Transfiguration

On the last Sunday before Lent, we find ourselves on the Mount of the Transfiguration. We don’t actually know for certain what mountain Jesus ascended that day. The traditional site is Mount Tabor, and that’s where the Church of the Transfiguration can be visited by pilgrims. But some people think it was Mount Hermon, which isn’t far from Caesarea Philippi, where Jesus based his Galilean ministry. One thing we do know is that the Gospel story of this event marks roughly a middle point within the ministry of Jesus; it comes towards the close of his time in Galilee, and at the point at he turns to Judaea and the Holy City of Jerusalem.

Jesus takes with him the “inner three” of his disciples, Peter, James and John. And while they’re on the mountain, these three see Jesus transformed: his face shining, and his clothes a dazzling white. And they see Moses and Elijah suddenly there with him - two great heroes of the Jewish faith, both of which were believed not to have died, but to have been taken bodily into heaven.

People seem always to have ascended mountains to find spiritual refreshment and enlightenment. It’s one of the stock images of the cartoonist, the sage on the mountain top, along with the desert island. On a mountain the air is clearer, and you’re away from it all, lifted above the press and hubbub or ordinary human life. You can see an awful long way. And, as someone once said to me about the holy island of Iona, “the sky seems thinner, and you feel closer to heaven.”

Jesus regularly went to quiet places to pray, and often that meant climbing a hill, usually on his own, but not this time. For Peter and the others, what happens there is not untypical of the kind of spiritual “mountaintop experiences” people seem to have: a sense of something changed and transformed, made brighter and clearer, challenging even, that leaves you with the question, “What does this all mean? What’s it saying to me?” A momentary experience - time may seem to have stopped while it happens, but really it’s hardly more than the blink of an eye.

Peter wanted to know more, and to hang on to the moment, at least for a short while. So he talked some nonsense about building three tents; if they couldn’t stay there forever, he at least wanted to hold on to the moment long enough to grasp what was going on, to try to understand. But mountaintop experiences are just glimpses, nothing more; and just then, maybe they needed the experience itself more than to understand it.

More about that in a moment. But it occurs to me that one of the decisive Easter events Matthew writes about also takes place on a mountaintop in Galilee. Right at the end of his Gospel, Matthew tells how Jesus met with his disciples on a mountain, and from there he sent them out into all the world, to make disciples of every nation. Was it the same mountain, I wonder? And is that when Peter really understood what the Transfiguration had been about?

We use the phrase “Mountaintop Experience” to describe the moments when we feel spiritually lifted or enlightened, or when the penny drops in some new or special way. These don’t always happen on mountaintops, but maybe it always feels a bit like being somewhere high up, somewhere where you see further and more clearly.

A survey carried out a few years ago across the UK showed that many more people were prepared to admit to having had something that could be described as a religious or mountaintop experience than were prepared to admit to a religious faith. Each such event may be rare and special itself, but they seem to be part of what it is to be human. Maybe they’re something we need; so how was the Transfiguration important to Peter and James and John?

I think it had an immediate importance as an experience of God’s glory, something to lift their spirits, and it would also have a later importance, as they looked back and reflected, and began gradually to understand it. They needed the experience there and then, and they’d need the understanding further along the road.

If we read on from where our Gospel ended this morning, we’ll see that Jesus and his disciples came down from the mountain straight into a very testing experience of human need, and the battle between good and evil: a frantic father and the demonic possession of his young son. And soon after that Jesus made the decision to move on from the familiar home communities of Galilee, into Judaea, and on towards Jerusalem.

And what they’d experienced on the mountain must have given Peter and the others a new strength and resolve, as they returned to the hard grind of discipleship. And that’s something we need as well. Our faith is constantly challenged, and as Christians we can get stretched and confused and worn out. Jesus offered those he first called no less than a share in the cross, and a life on the open road, and even to be hated by those who hated him first. So it’s not going to be easy, especially when he instructs us to love our enemies, to do good to those who persecute us, and to pray for those who mean us harm. For us as for Peter and James and John, the brief glimpses we get of God’s glory are given us to encourage us and to cheer us and to keep us on the road. We should treasure them as gifts, moments when we glimpse the glory that’s always there, but mostly is hidden from us.

In the Greek language of the New Testament there are two words for time, and two concepts of time. Chronos is everyday time, the stuff that’s measured in our calendars and by our clocks and watches; the time that gets used up, the time that can’t wait, the time that we know we have only so much of, the sand falling through the glass. But there’s also kairos, and that’s time of a different sort, not measured, not ticking away. Chronos is our time, kairos is God’s. Kairos is opportune time, the right or critical moment; the still point that is a breaking-in of eternity into the chronological drudge of our daily lives.

For Jesus, and certainly for his disciples on that day, the mountaintop was a place of kairos; a place where time as measured down below just for a brief interval stood still. And Jesus was momentarily revealed to them for what he always is. The experience of that moment of kairos helped nerve them for the road ahead with its challenges and dangers. Later they’d begin to understand the real meaning of what they’d seen that day - but only after they’d travelled through the testing and confusing times of Thursday in the Garden of Gethsemane, and Friday at Calvary, and the empty tomb on Easter morning.

Then, and in the light of Pentecost, they’d understand and take out into the world the good news that what had seemed to them at the time like a disaster, like everything going wrong, darkness victorious over light, had been in truth just what God had always planned, his loving purpose unfolding, and evil finally and decisively beaten back. By then they’d met again with their risen Lord, perhaps on that same mountain top.

Meanwhile our journey through the Christian year continues into Lent. Jesus set his face towards Jerusalem, and so must we. And as we travel with our Lord toward the cross, hold on to whatever glimpses of the divine come your way, and never dismiss the kairos moments, the mountaintop experiences. They’re important and necessary to our journey of faith, but that faith then has to be taken back down the mountain and into the everyday world. Like Peter and the others, we discover that transfiguration is given us not as an alternative to the messy and scruffy realities of life, but to help us to get back into the scruffiness and keep up the work there, for here too is where we shall find our God.

Kingfishers

A "Nature Notes" article . . .

It’s nearly ten years since I last wrote about the kingfisher, so perhaps it’s time to do so again. Just occasionally I’ve been blessed with having a good view of this bird: kingfishers are small, shy, with short wings blurred in rapid flight. So mostly all I see is the briefest glimpse of a brightly jewelled arrow fleeting past. Each time I’ve really been able to watch one, rather than just glimpse it, has been special and stays in my memory - always from hides: at Llyn Coed y Dinas, by Welshpool, where the speeding jewel alighted on a post not far from the hide; Doxey Marshes by Stafford, where I was able to watch a bird perched just feet away for probably as long as ten minutes; Slimbridge in Gloucestershire, where we had taken a party of youngsters - a real red letter day for them; and Rye Meads in the Lea Valley, where there was an excellent view of a very active nest hole, and the parent birds coming and going.

Kingfishers are surprisingly small, so much so that the sturdy dagger-like bill can seem almost half as long as the bird itself (and indeed it is!). The upper parts are blue green, the cheeks and underside a dullish orange. Throat and the back of the cheek are white, with the forward cheek around the eye orange. The upper parts are iridescent, hence that sense of a mobile jewel when the bird flies by you! The bird has a shrill, piping call, which you are likely to hear before you see the bird itself.

Kingfishers are resident in the UK, and are found throughout England and Wales, though absent from part of Scotland, perhaps because they don’t cope well with hard winters. They feed on small fish and tadpoles, etc, spotted from a suitable perch before diving to catch it. If there isn’t a perch to hand the bird may hover before diving. This diet of fish helps give the bird itself an unpleasant taste, so kingfishers are rarely predated.

The nest hole is also rather manky and smelly, due to the accumulation of fish bones, droppings and the like. The birds (both parents work together) can excavate a tunnel as long as three feet into the bank. Five to seven eggs are laid, and both parents are involved with feeding. Kingfishers will always swallow a fish head first; often it will hold a newly caught fish by the tail and beat its head against a branch, before turning the fish round in order to swallow it. Of course, fish presented to the youngsters are also offered head first.

There are ninety or so species of kingfisher around the world: “Our” kingfisher is found widely across Europe and Asia, and into North Africa, and as far as Papua New Guinea. Most kingfisher species live in places warmer than here, but the belted kingfisher I’ve seen in Canada nests up into the Arctic, though flying south for the winter. The ten species of kingfisher found in Australia include the kookaburra, which I think is the largest species of kingfisher - a “tree kingfisher”, whose lifestyle has very little to do with water - it eats insects, small vertebrates, and the occasional snake!

Anxiety and Creation

Anxiety is a constant feature of modern life. Though it always has been, I suppose. Jesus told his disciples not to be anxious, so presumably they were anxious, or at least tempted to be - otherwise why would he say what he did? Mind you, if you were to go back to the King James Bible, instead of “Do not be anxious” as we just heard, Jesus is recorded as saying, “Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on.” The word anxious doesn’t appear.

