of Ordinary Time - celebrating God’s creation (next week) and thinking of Jesus transfigured on the mountain (the week after), before we enter Lent and turn our faces towards the cross and on to Easter.
As the year moves on, we move on from celebration to action: from candles lit to brighten our Christmas celebration, to candles lighting candles lighting candles as we seek to take what Simeon saw in this little child - God’s promise of love and peace and justice and healing - out into all the world. Mission, in other words. We surely want mission, don’t we? Well, I do. I want this flame to lighten and enrich and change more and more hearts and lives, and I know that that begins here, in me; and in you, too. As candles burn for Jesus here on this Candlemas Day, may they burn also in our hearts. And may we, small as we are, be ready to say yes to being part of his work, witnesses to the world of the love born among us, the light no darkness can quench.
Sunday, 21 January 2018
The Miracle at Cana
A sermon to be preached today at Cefn . . .
It seems a little strange to be speaking about wine at a Methodist chapel, but it is a fact that the first miracle Jesus performed, as recorded by St John, turned water into wine.
It happened at a wedding, and wine does seem to me to be the proper drink for a wedding. I can’t somehow imagine drinking a toast in anything but wine to the bride and groom at a wedding. At any rate, that would certainly have been the case at a traditional Jewish wedding at the time of Jesus. The Jewish rabbis used to say that "without wine there is no joy." Don’t imagine that people went to a wedding expecting to drink themselves senseless - in fact, drunkenness would have been regarded as a most disgraceful thing; but the guests at a wedding would expect good wine to be served and in decent supply. And it would also be a disgrace if the hospitality offered to the wedding guests was found to be deficient.
So at a good and successful wedding you would need to make sure that there was enough wine and to spare. But at Cana there wasn’t, it seems. What a disaster! They had run out of wine! Why should that be, we might wonder. Maybe someone miscalculated, or maybe some of the wine had not been of good quality, and it had turned too sour to be used. Whatever the reason, it was a major problem, and potentially a real disgrace.
So Mary perhaps turned to her son and whispered, "Do something!" If she did, the reply Jesus gave her seems at first to our ears to strike a somewhat harsh note. It comes across as discourteous, really. “This isn’t any of my concern!” is what he tells her, and he seems to go on to say that it isn’t the right time. But any spoken words translated from one language and culture into another are likely to sound strange. It’s perhaps best to think of Jesus as saying to his mother that he won’t be doing this just to get this wedding host out of a hole (which was his mother’s concern), he will be doing it as a sign of God’s greatness.
Mary had faith enough in her son to say to the staff, "Just do whatever he tells you." But what then happened didn’t only save the party, it was one of the Epiphany events in which Jesus the carpenter's son was revealed as the one sent by God, the Christ - for those who had the eyes to see it and the heart to understand.
I quite like the fact that the very first miracle Jesus performed took place at a social do, with the result that a party went with more of a swing than it might otherwise have done. Christians are sometimes tempted to be too puritanical, so it’s good to be reminded from time to time that God’s people are supposed to enjoy life, to enjoy the world, to enjoy his creation in all its wonder and beauty. And, though I hesitate a little to say this in chapel, that might even include enjoying a glass of wine.
A wedding was certainly a good and right setting for this miracle. Prophets like Hosea called Israel the bride of God, because the Covenant made when the Law was given to Moses joined Israel to God as a wife is joined to her husband. That Old Testament image was attached by New Testament writers like Paul and John to the New Covenant made in Jesus, the new relationship into which we are drawn by the cross: we the Church are the new Israel, and that Church is hailed as the Bride of Christ.
The miracle at Cana is a story told by John, and when John tells a story every detail tends to stand for something beyond itself. Some commentators suggest that because the big water jars at Cana would have been intended for the purification rites required by the Law of Moses, John may want us to think of them as symbolising the old Covenant. And even the fact that there were six of them might be significant, because in Scripture six is an imperfect number: so maybe John wants us to reflect on the imperfection and insufficiency of the old Law, which is going to be transformed into something new in what Jesus will go on to do.
The miracle changes what was merely water into wine. So again, some scholars make the point that water was what John the Baptist used; but John also spoke of “the one who will baptize with the Holy Spirit and with fire” - and new wine is a symbol of Pentecost, a symbol of new life in the Spirit.