Any translation will use words appropriate to the day to translate the original Greek. The Greek word translated as “be anxious” is “merimnate” - and though the word anxious didn’t appear in the King James translation, by the time of the Revised Standard Version published in 1952, and presumably therefore the American Standard Version of 1901, “do not be anxious” was the accepted best translation.

In fact, anxiety became a word in English somewhere around the 1520’s, deriving from the Latin root “anxius” meaning “uneasy, or troubled in mind”. I’m not surprised that it should have been too new a word to be used when the King James Bible was produced less than a century later, because it took quite a long time to be used much in every day speech. In fact, it wasn’t much used as a word until the 19th century. But then from about 1904 it acquired a more technical usage: “anxiety” became identified as a condition by psychiatrists. And when I took a few weeks off stress back in 1993 the word actually used on my doctor’s note was “anxiety”.

We could therefore think of anxiety as “being so worried it makes us ill”. But we shouldn’t forget that the word “anxious” doesn’t always have to have a negative meaning. As a host, I might be anxious to ensure my guest has an enjoyable visit, and is fed and watered as he or she should be. That doesn’t have to mean I’m worried about what they might think or say if they’re not - just that I’m looking out for their welfare, and wanting to do my best to make sure they’ve enjoy their visit.

So it occurs to me that Jesus is not saying to his disciples that they should not be anxious, full stop, but that they should be anxious for the right things.

In which case, what are the things in our lives that cause us anxiety? A quick trawl through the magazine that helpfully came through my letter box as I was sitting down to write this suggests that we’re not short of people looking to persuade us into anxiety about the right things to eat and the right things to wear, like in our reading. And we may also be anxious about the right car to drive, the right watch to wear, or the right perfume to splash on ourselves. All in the ads in my magazine: advertising and anxiety are closely connected in today’s society - some of the most effective ads either latch on to our perceived anxieties or even create them. What will people think of us, if we don’t drive this, or wear that, or serve this to our families at tea time? Along with - just at the moment - look at these people enjoying themselves in sunny Tenerife or Bodum or Rhodes: we could be enjoying ourselves too, if we booked with whoever it might be.

But maybe we have some more serious anxieties: what will happen now we’ve left the EU, for example - you don’t have to have been a remainer to worry a bit about what leaving might mean in practice. Or there’s global warming; or hardening attitudes in world politics, radical Islam, increasingly illiberal regimes in (say) Russia or America. What about the perceived threat from immigrants who won’t conform to our ways, or the latest pandemic to emerge in China or Africa? The list is endless, and what’s on it probably depends on what newspaper you read, who you watch on TV, or who you last spoke to down the pub. And then we’ll all have our more local and personal anxieties: Is my job secure? Will I get on with the new people who’ve moved next door? Can I afford to get that gutter fixed? Am I eating too much cake? And so on - some of it trivial stuff, but not all of it; there’ll be individual anxieties that are really important and maybe quite scary.

In other words, anxiety is a fact of life, and we can’t escape it. If it gets out of hand, it disables us, both as individuals and also as communities and societies. Some of the most horrible things that happen in our world - ethnic cleansing in Bosnia or Rwanda, for example, began with a shared anxiety that was then stoked up and allowed to run rampant.

But anxiety can also be a force for good. It can change our lives and our choices in good and healthy ways, too. Greta Thunberg and David Attenborough have in their different ways encouraged not just awareness of global warming and anxiety about it, which is useless if all we do is wring our hands and tear our hair, but practical response - by individuals, by communities, and even by governments: maybe not enough yet, but a move in the right direction, even if some like Mr Trump remain to be persuaded.

So Jesus is telling us to be anxious for the right things, to be anxious in the right direction. And in particular, he says to us, “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness” - or, in the version we heard, “Set your minds on God’s kingdom and his justice before everything else.” In other words, instead of being anxious about things that aren’t really all that important, be anxious for the one thing that really is important - that God’s kingdom is proclaimed and built where we are.

And how will that happen? The kingdom of God happens whenever and wherever people are doing God’s will. Martin Luther King said this: “When we see social relationships controlled everywhere by the principles which Jesus illustrated in life - trust, love, mercy, and altruism - then we shall know that the kingdom of God is here.”  And that starts within ourselves. Albert Schweitzer wrote: “There can be no Kingdom of God in the world without the Kingdom of God in our hearts.” So to be anxious for the kingdom of God means to let Jesus into our hearts, and into our lives, and to give ourselves in our living, in our behaving, in the choices we make, to be as like him as we can be.

The theme for today, the Second Sunday before Lent, is not anxiety - although that of course was there in our reading - but  creation. The state of God’s world is a major thing to be anxious about, and an important thing to be anxious for, for all of us.

Paul wrote to the Church in Rome that, as he saw it, “The whole created universe in all its parts groans as if in the pangs of childbirth.” There’s such a lot of anxious groaning around us today, and - to be honest - lots to validly groan about; in fact, we’re surrounded by so many and such huge problems they could just stifle and paralyse us. It’s too much, too big a task!

But Paul is writing not just about the agonies of the world, but also about opportunity. God is bringing something new to birth, he tells his readers in Rome. And Jesus tells his friends, “Be anxious for the kingdom, and God will give you all you need for the task ahead.”

So be anxious for the good things, be anxious in the right way, be anxious for the kingdom of God; and though what I might do, and what you might do, might seem not very much, might seem too small, what we can do together can be (and surely, in the cause of the kingdom, will be) earth changing. So let me end with one of my favourite quotes, from Archbishop Desmond Tutu: “Do your little bit of good where you are; it's those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world.”

Some thoughts on law and light

Today’s Gospel reading requires us to think about Law. I have some friends who are well versed in the law, so much so that one of them’s just been made a judge. We expect our judges to be wise and learned people, and so she is, and she’ll need to be, because the law of the land is a complex business. But we’re thinking today not about the law of the land but the Law of God. So I suppose we’ll surely also to be thinking about sin, for sin is the word we use for when we break the Law of God.

Now for Jews the Law of God and the law of the land had been one and the same thing ever since they entered the Promised Land. The Law Moses brought down from the mountain top governed every aspect of their lives. But by the time of Jesus that had ceased to be the case, for now the people had to live their daily lives subject to the laws of Rome. There’ll have been many legal areas in which Rome and Moses were bound to agree - that murdering people is essentially wrong, for example - but even so, the very fact that a law made by an earthly emperor should take precedence over the law given by Moses would have rankled deeply with the faithful.

Most of us aim to be law-abiding, but all of us have times when we skate on some legal thin ice. The speed at which we choose to drive our car, for example, or if we ignore a “No trespassers” sign to take a short cut. Some laws we take more seriously than others. Or we may choose to break the law by, say, sitting down in the street as part of a demonstration against some action we don’t agree with, or by some form of non-violent direct action. And God’s law? How readily do we break that? Too readily, I guess. Maybe out of thoughtlessness, maybe out of self-interest or greed, maybe just because we’re in a hurry: times when perhaps we take more than we should, or don’t notice when someone’s been hurt, or rush past when we could have stopped and helped. It’s sort of hard not to break God’s law. Sometimes we have to choose the lesser of two evils: and whichever alternative we go for, we end up hurting someone or doing something we’re not happy to have done.

And then there are the times when we act with all good intent, and only realise afterwards that what we said or did was wrong. Hindsight can be a marvellous thing! And times when we’ve been wronged, but then what we then do or say makes things worse. And we could even find ourselves using the law itself as a means of wounding, limiting or excluding others.

In today’s gospel reading, Jesus tells his hearers that not a single letter of the law will be taken away by his teaching. Some folk, hearing the freshness of his teaching, had thought he was challenging the Law, rather like a 1960’s hippy in Haight-Ashbury saying, “Hey man, you don’t need all that law stuff any more, let’s all just love one another.” But Jesus tells them he’s come not to do away with the law but to complete it.

Rules are of course essential for the proper ordering of things. The Law is there for a good and necessary purpose. My freedom to do what I want has to be limited, so that I’m not damaging your freedom more than I have to. Rules keep a balance. But they also have their limits. You can be really good at keeping to the letter of the law, while still acting in a way that’s immoral or damaging - and you might even use the law itself as a means to do down others and make sure things go your way.

So laws don’t always do the job they’re meant to. To test whether a rule is working properly, we need to look at the effect it has on the person at its receiving end. Maybe a law is fair but the punishment is excessive. Or maybe it’s being applied without compassion or humanity. Bad law and badly applied law causes harm instead of limiting harm. Here’s where those who administer the law, including new judges like my friend, need more than just book wisdom and a detailed knowledge of the mechanism of justice. Paul, writing to the church in Corinth, claims to be speaking with a greater and higher wisdom than the wisdom of the world - for by the Holy Spirit he’s brought into a knowledge of God’s own nature, and that’s what guides his speech and his action.