Biblical scholars can be a little fanciful sometimes, but we’re on more solid ground when we think of the quantity of water contained in those jars: they would have held something not far short of two hundred gallons. Imagine that much wine released into a wedding! What a sign of the liberality and abundance of God's grace! We can see in this miracle how generous God is. No need on earth can exhaust what he has to give, because what God gives - in Jesus Christ and in the gifting of his Spirit - is himself.
So here we see Jesus take what is imperfect and transform it; the message is that in him we find unlimited and superabundant grace to meet our every need. That word “grace” expresses a love that holds nothing back, and is open to all: It’s for everyone - all may partake, like the wine at the feast. And it’s not restricted to special and holy places; anywhere we meet in fellowship together becomes a holy place if Jesus is there. It’s good, by the way, that this story turns up as a reading each year as the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity approaches. This is a gift to break down barriers and confirm unity. We may sing different hymns and worship in different styles and places, but the one loving and generous God pours abundant grace on all of us.
Wherever Jesus went in life, whatever he did and said, was like water being turned into wine. Invite him in, and hearts and minds and lives and relationships are transformed. Without wine there’s no joy, the rabbis said. But we do have cause for joy, and for hope and courage too: if we give our lives to him, Jesus gives us the new wine of the Spirit as the source and spring of a joy that is real, and that is firmly founded and forever.
It seems a little strange to be speaking about wine at a Methodist chapel, but it is a fact that the first miracle Jesus performed, as recorded by St John, turned water into wine.
It happened at a wedding, and wine does seem to me to be the proper drink for a wedding. I can’t somehow imagine drinking a toast in anything but wine to the bride and groom at a wedding. At any rate, that would certainly have been the case at a traditional Jewish wedding at the time of Jesus. The Jewish rabbis used to say that "without wine there is no joy." Don’t imagine that people went to a wedding expecting to drink themselves senseless - in fact, drunkenness would have been regarded as a most disgraceful thing; but the guests at a wedding would expect good wine to be served and in decent supply. And it would also be a disgrace if the hospitality offered to the wedding guests was found to be deficient.
So at a good and successful wedding you would need to make sure that there was enough wine and to spare. But at Cana there wasn’t, it seems. What a disaster! They had run out of wine! Why should that be, we might wonder. Maybe someone miscalculated, or maybe some of the wine had not been of good quality, and it had turned too sour to be used. Whatever the reason, it was a major problem, and potentially a real disgrace.
So Mary perhaps turned to her son and whispered, "Do something!" If she did, the reply Jesus gave her seems at first to our ears to strike a somewhat harsh note. It comes across as discourteous, really. “This isn’t any of my concern!” is what he tells her, and he seems to go on to say that it isn’t the right time. But any spoken words translated from one language and culture into another are likely to sound strange. It’s perhaps best to think of Jesus as saying to his mother that he won’t be doing this just to get this wedding host out of a hole (which was his mother’s concern), he will be doing it as a sign of God’s greatness.
Mary had faith enough in her son to say to the staff, "Just do whatever he tells you." But what then happened didn’t only save the party, it was one of the Epiphany events in which Jesus the carpenter's son was revealed as the one sent by God, the Christ - for those who had the eyes to see it and the heart to understand.
I quite like the fact that the very first miracle Jesus performed took place at a social do, with the result that a party went with more of a swing than it might otherwise have done. Christians are sometimes tempted to be too puritanical, so it’s good to be reminded from time to time that God’s people are supposed to enjoy life, to enjoy the world, to enjoy his creation in all its wonder and beauty. And, though I hesitate a little to say this in chapel, that might even include enjoying a glass of wine.
A wedding was certainly a good and right setting for this miracle. Prophets like Hosea called Israel the bride of God, because the Covenant made when the Law was given to Moses joined Israel to God as a wife is joined to her husband. That Old Testament image was attached by New Testament writers like Paul and John to the New Covenant made in Jesus, the new relationship into which we are drawn by the cross: we the Church are the new Israel, and that Church is hailed as the Bride of Christ.
The miracle at Cana is a story told by John, and when John tells a story every detail tends to stand for something beyond itself. Some commentators suggest that because the big water jars at Cana would have been intended for the purification rites required by the Law of Moses, John may want us to think of them as symbolising the old Covenant. And even the fact that there were six of them might be significant, because in Scripture six is an imperfect number: so maybe John wants us to reflect on the imperfection and insufficiency of the old Law, which is going to be transformed into something new in what Jesus will go on to do.
The miracle changes what was merely water into wine. So again, some scholars make the point that water was what John the Baptist used; but John also spoke of “the one who will baptize with the Holy Spirit and with fire” - and new wine is a symbol of Pentecost, a symbol of new life in the Spirit.
Biblical scholars can be a little fanciful sometimes, but we’re on more solid ground when we think of the quantity of water contained in those jars: they would have held something not far short of two hundred gallons. Imagine that much wine released into a wedding! What a sign of the liberality and abundance of God's grace! We can see in this miracle how generous God is. No need on earth can exhaust what he has to give, because what God gives - in Jesus Christ and in the gifting of his Spirit - is himself.
So here we see Jesus take what is imperfect and transform it; the message is that in him we find unlimited and superabundant grace to meet our every need. That word “grace” expresses a love that holds nothing back, and is open to all: It’s for everyone - all may partake, like the wine at the feast. And it’s not restricted to special and holy places; anywhere we meet in fellowship together becomes a holy place if Jesus is there. It’s good, by the way, that this story turns up as a reading each year as the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity approaches. This is a gift to break down barriers and confirm unity. We may sing different hymns and worship in different styles and places, but the one loving and generous God pours abundant grace on all of us.
Wherever Jesus went in life, whatever he did and said, was like water being turned into wine. Invite him in, and hearts and minds and lives and relationships are transformed. Without wine there’s no joy, the rabbis said. But we do have cause for joy, and for hope and courage too: if we give our lives to him, Jesus gives us the new wine of the Spirit as the source and spring of a joy that is real, and that is firmly founded and forever.
A January Walk
On a very cold morning I walked out from our place in Welshpool, through the small woodland reserve at Bryn Glas, then across a field of sheep to the lane below Gungrog Hall. I turned down to cross the canal, and reached the main road. A heron lifted up from among the grazing sheep just ahead of me, and drifted down in the direction of the canal. A small covey of maybe eight or nine redwings took flight from a nearby tree. I had hoped to see their larger cousins, the fieldfares, sometimes present in tremendous numbers, but no joy today.
Over the main road, I crossed a field to pass round the back of the market, busy again on the first Monday after New Year’s Day. Hazel catkins brightened the trees by the path. These “lamb’s tails” are the male flower, opening widely to allow the winter wind to disperse the plentiful pollen. The female flower takes a bit more searching out: it resembles a small bright green bud, topped though with a little star of deep red filaments maybe a couple of millimetres long, the styles awaiting the pollen to begin the process of forming next autumn’s hazel nuts.
I crossed the Shrewsbury road to leave the market behind and cross the fields towards Pool Quay. Soon I shall hope to hear curlews and see sand martins here by the Severn, but not yet awhile. What I did see, standing in a single row along the cliff edge of the river bank, was a line of maybe forty or so Canada geese. There were a few more on the other side of the river, so fifty or more altogether. These are handsome birds, but, frankly, a bit of a pest. They will have been happy to feed on the grass in the field - geese are grazing birds - but I’m not sure why they were all stood in a row like that. They ignored me completely.
A small group of mallard on the water did not ignore me, and splashily took flight down river. A single tree in the field turned out to be well stocked with jackdaws, which also took off at the sight of me (still no fieldfares, sadly).
I reached the main road, crossed it, and made for the canal towpath to head back to Welshpool. There were plenty of examples here of another catkin tree, the alder. Its catkins, dark in colour, were visible, but not yet open and shedding pollen; as they open they will look greener. Catkin trees need to shed huge amounts of pollen, as they are wind pollinated, and can’t target their pollen as insect-pollinated plants can.
Great tits were very vocal in the woodland - their “teacher, teacher” call is one of the first you’ll hear as the year looks towards Spring. A robin was singing from an ivy-clad tree - they sing all year round, as each robin holds a territory through the winter. A lot of ivy had been cut down, but I was pleased to see it had been left there: the shelter it provides is important to birds and of course to the invertebrates on which many birds, like wrens, feed. As if to prove my point, a wren burst from the stacked ivy and crossed the canal in front of me. A pair of moorhens and a few house sparrows were prospecting the reeds, as I left to turn uphill for home.