As Christians, we should allow the Spirit to lead us into a Christ-like way of living. And when it comes to law and sin we do well to be critical of ourselves, and how rules and laws are applied and used. And our clue to what’s expected of us is there at the start of our Gospel. Before he talks about the Law standing unchanged, unaltered, with not one jot taken away, Jesus tells his hearers about what their role should be as his people.

They, and we, are to be salt and light to the world. In other words, making a positive difference, making things better, and affirming people, showing them the way. This is the higher and wiser application of the Law, whose true aim is never to beat people down but always to raise them up. The demanding question Christians need always to ask, especially if we’re tempted into any form of self-righteousness, is this: Am I standing up for righteousness and truth, or am I doing this to make myself feel good and maybe to leave someone else feeling bad?

Throughout what we call the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus encourages those who heard him there to show compassion to those around them, to care for others. His teaching takes nothing from the list of rules and laws that governed people’s lives, but it does turn that law on its head, and change the way it applies to us. All law, religious and secular, aims to order society and keep us safe – if you don’t have rules then you end up with chaos and anarchy. So the law merits our honour and respect.

But when law is used to exclude or to oppress, when law lowers one person’s status so that another’s may be enhanced, or when law boosts one person’s sense of righteousness and labels another person as useless or incapable, or for that matter when law is applied letter by letter but without compassion, then law isn’t doing what God intends it to do. We sin not when we don’t keep the law letter by letter: we sin when we’re not being salt, when we’re hiding our light, when we let God’s love go begging.

And we do these things more often than we recognise; but sin, praise God, has a remedy. When we face up to our failings, and confess our sins and mean it, God promises to forgive us. It’s like we get given instead of our tatty old workbook a brand new diary with no ink blots and no crossings out - a chance to start afresh, to have another go. That amazing forgiveness should itself challenge and change any self-righteous attitude to what law is there to do. How can I not have compassion on my neighbour who makes a mistake, when God has been so compassionate to me? At the heart of all that Jesus says about law and judgement - and he says a lot - is this plain truth: we are all loved, completely and without any question by the one who is the source of all law, and whose nature is all love.

Candlemas

It's time, I think, that I should post my Sunday sermons again! So here is what I hope to preach at our Candlemas services this coming Sunday, at Holy Trinity, Leighton and St Michael's, Chirbury.

It’s more than twenty years since Ann and I were in Jerusalem. We stayed in a Palestinian-run hotel not far from the Damascus Gate, near a busy urban bus station that woke us up each morning. We found Jerusalem to be a busy and bustling and very varied city. Its different communities lived alongside each other, but were also very separate. A short walk one evening took me through the jostling streets of a Palestinian area and then almost immediately into the very different ambience of an Orthodox Jewish district of modern apartment blocks and wide but much quieter streets.

I don’t know how much things have changed by now. There were tensions in the air back then - flags flew to mark the claims and possessions of each different community, and there were places where I didn’t altogether feel at ease, that’s for sure: but there was also the pzazz of city life, where I could be anonymous, and just watch and listen and feel.

I love the anonymity of city life. I like to get away from the tourist trail to places where city life can just swirl around me. I’ve mostly lived in rural places, but there’s a city boy inside me that I can’t deny. City streets are places of hope, intrigue, destiny, and of mystery and revelation. Could I make my home in the city? Probably not - but I love the chances I have to be there. Even the disorientation and dirt and grime, the traffic noises, the tall buildings, the kamikaze pigeons, the purposeful tread of shoppers and commuters - even that I love.

Anyway, today’s Gospel starts on the city streets. Mary and Joseph in a very different time are walking through urban Jerusalem, carrying their first child. Very different streets back then, but still they bustled and were noisy and full of possibility. Back then the temple complex was virtually the same size as the rest of the city all put together. So it would have been the largest building they’d ever seen, by some distance. Unlike my aimless wanderings, Mary and Joseph had a purpose. They had an obligation to fulfil. Their boy child must be presented to the Lord.

In Jewish tradition, the first son belonged to God, and Mary and Joseph needed to do what the Law required, to make the prescribed offering that would ransom back their son. As they weren’t well-off, they’d brought a pair of pigeons. As they entered the temple, they were met by an old man; a man who’d been waiting for this day. I wonder how much Mary and Joseph understood, there and then, of what he said. Cities are hugely disorientating places, at any rate they’re bound to be for those who come in fresh from the country. You never know who you might meet, what might happen, what’s around the corner. They’ll have entered the temple in some trepidation - and now this. What could he mean?

The old man said things about “the one who will be light to the nations, and give glory to Israel.” But then to Mary he said “A sword will also pierce your own soul.” Which, of course, in time it would. Luke tells us the story, and Luke also tells us how Mary stored up in her heart all these things she didn’t really understand. Like that word, for sure. We, knowing what lies ahead, can picture Mary’s anxiety as Jesus leaves the carpenter’s shop to preach in the towns and villages of Galilee and then set his face to the city and the temple where she first heard those words; and her desolation as, on a hill just outside the city walls, she watches her firstborn son die on a cross.

So though today, Candlemas, the Feast of the Presentation is a festival of light to bring a joyful close to the long season of Christmas and Epiphany, it does also have its sombre side. We’re reminded how on our Christian journey light and dark are always intertwined, rejoicing and sadness are never far apart.

The old man, Simeon, and then a little later the widow Anna - for both of them there’s a sense of delight and rejoicing. At last it’s happened. What Malachi the prophet promised has come to pass: “The Lord you seek will suddenly come to his temple.” God has fulfilled his promise to Israel: as we read in Psalm 24, the King of Glory has come in; God’s redemption is at hand.

But there’ll be no redeeming victory without also pain, and the child destined for glory is also bound to suffer. Today Mary’s child is blessed by the temple priests, but one day the priests will conspire to have him put to death.

Of course, as Mary and Joseph stand in the temple, and old Simeon takes their child in his arms, they can’t know anything of what lies ahead for him or for them. It’s just one more moment of disorientation on their visit to the great city, one encounter among many in the shove and bustle of city life.

In a city I quite like to find some quiet spot where the bustle can just flow round me while I watch and consider and spend time with my own thoughts. But then perhaps something will jolt me back into a sharper awareness of what’s around me: a sudden noise, an unexpected sight, something overheard, someone approaching me - and I realise that like it or not, I’m connected into it all, part of that larger story that I can’t ever really just observe from outside. For all of us, there’ll be times when a sword will pierce our own souls, too. And maybe the painful moments and encounters are necessary in fact to our awareness of God.

For disciples of Jesus can’t be insulated from the darkness and pain of the world. We’re not disciples so that the world can’t touch us, we’re disciples so that we can touch the world. When we come to church we’re here to be challenged as well as to be joyful or at peace. At Candlemas traditionally we renew our baptismal vows - and the words said when a child is baptized are in fact quite tough - about fighting evil and renouncing sin. We’re to be light to the world in whatever ways we can, because that’s what Jesus was, and those who are baptized belong to him.

It’s surely a bit dangerous, someone said to me, to go out walking on your own the streets of a city you don’t know. Maybe it is, and I don’t necessarily recommend it to you or anyone else. I suppose I have felt vulnerable, though never seriously threatened.

But consider this: when we see the child Jesus brought into the temple and held there in the arms of old Simeon what we see is God making himself vulnerable - we see God’s saving and redeeming love taking its chance with us. Some like Simeon will recognise that love for what it is. But others may turn away and choose their own path, and there’ll be some who’ll actively oppose it. To follow Jesus is to carry a cross; to accept his way is to accept also the sword that can pierce our souls. But baptism commits us to active faith, and to not playing safe. Jesus says, “Go into all the world.” That’s surely the very opposite of playing safe.

And so, on this day, on a feast that contains both joy and pain, and as we picture the temple in which we find both blessing and burden, perhaps we might take to heart these inspiring words of John Wesley about discipleship and baptismal faith: “Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, for as long as ever you can.”

In other words, let’s not play safe. In the name of the one we call the man for others, and for the sake of the God who became small and vulnerable because that’s what it took to save us, may we be ready to offer ourselves, and in the busy cacophony of human life may his light shine in us for the good of his always fragile and often hurting world.

Christ the King

A Sermon for the Sunday before Advent, to be preached at Marton, Leighton, Welshpool Methodist, and Corndon Marsh Chapel.

Next Sunday we start a new church year, as the season of Advent begins. And of course we’ll be looking forward to Christmas, and our celebration of the birth of Jesus. So it may feel a bit odd that our Gospel reading this morning should be something from the other end of that story, part of Luke’s account of the death of Jesus.