Over the main road, I crossed a field to pass round the back of the market, busy again on the first Monday after New Year’s Day. Hazel catkins brightened the trees by the path. These “lamb’s tails” are the male flower, opening widely to allow the winter wind to disperse the plentiful pollen. The female flower takes a bit more searching out: it resembles a small bright green bud, topped though with a little star of deep red filaments maybe a couple of millimetres long, the styles awaiting the pollen to begin the process of forming next autumn’s hazel nuts.
I crossed the Shrewsbury road to leave the market behind and cross the fields towards Pool Quay. Soon I shall hope to hear curlews and see sand martins here by the Severn, but not yet awhile. What I did see, standing in a single row along the cliff edge of the river bank, was a line of maybe forty or so Canada geese. There were a few more on the other side of the river, so fifty or more altogether. These are handsome birds, but, frankly, a bit of a pest. They will have been happy to feed on the grass in the field - geese are grazing birds - but I’m not sure why they were all stood in a row like that. They ignored me completely.
A small group of mallard on the water did not ignore me, and splashily took flight down river. A single tree in the field turned out to be well stocked with jackdaws, which also took off at the sight of me (still no fieldfares, sadly).
I reached the main road, crossed it, and made for the canal towpath to head back to Welshpool. There were plenty of examples here of another catkin tree, the alder. Its catkins, dark in colour, were visible, but not yet open and shedding pollen; as they open they will look greener. Catkin trees need to shed huge amounts of pollen, as they are wind pollinated, and can’t target their pollen as insect-pollinated plants can.
Great tits were very vocal in the woodland - their “teacher, teacher” call is one of the first you’ll hear as the year looks towards Spring. A robin was singing from an ivy-clad tree - they sing all year round, as each robin holds a territory through the winter. A lot of ivy had been cut down, but I was pleased to see it had been left there: the shelter it provides is important to birds and of course to the invertebrates on which many birds, like wrens, feed. As if to prove my point, a wren burst from the stacked ivy and crossed the canal in front of me. A pair of moorhens and a few house sparrows were prospecting the reeds, as I left to turn uphill for home.
Saturday, 6 January 2018
Epiphany
For services at Coedway and Welshpool :
King Herod, Herod the Great as he was called even in his own lifetime, was a man who must have thought he was in control. We I think would call him a paranoid megalomaniac; after all, he had many of his own sons put to death, as potential threats to his power, which they probably were - though that was maybe not that unusual for a king of his time, I suspect. But how in control was Herod, really? He was a client king of the Romans, part of their empire, within which he’d built up something of a power base; he was respected and feared, and had the ear of the emperor. He had rebuilt cities, and his biggest project had been the great temple in Jerusalem. But even a king as mighty as Herod was constantly looking over his shoulder, watching for the next threat.
And one day, strangers arrived from the east. They were looking for a new king, having seen something special as they studied the stars. People have always wanted to understand and explain the world, to foresee the future, to trace some sense of order and direction in what might otherwise seem to be simply chaotic. And these magi or wise men believed that patterns in the night sky might somehow chart the course of history and the direction of human lives. Many people shared their belief.
So what had they seen? A strangely bright star in the east - though the Greek of the gospel might also mean “a star at its rising” - and many modern translations take that as the better translation. A new star, to speak of a new king. Astronomers suggest it may have been a conjunction of three planets, seeming therefore to be specially bright as their lights were added together. Others suggest a supernova, a distant star exploding. Or it could have been a comet, which might provide more of a sense of movement. Maybe it was none of those things, maybe it was something completely supernatural. Was it something only seen by them? Or was it widely seen, but only they interpreted it in the way they did? In fact, what they saw doesn’t matter so much. It’s what they made of it that counts.
It sent them off to find a king. Perhaps a more careful study of the stars would have led the wise men to avoid Herod. A bit of background research might have made them more aware of what kind of man Herod was. But Jerusalem was the obvious place to go, and even wise men weren't wise enough to imagine that a child born to be king could be found anywhere but in a palace.
Herod, of course, was greatly disturbed. For all his power, he was worried. “And all Jerusalem with him,” we read in Matthew’s account, though I think Matthew would have been referring to Herod’s own court and administration, rather than the wider city. The foundations of Herod’s rule were for the most part sturdy and sure, but they contained one potentially fatal flaw: he was not descended from David. Indeed, he was of somewhat mixed descent, and not everyone accepted his credentials as a Jew, even. Now, I imagine that for many people, even the temple priests, a king in Jerusalem, however dubiously Jewish, was better than direct rule from Rome. And he had rebuilt the temple. But if a king of the line of David were to appear, Herod’s days might well be numbered. Surely the people would flock to such a king?
Herod’s people studied their books, and came up with Bethlehem as the place where a new king might be found. Herod would have been more worried still to hear that: for Bethlehem was David’s city. He tried to turn the wise men into his spies, by asking them to report back to him what they found there. He wasn’t to know that this new king was a different sort of king, whose royalty he’d never have recognised. What sort of a king starts life in a stable? Not Herod the Great, for sure. So the wise men set aside their preconceived idea of where a king might be found, and went to little Bethlehem, where they found the one they were searching for, and offered their symbolic gifts, and knelt in worship. To Herod’s annoyance, they didn’t report back, but headed straight for home, greatly changed in heart and mind - I should think - by their journey and by what they found at journey’s end.
For the king the wise men knelt to worship was nothing like King Herod or the Emperor in Rome. Herods and Caesars, and for that matter Trumps and Putins, want to impose their own order on the chaos of the world. The reason why Herod was called great was all that building he did, the temple especially, and the tough and wily way in which he controlled his unruly domain. But what greatness did he have, really? It didn’t long outlast him.
Herod’s temple and most of his city were demolished hardly more than sixty years after his death. Even before that his kingdom had been broken up and parcelled out, with Judea and Jerusalem ruled directly from Rome via governors like Pontius Pilate. Such is the fate of earthly kings and earthly kingdoms, whatever the stars or those who read them might promise.
Jesus did have a kingdom too - he spoke about it a great deal - but not the same sort of kingdom. We call Jesus the king of love, and love is the currency of his kingdom. This is a king born not in a palace but in a barn, on the edge of things; a king born not to take, or to build, or to achieve worldly greatness or power. This king is born to love and to give, to give without limit: the myrrh the kings present tells us he will give even his own life.
Our world remains a place of chaos and muddle and tragedy. But it’s in this mess of a world that we come to discover love. Love, divine love, is what the wise men encountered and worshipped in Bethlehem; they discovered there the God who does not abandon his people to the chaos, but comes to join us and to walk with us. In the birth of the Christ child God doesn’t take away the chaos of the world, he doesn’t remove pain and tragedy from human life and experience. But he enters the chaos, he takes on the pain: he is come to meet us, to claim us and to save us. He doesn’t conscript us into forced service, but, heart by heart, seeks to draw us into love.
The magi presented gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh - sacred gifts of mystic meaning, as one of the hymns of the season describes them. Gold for a king: the sign of authority and power, and there is real authority and power here, not just the show and bombast of Herod or Caesar. Incense for a priest: we see here the only priest who is worthy of the job, who is able to be the bridge between his people and their God, to remake the connection our sin has broken. And myrrh for a death: for the one true and perfect priest is also the one true sacrifice, and he will take upon himself the full weight of our sin and scorn.
Each gift from the wise men to the new king represents a gift that Christ himself will give. And we who receive are bound in turn to give: but what can we give that is worthy of him? “What can I give him, poor as I am?” as Christina Rossetti wrote, in a poem that became a carol. What gifts can we bring? Only this: our lives for his life, and our love for his love. As Rossetti went on to say - 'What I can I give him - give my heart.'
King Herod, Herod the Great as he was called even in his own lifetime, was a man who must have thought he was in control. We I think would call him a paranoid megalomaniac; after all, he had many of his own sons put to death, as potential threats to his power, which they probably were - though that was maybe not that unusual for a king of his time, I suspect. But how in control was Herod, really? He was a client king of the Romans, part of their empire, within which he’d built up something of a power base; he was respected and feared, and had the ear of the emperor. He had rebuilt cities, and his biggest project had been the great temple in Jerusalem. But even a king as mighty as Herod was constantly looking over his shoulder, watching for the next threat.
And one day, strangers arrived from the east. They were looking for a new king, having seen something special as they studied the stars. People have always wanted to understand and explain the world, to foresee the future, to trace some sense of order and direction in what might otherwise seem to be simply chaotic. And these magi or wise men believed that patterns in the night sky might somehow chart the course of history and the direction of human lives. Many people shared their belief.