But we end our church year by acclaiming Christ the King, and for me this Gospel reading provides an important insight into what his kingship means, and how it’s proclaimed. Our own royal family has been in the news this last week, and not necessarily for good reasons. My paper was headlined “Crisis at the Palace”. I think we all have huge respect for our Queen, and rightly so; she’s served country and commonwealth well, and with a deep sense of duty, both to her people and to God. Nothing can take that away; but respect for the family as a whole has been dented by recent events.

But if we’re looking for leaders, where else do we go? We’re in the midst of a general election campaign that it seems no-one wants, though some may agree that it’s necessary. People I’ve spoken with over the past week or two, whichever way they’ve decided to vote (assuming they’re even going to vote), most of them seem to have the philosophy of voting for the least worst option. “Not one of the lot of them is any good!” I was told yesterday.

It’s no surprise that many people over the past few months have come to see the political establishment as both inept and self-serving. Leading candidates on every side see no need to correct or apologise for false and inaccurate claims or counter claims, and instead simply repeat them. On Christ the King Sunday we’re reminded that whoever we choose for government, Christians have a greater loyalty, to the one ruler who truly is worth our devotion and service.

But I worry about the increasingly tribal nature of our society. New technologies and social media have helped this along I think. And prejudices get formed and reinforced by a sense that we have to stay loyal to our own tribe. We no longer relate to our actual geographic neighbours, just to the tribe to which we’ve decided we belong.

Or so some of the commentators tell us. And while I don’t think they’re completely right, or I hope not anyway, neither are they completely wrong. That’s why our political parties are all over the social media, using Facebook, Twitter and of course emails to an ever greater extent. I had three emails yesterday just from one particular party, including one purporting to come directly from its leader, despite never having been a party member or supporter. As a floating voter, I do try to listen even to those I don’t naturally agree with; but people with a strong tribal loyalty will often want to shut out and stop their ears to opposing ideas or troublesome facts that might challenge where they stand. And social media makes it easier to do that, I think.

Having said that, tribalism itself is nothing new. People have always belonged to tribes. Back in my school days, we were all either Mods or Rockers, and the really keen ones tried to customise their school uniforms accordingly. And tribalism was one of the forces at work two thousand years ago in the events leading up to today’s Gospel reading. Members of the religious elite had manufactured charges against Jesus, and stirred up the crowd, because they saw Jesus as a threat to the security of the realm. Meanwhile, the Roman governor and his forces were happy enough to facilitate this man’s death, if it would keep things quiet.

“The King of the Jews” read the sign above the head of Jesus. He didn’t look much like a king though; in fact, weak, helpless and broken, he was the antithesis of a king. He hung there as the victim of the prejudices and fears shaped by the religious, cultural and political tribes to which those who crucified him subscribed.

But as he hung there, there were two other men hanging with him. on three crosses. One of the men challenged Jesus. “Save yourself and us” he cried, but you get the feeling he didn’t believe for a moment that Jesus could actually do it. This man is obviously not a real Messiah. He’s weak, he’s broken, he’s humiliated. He’s going nowhere.

I feel a bit sorry for that criminal. He taunted Jesus, and couldn’t believe in him, but he was in agony, he was dying. And maybe in all this pain he was also incredibly angry with Jesus for having done nothing to stop the dreadful thing that was happening. If he could stop it, why didn’t he? It’s the other criminal who surprises me. In this most dire situation he still saw the truth of Jesus, the innocence of Jesus. He recognised the goodness of Jesus even as his own world imploded in pain and fear.

It took a criminal, justly facing the punishment his crimes deserved, to see that the most powerful person on that dark hill was the one everyone else thought of as the weakest. And that, as others would come to understand later, what looked like a cross was in fact a royal throne, and what looked like a death was in fact the defeat of death. To him, Jesus replied, “Today you’ll be with me in Paradise”.

Who would look for a king at a place of execution? Or for that matter in a manger in a cow shed? This king defies our natural expectations of kingship. Kings should never be vulnerable, or at the mercy of others. But his way is not the way of the world. A conference I was at some years ago in Brazil had as its motto “Um outre mundo es possivel” (A different world is possible). Christ the King Sunday reminds us that this King, the King who forgives and heals, who loves, who dies even for those who have mocked and denied and abandoned him, this King seeks to lead us to that different world.

I don’t expect this world any time soon to leave behind its tribal insecurities and feuds. And I doubt those who promise that after this election everything will be sunny and wonderful again, once he or she gets the keys to Number Ten. But I do hope we make some progress towards recognition, penitence and healing. We may be tribal, but our shared humanity is worth much more than our tribal fears. And no tribe has all the truth. So let’s not indulge in mockery, prejudice or fear. Let’s continue to stand for goodness and justice and truth. And let’s pray with that criminal at Calvary, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom”.

Nature Notes - Birdwatching in Sydney

Having made an Autumn visit to Sydney, NSW, I had a couple of weeks of watching birds most of which were completely new to me. Though not all of them were. The first European settlers brought European birds with them so that they would feel at home, so house sparrows, starlings, blackbirds and goldfinches are all part of the avian scene. I saw quite a starlings, but the commonest bird in Sydney was another bird of that family, again not a native Australian bird, but one from the Indian subcontinent, the common mynah. They were all over the place, and very noisy. Like starlings, they gather together in urban trees at sunset, chattering noisily.

The most obvious native birds were the sulphur crested cockatoos, which are large, noisy and dazzlingly white in the sun. Other cockatoos included little corellas, and galahs. All of these can be very tame, and at the national park visitor centre I had to wade through a flock of feeding cockatoos and coots on the grass outside to get to the Gents! Sulphur crested cockatoos have adapted well to urban life, and I have a great picture of one perched on a shopping trolley outside one of the big malls. A more surprising urban bird was the Australian white ibis, a sociable heron-like bird that can be found hunting for scraps right in the heart of the city. One person I spoke to referred to them as “Bin Chickens”.

Other parrot species abound, but most of them are a lot shyer than cockatoos, though I was able to take some good shots of rainbow lorikeets, fast and noisy flyers that are adapted to feeding on flowers, crimson rosellas and other colourful small parrots. But I didn’t see any wild budgerigars, which are more associated with the open plains.

Mention of coots earlier reminds me that some birds have such a global range that, for example coots in Australia and coots here are the same species. There is also a moorhen, but the Australian bird, the dusky moorhen, is classed as a distinct species. The related but larger purple swamphen, though, is another species with a wide global distribution, and can be found also in India, South Africa, and Spain.

Other birds are migratory, and travel all the way from here to there, or there to here. These include waders like the greenshank, and seabirds like the Caspian tern I was able to see while out whale watching. Another bird found both here and in Australia is, to my surprise, the great crested grebe. They have dabchicks too, but the Australian bird is a different species from the dabchick, or little grebe, found here.

 

I saw lots of other interesting birds: magpie larks, red tailed finches, red necked avocets, Australian pelicans, royal spoonbills, black swans of course, wattlebirds, and the iconic kookaburra. Australian ravens with their strange and mournful cries, and magpies which are totally different to ours, and not actually members of the crow family. Black winged stilts with their impossibly long legs. My favourites were probably the tiny, long-tailed and highly coloured fairy wrens. I can’t wait to go back!

Hating Your Family?

A sermon on Proper 18 Year C readings, mostly Luke 14.25-33.

We’ve two readings today which both merit a sermon, but it’s not easy I think to preach about the two of them together. Our first reading was virtually the whole of Paul’s very personal letter to his friend Philemon - but while I will just touch on that later, I’d like to speak about that difficult Gospel reading in which Jesus - quite shockingly to my ears - tells us that to be his disciples we have to hate our own families. That so much flies in the face of everything I’ve been taught to do as a Christian, that I think we need to explore that further.

It was very possibly the playwright Tennessee Williams who described friends as “God's way of apologizing to us for our families.” Like many a cynical comment, it’s not without a grain of truth. After all, as another saying puts it, “You can choose your friends, but you can’t choose your families.” But in reality the distinction between family and friends isn’t so clear cut. You can be best friends with people you’re related to, and you can be badly let down by people you thought were friends.

And anyway, I’m not sure Jesus is talking only about blood relatives. I think he’s probably including anyone you’re close to and connected to, friends as well. It’s a really tough thing to say, it’s hard to accept. But let me say two things straight away. The first is this: Jesus spoke toughly because he needed to be tough. There’s no room for fair weather or part time disciples in his band, any more than there’d be room for fair weather or part time soldiers on the eve of battle. Those he called came straight away; they gave their full and complete commitment. Nothing less than that is acceptable.

And having said that, the second thing I want to mention is that there’s a translation issue here. Aramaic doesn’t do comparatives the way we do. Where we’d say, “I prefer tea to coffee” someone speaking in Aramaic would need to say “I love tea and hate coffee” in order to make the same comparison. So Jesus is actually saying, “Your loyalty to God must be above even your loyalty to your family.”