So what had they seen? A strangely bright star in the east - though the Greek of the gospel might also mean “a star at its rising” - and many modern translations take that as the better translation. A new star, to speak of a new king. Astronomers suggest it may have been a conjunction of three planets, seeming therefore to be specially bright as their lights were added together. Others suggest a supernova, a distant star exploding. Or it could have been a comet, which might provide more of a sense of movement. Maybe it was none of those things, maybe it was something completely supernatural. Was it something only seen by them? Or was it widely seen, but only they interpreted it in the way they did? In fact, what they saw doesn’t matter so much. It’s what they made of it that counts.
It sent them off to find a king. Perhaps a more careful study of the stars would have led the wise men to avoid Herod. A bit of background research might have made them more aware of what kind of man Herod was. But Jerusalem was the obvious place to go, and even wise men weren't wise enough to imagine that a child born to be king could be found anywhere but in a palace.
Herod, of course, was greatly disturbed. For all his power, he was worried. “And all Jerusalem with him,” we read in Matthew’s account, though I think Matthew would have been referring to Herod’s own court and administration, rather than the wider city. The foundations of Herod’s rule were for the most part sturdy and sure, but they contained one potentially fatal flaw: he was not descended from David. Indeed, he was of somewhat mixed descent, and not everyone accepted his credentials as a Jew, even. Now, I imagine that for many people, even the temple priests, a king in Jerusalem, however dubiously Jewish, was better than direct rule from Rome. And he had rebuilt the temple. But if a king of the line of David were to appear, Herod’s days might well be numbered. Surely the people would flock to such a king?
Herod’s people studied their books, and came up with Bethlehem as the place where a new king might be found. Herod would have been more worried still to hear that: for Bethlehem was David’s city. He tried to turn the wise men into his spies, by asking them to report back to him what they found there. He wasn’t to know that this new king was a different sort of king, whose royalty he’d never have recognised. What sort of a king starts life in a stable? Not Herod the Great, for sure. So the wise men set aside their preconceived idea of where a king might be found, and went to little Bethlehem, where they found the one they were searching for, and offered their symbolic gifts, and knelt in worship. To Herod’s annoyance, they didn’t report back, but headed straight for home, greatly changed in heart and mind - I should think - by their journey and by what they found at journey’s end.
For the king the wise men knelt to worship was nothing like King Herod or the Emperor in Rome. Herods and Caesars, and for that matter Trumps and Putins, want to impose their own order on the chaos of the world. The reason why Herod was called great was all that building he did, the temple especially, and the tough and wily way in which he controlled his unruly domain. But what greatness did he have, really? It didn’t long outlast him.
Herod’s temple and most of his city were demolished hardly more than sixty years after his death. Even before that his kingdom had been broken up and parcelled out, with Judea and Jerusalem ruled directly from Rome via governors like Pontius Pilate. Such is the fate of earthly kings and earthly kingdoms, whatever the stars or those who read them might promise.
Jesus did have a kingdom too - he spoke about it a great deal - but not the same sort of kingdom. We call Jesus the king of love, and love is the currency of his kingdom. This is a king born not in a palace but in a barn, on the edge of things; a king born not to take, or to build, or to achieve worldly greatness or power. This king is born to love and to give, to give without limit: the myrrh the kings present tells us he will give even his own life.
Our world remains a place of chaos and muddle and tragedy. But it’s in this mess of a world that we come to discover love. Love, divine love, is what the wise men encountered and worshipped in Bethlehem; they discovered there the God who does not abandon his people to the chaos, but comes to join us and to walk with us. In the birth of the Christ child God doesn’t take away the chaos of the world, he doesn’t remove pain and tragedy from human life and experience. But he enters the chaos, he takes on the pain: he is come to meet us, to claim us and to save us. He doesn’t conscript us into forced service, but, heart by heart, seeks to draw us into love.
The magi presented gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh - sacred gifts of mystic meaning, as one of the hymns of the season describes them. Gold for a king: the sign of authority and power, and there is real authority and power here, not just the show and bombast of Herod or Caesar. Incense for a priest: we see here the only priest who is worthy of the job, who is able to be the bridge between his people and their God, to remake the connection our sin has broken. And myrrh for a death: for the one true and perfect priest is also the one true sacrifice, and he will take upon himself the full weight of our sin and scorn.
Each gift from the wise men to the new king represents a gift that Christ himself will give. And we who receive are bound in turn to give: but what can we give that is worthy of him? “What can I give him, poor as I am?” as Christina Rossetti wrote, in a poem that became a carol. What gifts can we bring? Only this: our lives for his life, and our love for his love. As Rossetti went on to say - 'What I can I give him - give my heart.'
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