But it’s still pretty tough. One of the ways in which I express my faith in God should surely be within my own family. I have responsibilities and loyalties there I can’t just walk away from. Having said that, we’ve had an example this week, haven’t we, of what happens when what you strongly believe is right is the opposite of what your brother strongly believes is right. Some people are praising Jo Johnson for his courage; others are denouncing him as a traitor. I make no comment on the issue itself, except to say that the Christian disciple can’t compromise on his or her faith in Christ, and sometimes there will be hard decisions to be made.

Discipleship or a commitment to follow Jesus as Lord requires serious resolve and loyalty. It doesn’t mean actually hating or even abandoning our families, but it does mean making sure that God comes first in my life, before even the most precious other things. The reason why Jesus talked about families wasn’t to belittle them and say they’re not important; it’s in fact exactly the opposite. Family is really important, and well deserving of our time and energy and commitment. These are the people to whom we belong, and who belong to us. But even they, even our close families, must take second place to God.

Indeed, even our own life must take second place to God. Jesus also talks about laying down our life for his sake and for the Gospel, and tradition assures us that almost every one of the first apostles accepted a martyr’s death. Laying down our life: Jesus says that when we place at his feet our freedom to choose, we will receive that freedom back again. Disciples are there to learn the master’s ways, to see through the master’s eyes. And this can lead us into a creative and loving relationship with those around us, our friends and families, the special people in our lives. And it won’t be the same as before. We may be more patient, more ready to help and to serve, more able to listen, to take seriously what others are thinking, how they feel.

And discipleship opens up our vision of family. Family - in terms of our own blood relatives - isn’t the limit of our vision or our love. And while being a Christian shouldn’t make anyone turn their back on their own family, but it should be something that widens the bounds of family. We may be born into one family, but we are then baptized into a greater one.

And I’d want to go on to say that for all the blessings of  family, human families can also be cramp and limit and control, in ways that aren’t always helpful. Pushy parents may require their children to achieve what they failed to achieve themselves. Or they may restrict the options and freedom of their children by forcing them to follow a set path, or maybe work in the family business. Children may feel they have to stay within a particular orbit, rather than strike out on their own, because that’s what family loyalty requires of them.

I hope that as a Christian my vision of family is wider that that, freer than that. The bonds of love within a family should never prevent each member being valued and applauded for who they are, and offered freedom and space to grow as their own people. Indeed, love should surely encourage this, within what is healthy and safe. I think that, though it can be hard as a Christian parent to live with this, even the faith of your children surely has to be their own faith, something they’ve freely thought out and chosen and accepted, rather than a thing forced on them or required of them because that’s what we do as a family. We can’t order our children to believe what we believe, we can only hope to live our what we believe in a way that maybe they can look at and see that it makes sense for us, and maybe therefore will make sense for them. The only way to really teach the faith is to live the faith. But there is always the risk that your children won’t take your faith to heart. They may have to encounter faith in a different person, or a different place, in order for it to make sense for them.

So families can be tough going, and things don’t always work the way you want. And if some of us some of the time look for support from friends instead, or maybe blow off steam with a few drinking buddies, that’s no great surprise. But actually if we run away from our families to Jesus, he will send us back there. Faith is lived out in ordinary places, just where we are. Not everyone has to be a missionary or a monk, and discipleship doesn’t really require us to hate our families, or our friends, or any source of love and comfort and fellowship in our lives. Put God first, that is important. But then as we relate to one another as God’s people we’ll find we don’t hate family, but we will see maybe how to do something about the stuff that can go wrong: relationships misused, relationships that are controlling or toxic, and that element of spiritual blindness that, if uncorrected, means we fail to see the damage we do. Discipleship encourages us to place divine love at the heart of every human relationship.

So finally, a word on the connection between all of this and that letter Paul wrote to his friend Philemon. He wrote, as you’ll recall, about Philemon’s runaway slave Onesimus, who’d made his way to where Paul was and had in the process become a Christian. Paul sent him back, and asked Philemon to accept him now not only as a slave but a Christian brother. There’ll maybe be another time to discuss slavery itself; let’s just say it was a fact of life in the Roman empire, and Paul doesn’t challenge it here. But what Paul is asking is important. In Christ we relate to one another in a new way. Christ becomes part of the relationship. So Paul asks that this new Christ-inspired element should be part of the picture as Onesimus returns home: that Onesimus the slave should be accepted as more than a slave, accepted with love, and recognised as one who is part of the family, his family, our family, the family of Christ.

Pecking Orders - a sermon for Trinity 11

(Luke 14.7-14)

Last Sunday afternoon I was sitting in the garden of friends, counting the butterflies on their Buddleia. On a warm and sunny day many different species were being attracted to the sweet scent of the flowers. It’s called the “butterfly bush”, and that day it was doing just what it says on the tin. And one thing I noticed was that there seemed to be a definite pecking order - even among butterflies, it seems, some guys get the best seats at the table, while others have to wait their turn.

So there before me in insect form was the theme of our Gospel reading today. In all human situations, there’s a pecking order too. And isn’t it annoying and frustrating when people get noticed not for having the best ideas, not for their commitment, not for their hard work, but just because they’re good at being noticed! “Make sure you’re in the right place at the right time,” they tell you. “Make sure you grease the right palms,” even.

But here’s an important warning we’ll come back to: “A person may spend his whole life climbing the ladder of success only to find, once he gets to the top, that the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall,” said by the monk and Christian writer Thomas Merton.

In today’s Gospel we find Jesus engaging with a pattern of behaviour that’s all too familiar. In every walk of life, there’s a pecking order. It’s how we are, and vicars aren’t all that much better. The way we live and relate together is judged by a whole range of status signals, some subtle, some quite brazen and blatant. These signals communicate where we are in the hierarchy, or where we think we are; they say how we want others to see us. Where you’re placed at a formal dinner can be part of that. Are you on the high table? Or are you somewhere down below. And, if I’m honest, even if I really don’t want to be at the top table, and wouldn’t be comfortable there, I can still get cross when I see someone else placed in a better seat than mine when so far as I can see I’m every bit as good and capable as they are, and maybe a whole lot more so.

And it’s not just who sits where at formal dinners: think about all the many ways in which a message of status and standing is communicated. Whether you qualify for a marked parking space, or your own private office. How many birthday parties your child is invited to from school - or indeed how many children come to hers. What the number plate is on your car: is it a 19 plate, a 69? Or your own personal plate, perhaps? Where do you buy your clothes? Everything about us says something, and much of it can be interpreted in terms of rungs on the ladder.

Well, at the time of Jesus the seating at a meal was quite a big thing. Where you sat signalled your wealth or prestige or status, and of course the host might also manipulate the seating pattern. Say you were giving a dinner: you might wish to arrange an advantageous marriage between your daughter and some particular young man, in which case it could be good to place his father higher at the table than perhaps he might have expected. Or you might want to move someone down to a lower place if you’d been offended by him in some way, or if, say, he’d treated you badly or unfairly in some business transaction. In this way a meal became the stage on which social niceties were observed and arranged, and social politics played out. And it might well all be open to the street: anyone passing could assess your standing, and see the honour in which you were, or were not, held.

At first reading, Jesus doesn’t seem to be challenging this. I might have expected him to condemn this ridiculous system of status measured by where a person sits, but instead he seems to be talking about how best to use the system. “Don’t go to the highest place, for you might be sent somewhere lower,” he says. “Take the lowest place, and maybe that your host will say to you, ‘Friend, come up higher’, and everyone will see the honour you receive.” But of course the reason he says any of this is to make this vital point: “All who exalt themselves will be humbled, while those who humble themselves will be exalted.”

Jesus may not have openly challenged the status systems of his day, but he was in fact doing more than just giving advice on how best to play the game. It’s nice to think that if I took a lowly place my host might call me up to sit higher. But he probably wouldn’t; and if my whole reason for taking that holy place was that I’d be publicly honoured, it’s going to be really annoying when that doesn’t happen. The big risk of taking the lowest place is that you might well end up staying there.

Jesus said, “All who exalt themselves will be humbled.” Thomas Merton said that those who’re so keen to climb the ladder may find it’s leaning against the wrong wall. What Jesus is really saying is I think that if our greatest aim is to put ourselves above others, we might well find ourselves with lots of shiny things, and we might have the grudging respect of those who’re looking up at us - but we might also end up with cold and empty hearts. All along the ladder was leant against the wrong wall. We exalt ourselves at the cost of our integrity and our soul.

Think about what jockeying for position can do to a person. We’re seeing enough of it I think just now in our own nation’s political life. But it happens everywhere. We’re annoyed by the unfairness of it all: one person is rewarded without really deserving it, while another gets shoved down a rung despite all their best efforts. We’re exhausted by the endless competition. The working environment can become toxic when ambitious personalities clash. Things get twisted round so that it’s all about them. We walk on eggshells; and the truth is the first victim, when people are in it for themselves.

Jesus says, “All who humble themselves will be exalted.” But not necessarily within this system. If I humble myself in order to be noticed, and sit low down in order to be invited higher up, I strongly suspect I’m going to be deeply disappointed. Jesus is really talking about not playing the status game any more, he’s telling me to get off that ladder.

And if I’m no longer playing the game, maybe I’ll find I’m making some creatively different choices. Maybe I can stop looking for a way to get to that next rung on the ladder, and instead look for ways I can lend a hand. Maybe I can move from being a toxic element in the organisation to being a healing one. Maybe I can get away from a “what’s in it for me” view of the world, and start thinking about what the world might need from me, rather than what it ought to be doing for me. Then maybe I’ll find I’m beginning to get things the right way round. I may be climbing a few rungs even, but this time on the right ladder.

That’s a matter of spiritual discipline, to start with, anyway. I need to make the decision to go against my natural desire to aim for my own comfort and status and power. But maybe as I make that effort I’ll find that craving to be the best and to have the most begin to ebb away. As I work at it, taking small steps, maybe there’ll be something Christ-like within me that begins to grow.

We can’t free ourselves from the status system, because that’s how human communities, and animal communities work, even butterflies on Buddleia bushes. There’ll always be a table and there’ll always be people jostling for the top positions on it. But we do have a choice about whether we go along with all of that. I can choose where I want to sit. I can choose to be where I’ll be useful, rather than where I might be noticed, or have the best shot at success and money and power. And if I’m making the right choices, for the sake of Jesus and seeking his help, it’ll be his ladder I’m climbing, the one that frees me from being tied to status and worldly styles of success.

I don’t need to make a big show of things, or pretend to be something I’m not. Jesus knows my true worth, and I know that that worth isn’t a matter of where I sit, but how I love, and by whom I am loved. And I am free to live a life thankful for what I’ve been given, rather than anxious about what I can get. Amen.

Sermon for this Sunday Trinity 10 (Proper 16)

"Happy holy days" said the sign outside the United Reformed Church by the English Bridge in Shrewsbury. Well, it’s a holiday weekend, and holiday and holy day are really the same word. We’re reminded that back in the days when our fore-fathers were mostly serfs and villeins, the only time they had off from their labours was when the Church had its holy days. Some modern bank holidays are still Church festivals, but not this weekend. Still, the weather's come right for us, and the roads will be packed and the beaches crowded, and anyone with any sense knows they’re much better off staying at home.

But all work and no play is never good for us. We need our rest and recreation, and 'recreation' is of course re-creation, being re-made. We get used up if we don't rest, we become less effective, less what we should be, not just as productive workers, but as people. Old Testament prophets like Isaiah told the people that God wanted them to keep the Sabbath, in order to be right with him, and so that he would bless them. Refraining from Sabbath journeys was part of the deal, I recall, with this weekend’s crowded roads in mind.

The people should also honour the Sabbath by not pursuing their own interests, I find, when I look at Isaiah. And that phrase,  not pursuing their own interests, provides an important clue to what the Sabbath is for: it’s not just a rest and break from, it needs also to be a positive means towards. Sabbath should be time away from the slog and routine of work, but not only that: also a time to tune ourselves back into what is divine, to what is of God. If we’re to be re-created we surely need to be seeking the mind and heart of our Creator.

Religion should be a liberating force, but all too often it isn’t. So easily religion fails to liberate, and cramps and imposes instead. As Sabbath often did at the time of Jesus.

And that’s why Jesus needed to tell the people: 'The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath'. He wanted them to get things the right way round. Our Gospel finds him in the synagogue responding to the desperate need of a woman suffering from what sounds a lot like rheumatoid arthritis. He heals her, but on the Sabbath it’s wrong to do that. Perhaps the synagogue leader feared he was losing control. Maybe he thought his service might become a free-for-all healing session. “There are six other days in the week, so come and get healed on one of them,” he tells his congregation. 

What would I have done, if Jesus had turned up at my service and done this? Would I have rejoiced that one of God's children had been released from slavery and suffering, or would I have moaned about the disruption of my carefully planned and ordered act of worship? About lack of discipline and things not being done properly? Would I have felt my nose being pushed out of joint?

Maybe so! And yet, how had Jesus really broken the Sabbath?  He’d not been pursuing his own interests or attending to his own affairs. For surely God wanted this woman released from her imprisonment to disability. To make the Sabbath an excuse for not helping her surely would have been to misuse it. For God wants the Sabbath to benefit us, to heal us, not to oppress or imprison us. He made the Sabbath for us, and not the other way round.

Sunday isn't the Jewish Sabbath, which was Saturday, the seventh day, on which God rested from creation. But it’s our holy day, and often used in the same way - as God's day, when no work can be done. As recently as when I was young, the Sunday Sabbath was a day of enforced stillness and inactivity imposed on the whole of the land. Mum didn’t dare hang out the washing in case the neighbours saw it. Shops were closed. Buses and trains didn’t run. Even the pubs were closed, over the border, anyway.

Now Sunday’s pretty much a free for all. Has the pendulum moved too far the other way? Perhaps so. Many people work on a Sunday, so maybe our churches should be doing more during the week to cater for those who can't come on a Sunday even if they want.  But Sunday leisure activities have grown out of all proportion, Sunday sport too - and it’s big business these days. Even Sunday telly. It was the Forsyte Saga that first did for evening prayer, and the TV companies have never looked back; Sunday early evening is regarded as a prime slot, and Songs of Praise gets shunted off into an early afternoon corner.

And people tell me they’d like to come to church but it’s the only day they can visit the family, or the only day their children can do football, or swimming, or ballet, or whatever. As a Rotarian, almost all our district events are now programmed for Sundays - and a higher proportion of Rotarians are churchgoers than would be true elsewhere. And that’s without the lure of Sunday sports, or Tesco.

We can moan about that. But does the Church have any right really to insist that those who aren’t members should have to observe its holy day. We've ceased to be a Christian country, not so much because of the impact of other faiths, but because we prefer to be secular. And though for better or worse the Church still has a stake in the structures and hierarchies of British society, the decline of its influence is inevitable and unstoppable, or so it seems. The loss of Sunday as a national holy day is just one of the more obvious symptoms of that.

Where does that leave us as Christians and churchfolk? With an opportunity for witness, perhaps. It’s a witness to our faith if we keep our holy day even though the world around us doesn't. Like Muslims keep Friday, or Jews Saturday, as holy day even though the rest of the world carries on regardless.

Well, most of us probably don't keep a Sunday Sabbath as well as we might. It's uncomfortable to be different in what we do from our neighbours and friends. We may well end up paying little more than lip service to our holy day, maybe squeezing in a visit to church when we can, or watching Songs of Praise if we manage to work out when it’s on. Or of course we could go to the other extreme, and become super-zealous holier-than-thou Sunday keepers who can look smugly down on those who don’t manage to do what we do and what everyone ought to do. Either of these would be a shame. They both sell the Sabbath short, as God’s special day. 

Vicars often get comments like, “Not a bad job, yours, you only work one day a week!” But I don’t work on Sunday, I reply. I go to church, and for me Sunday isn’t Sunday if I don’t go to church. It feels wrong, like something important is missing. But I don’t work. Vicars work five days a week, take one day off, and take the first day for worship. So I was told, back in the day.

But for me Sunday, however I spend it, is a day to do honour to God. And I’ll always try to keep it with serious intent, and to use my Sunday in a way that preaches and proclaims the love of God and the desire of God that everyone should find healing and salvation in him. It’s the Sabbath, a chance for a change of pace. And even for people who aren’t religious, some sort of Sabbath would be good. Not one imposed by me and my Church, just a day off from all the other stuff. It’s how God made us to live, it’s how we are re-created.

But for me to keep Sunday as a Christian Sabbath must be a positive thing; it’s about what I do, not what I’m stopped from doing, it’s me saying that God comes first in my life. Sabbath is his gift to me; and I should use that gift to seek his grace and learn of his purposes, so as to use every day in his service.

An evening sermon for next Sunday, Trinity 9

Texts: Isaiah 28.9 to 22 and 2 Corinthians 8.1 to 9:

To be honest, it doesn’t look as if politicians have changed very much, from the days of the prophet Isaiah to now. A babble of meaningless noises, says Isaiah, who might well be describing the House of Commons on a bad day, or even on a fairly good one.

In fact, Isaiah was of course accusing the leaders of his day of listening to every voice except the right one, the one they should be taking to heart, the voice of God. These leaders claim to have the keys to success and safety and salvation, but they’ve ceased to pay attention to the Lord, and to take his words - indeed, his offer of rest and comfort - to heart. Their boastful confusion dooms them to failure; even the word of the Lord itself has become meaningless babble to their confused ears.

I don’t want to make any comment on any topic within the confused world of our present-day politics, and certainly not the one beginning with the letter “B”. But I can’t help but think that the adversarial nature of our political system is beginning to fail us, and I hate the ease with which people in high places lie and dissemble and cloak the truth. To recover and move forward, our nation is seriously in need of reconciliation, or else our society as a whole may become too deeply fractured to repair.

Perhaps that will be a role for the Church, though Church itself isn’t always a harmonious and peaceful place. How do we find ways to belong together, when sometimes we deeply disagree? It isn’t easy, but we need to remind ourselves that love isn’t conditional upon the person loved getting everything right. If it were, God wouldn’t love me, or you; and yet he does.

I think that perhaps our two readings tonight contrast a group of people in it for themselves - the leaders of the nation so firmly condemned by Isaiah - and a group of people who, potentially at least, are there for one another, as Paul encourages church folk in Corinth to contribute towards the needs of their sisters and brothers in Jerusalem.

Chapter eight of second Corinthians contains verses much used by preachers on Christian giving and in stewardship campaigns. Paul was very anxious that the church he had helped to found in Corinth should play its part in helping the mother Church in Jerusalem, where things were not going well. And as he urges the Corinthians to give generously, he uses a number of different ways of appealing to them.

Firstly, he challenges them, by telling them how generously the Christian communities in Macedonia has responded; secondly he urges them to complete what they’ve already started - a bit like the teachers along our cross-country course at school: “Come on, Rowell, you’ve run this far, you can’t give up now!” That, presumably, was the role to be fulfilled by Titus, as Paul writes “We have asked Titus to bring your share in this work to its  completion.”

Thirdly, he praises the past record of the Corinthian church, and encourages them to recognise just how rich they are in so many ways. They’ve set themselves a target to keep to, that’s part of his argument. But maybe also he’s saying something about not just feeling sorry for someone in need, but actually acting on how you feel. Pity that remains only that, without being turned into a generous action, is without value. The New Testament scholar William Barclay, commenting on this passage, notes that the tragedy of life isn’t that we have no high impulses, but that we fail to turn them into fine actions.

But finally Paul reminds his Corinthian readers of the generosity of Christ. He was rich, writes Paul, but for your sakes he became poor, so that you in turn might be rich. We might think of wealth in terms of possessions and assets; but for Paul things we own should always be understood in terms of opportunity: our way to do in the world something that reflects what Christ has already done for us: Christ who, in Paul’s words to the Philippians, “emptied himself, taking the form of a servant.”

The imitation of Christ is our highest call. Paul himself speaks of completing the work of Christ in his own poor body. And when Jesus says to his disciples, “Follow me,” he’s not really meaning the physical act of walking along the highway. He’s saying, see what I do, and do the same. Learn from me, take my example to heart; be as like me as you can be.

So let me now turn back to say a little more about the first point Paul made to the Corinthians, which was about how open handed and generous was the response of the people in Macedonia, in Thessalonica and elsewhere. These Macedonian Christians had been having a pretty hard time of it themselves, and they weren’t  by any means well off in terms of money and possessions; and yet, writes Paul, “from their poverty they have shown themselves lavishly open-handed.”

Doing some research recently in advance of a Christian giving campaign I want to carry forward on my patch this autumn, I discovered that the highest weekly giving in the Church of England comes not from some wealthy stockbroker belt diocese in the south-east, but from an old industrial region that has to be one of the least well-off bits of the Church.

That surprised me, but perhaps it shouldn’t have. Often those who have least to give are among the most ready to give. I’ve experienced standards of generosity and hospitality in African villages and South American shanty towns that leave the often measured and careful hospitality of these parts far behind.

The Jewish feast of Purim - which celebrates the saving of the people from a plot by an official of the Persian Empire to kill them all (you can read the story in the Book of Esther) - anyway, at Purim, gifts are part of the celebration, and it’s a firm rule that, however poor you are, you must find someone poorer than you and give them a gift.

Maybe, of course, a degree of poverty helps you to understand what it’s like for others going through the same thing, and so to sympathise with their plight. A man with a single piece of bread tore it in two and gave half to a man next to him who had nothing. “Here!” he said. “Now, though neither of us has got enough, at least each of us has something!”  Whereas Marie Antoinette, Queen of France, when told that the people had no bread, replied, “Let them eat cake!” That sounds like a scornful response, but really she simply was unable to imagine a situation where someone might have nothing to eat. She was too rich to interpret and understand poverty.

Isaiah tells the Marie Antoinettes of his day that the Lord is about to measure them, and the measure he’ll be using will be the measure of justice: justice as a plumb line and righteousness as a plummet, is how Isaiah puts it. They’ve this one chance to turn aside from their thoughtless and arrogant ways. This is one of the places in the Old Testament understood as a prophecy of the Messiah - as Isaiah speaks of the corner-stone of great worth that will be laid in Zion. Against it, those who rule without really caring will be found wanting.

One last thing. Speaking of the generosity of the Macedonians, Paul writes that “they gave themselves.” Charity is a word that has become somewhat degraded these days. That’s partly the idea of charity as something that allows you to look good and maybe boast a bit, maybe done mostly with the aim of drawing favourable attention to oneself or reviving a flagging celebrity career. Or we may think of charity as what you do with the spare coppers, the bits of cash you can spare without noticing. Nothing wrong with that as such, of course, but maybe there is if it’s only that. Really though charity is a word interchangeable with love - or it was, anyway. Those who truly give, give something of them-selves, not just the spare cash.  I have things given me that immediately call to mind the person who gave them.

So personal giving is always something special. And the highest example of personal giving, and the motivation for all that we give, is or should be that Jesus Christ gave everything for me, and for you, and for the world. In him, and him alone, we find the corner-stone on which our own generosity and sharing rests and finds its foundation; in him, and him alone, we see the one who makes plain in a life that gives all it can God’s love for me and you and the world; and God’s call to us to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with him.

A morning sermon for next Sunday, Trinity 9 . . .

Texts: Hebrews 11.29 to 12.2, and Luke 12.49 to 56:

I reckon that this morning’s readings are among the hardest to understand, hardest to accept, and hardest therefore to preach from, in the whole church year. The Gospel especially. Back at the start of the year, within our Christmas services, we joined the angels to acclaim the birth of the Prince of Peace. And yet now we hear the man that child grew up to become say to his disciples, “Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division and dissent!”

We’ve seen already in our first reading, from Hebrews, how lots of bad things happened to lots of good people in the Old Testament stories. I have to admit that as a young choirboy I used to really enjoy singing those bloodthirsty words from Christopher Wordsworth’s hymn “Hark the sound of holy voices”: “Mocked, imprisoned, stoned, tormented / Sawn asunder, slain with sword . . .” Though at the same time I did rather hope that none of those things would have to happen to me.

And Jesus says on many occasions, to many different people, that there’s a cost to following him. Here he pulls no punches at all, as he speaks about families divided, one against another. That’s difficult to accept; our families are really important to us as Christians, and even beyond our families we’re surely supposed to be doing our best to live together in harmony and peace.

But there is peace, and there is peace, you might say. The Hebrew word for peace is “shalom”, and shalom means a lot more than just that the guns are silent, and we’re not actually at war. Shalom is respecting the rights of every person, and reaching out to the poorest and most vulnerable, making space for them; shalom is about wholeness, wellbeing, safety and health. If those things are lacking, then whatever peace we may have is conditional at best, incomplete, not the peace God desires. Shalom is the peace of God that passes our human understanding: true and lasting peace, the deep peace of the anthem by John Rutter that will close our Taizé service this afternoon.

And that godly peace is fundamental to the life and message of Jesus, from start to finish. He was what he was born to be, the Prince of Peace; when he healed people he pronounced God’s forgiveness, and sent them on their way with a blessing of peace. On Easter Day the risen Christ greets his disciples with the words, “Peace be with you!”

There can be no doubt of the desire and longing of Jesus to bring a deeper health and wholeness to our world. His message is all about the shalom peace that is his Father’s will for all creation. And yet he says, “The members of a family will be divided against one another.” There’ll be those who refuse to hear and accept his call, those who can’t accept the change in their own lives that’s required of them. And so the peace that God desires - shalom - comes at the cost of lesser forms of  peace.

What do I mean by lesser forms of peace? You can get a form of peace by balancing arms against arms. In the United States the National Rifle Association seems to believe that peace is better preserved by handing out more guns than by controlling them, despite all the evidence to the contrary. As countries we aim missiles against one another that we hope we’ll never have to use in what’s known as MAD - Mutually Assured Destruction.

It’s the difference between peacemaking and peace keeping. You can keep the peace by holding people apart and preventing them from landing their punches. But making peace requires a change of heart, a spirit of forgiveness, and a reconciliation that allows all those involved to begin again. It’s hard to do, and it’s not always possible. Sometimes peacekeeping is as much as we can manage, but it should never be what we allow ourselves to be content with; it should never be our benchmark.
Lesser forms of peace are kept in communities, institutions, families even, too. We may hide the truth, try to look as though it’s all right, pretend that something bad isn’t happening.

Like the family whose lives are distorted by the emotional or even physical abuse perpetrated by one member, but who won’t let on to anyone else that life at home is anything but perfect. Like the child falling into drug addiction, or maybe involved in gang culture, while parents perhaps choose to ignore the signs and hope that somehow it’ll all come right again. Like the workplace where the toxic behaviour of a colleague or maybe a boss has to be tolerated, because maybe the alternative is you get handed your cards.  Like the many situations where we see problems and we know they’re there, but we pretend not to have seen them, say nothing and try to keep the peace. Or some kind of peace.

There is, alas, a long way to go before all God’s children can know the wholeness and well-being of shalom. In the meantime often we have to make do with the avoidance of conflict. But we must always recognise that there is more to do, and further to go. Peacekeeping is never really enough. Being members of God’s kingdom - praying as we do, “Thy kingdom come” - commits us always to desire more than the small and incomplete forms of peace we can manage to keep.

Jesus was, let’s be honest, an uncomfortable person to have around. He reached out the wrong sorts of people, made time for those who were outcasts, people other folk shunned, and upset the status quo. Eventually they put him to death: the price of the peace he preached was division, rejection, and the cross.

We haven’t had many christenings this year: next Sunday’s at Leighton is I think only the third of the year. In it I shall mark the sign of the cross on the forehead of the little girl who’s being baptized, and her parents and godparents will say, for themselves and also for her, “I turn to Christ.” All of us who’ve been baptized have made that promise, or it’s been made for us: “I turn to Christ.” At confirmation we make it for ourselves, and every time we receive holy communion we do in fact remake that baptism promise: “I turn to Christ.”

And turning to Christ, and taking seriously the promises made in baptism, is about a change of heart and a change of life. It commits us to shalom, to God’s deep and forever peace. The tension in that is that we naturally want to avoid conflict, we want to be liked, and it’s tempting to settle for a lesser peace, to accommodate and to compromise. There’s nothing wrong with compromise, and we have to do whatever is possible as we serve God and serve one another. But Christians should always be aiming higher and wanting more. Shalom, God’s true peace, calls us to stand against injustice, to make no cheap deals, and to truly love our neighbour. To preserve a lesser peace at someone else’s cost, or by turning aside from a someone else’s pain or unjust treatment, is to trade God’s shalom for a poor imitation.

Christians are not called to be nice; we’re called to be loving, to be generous, to be forgiving, to be true, and to stand firm against all that seeks to deny the true reign of God’s love. But not necessarily nice. There’s no Christian ministry of being a doormat, and letting other people walk all over us, even though that, too, might preserve some kind of peace. Let’s never confuse humility with inertia. It’s not enough; it’s not what God wants; it’s not what the cross stands for.

Hard readings today, indeed. But maybe the more important question when you look at them isn’t “Why did Jesus teach that following him could lead to division?” but “Why doesn’t our faith disturb people more than it does?” Do we hold back when we should be speaking out? Should we be bolder, more challenging, more questioning, less accepting?  Those who speak the truth in love may not always be heard gladly, but if we’re too afraid of dissent and division maybe we’re turning aside from that deep shalom peace for which Jesus lived and died, and for which our troubled world, and our own souls, long.

Not a sermon about money?

 . . . proper 13, year C, preached at Holy Trinity, Leighton:

On the front page of last month’s magazine I said that I’d be talking a bit about money and Christian giving during the autumn. This sermon isn’t it; we’re not there yet. Having said that, today’s Gospel is one example of the many places where Jesus talks about money and possessions, and about how we relate to the stuff we own. You might not think so, but Jesus said more about money than about most things.

The story St Luke gives us begins with Jesus surrounded by a crowd of people, and he’s teaching them. And a man comes up to him and says, “Tell my brother to give me my share of the family property.” That may sound a bit brazen, even a bit odd, but a rabbi or religious teacher would have been regarded as having the right to arbitrate in a dispute of that kind.

But Jesus refuses to get involved. And instead he uses the opportunity it gives him to tell a story about what’s really important in life. We sometimes call it the Parable of the Rich Fool. And the first thing I’d want to say about it is that the main character isn’t a bad man. He’s worked for what he’s got, and as a farmer he’s done well.

None of his wealth has come from cheating anyone or stealing from them. And his plans make sense as well. To build some bigger barns to store it all seems not an unreasonable thing to do. He needs somewhere to put the good harvest he’s brought in, and what’s ever wrong about saving for a rainy day?

Nothing, is the answer to that question. So why do we call him the Rich Fool? Why is he called a fool in the parable? Not because he wants to build some new barns. Not because he’s rich, even. Not because he’s ambitious, either. All of these are things we’d be right to praise in many an entrepreneur. But there is a spiritual hollowness in this man, and we can see that most plainly revealed in the dialogue he has with himself.

Here’s what he says: “What am I to do? I have not the space to store my produce. This is what I will do, I will pull down my barns and build them bigger. I will collect in them all my grain and other goods, and I will say to myself, ‘You have plenty of good things laid by, enough for many years to come: take life easy, eat, drink, and enjoy yourself.’”

If you add up all the personal pronouns, all the I me my words - and the you and your words because after all it’s himself he’s talking to, you’ll find there’s an awful lot of them. One commentary suggests it’s not far short of a quarter of the words - I, me, mine (and you and yours as well, as it’s himself he’s talking to).

There’s the spiritual emptiness of this man. It’s all about himself. He’s probably got family, friends, and presumably a workforce to help him bring in all that great harvest. None of them gets a mention. Nor does God, by the way. It looks very much as though he thinks he’s produced all his wealth himself, and that it’s his entirely to possess, his alone to control.

Today’s world is sometimes described as the “I me my” generation. Think of what Gordon Gecko, as played by Michael Douglas, says in the film “Wall Street”: “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works.” It seems a self-centred view of the world finds less challenge than it used to; almost everything is assessed in terms of the money it makes. But this story suggests this is nothing new. Jesus wouldn’t have told it otherwise.

The other delusion that distorts this man’s relationship with his wealth is this: he seems to think the clock is going to go on ticking. He’s forgotten, or he’s chosen to ignore, the uncomfortable reality that one day time runs out for every one of us. None of us is here for keeps. And ultimately, what we keep for ourselves, we lose.

My old parish church at Minsterley has memento mori above the main door people used to enter the church by, on the west front. They’re a bit gruesome, skulls and cross bones, and glasses with the sand running through them, copied I think from one of Wren’s churches in London. They remind everyone as they enter of the Ash Wednesday words: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

For the man in the story, that happens that very night. And so the truth is made plain, that wealth and possessions can never save us. The clock one day will stop ticking. We might invest in new and more expensive clocks, but even so, one day they will cease to tick.

Let’s turn for a moment to our first reading, Paul writing to the young church in Colossae. Paul’s colleague Epaphras had taken the Gospel message to Colossae, and the people there had embraced it with great enthusiasm. But one thing Paul wants to tell them is that there need to be some radical changes - the way they used to live can’t be the way they live now.

And what that boils down to is this: where before they lived an every man for himself kind of life, now they need to be living for one another. Christ has so freely and completely given you life; now you must be giving life to each other.

The new church at Colossae was learning to live as people who belonged to Jesus. And if we belong to Jesus, then so do the things we own. So nothing I own really belongs to me. Nor does the talent and skill that helps me to earn. Nor does the time. All of it is God-given, and mine only on loan.
That doesn’t mean I shouldn’t delight in it and enjoy what I’ve been given; but it does mean I think that the way I use what I have should reflect the generosity and the love of God. Unlike the Rich Fool, I should plan with more than just me in mind.

We live in the consumer society, and it can be hard to move away from a consumerist analysis of ourselves, or to shake off our need to keep up with the Joneses. But this parable calls on us to shift our priorities: to move from being consumers of resources to being instead stewards of what belongs to God. We may find we begin to ask different questions about how we use what we have, questions like: “Do I really need this, or could I live without it?” “How can what I have benefit the wider community?” or “What opportunities do I have to do some good?”

That doesn’t mean our own personal needs drop out of the equation; that doesn’t mean our own lives should be cramped or uncomfortable. It’s about restoring the balance. Does Jesus condemn wealth or ambition? I don’t think so. But he does see these things as there to be used in his Father’s service. And if they’re not seen and used and valued in that way, they can become spiritually dangerous. For if our possessions get too important, do we still own them, or have they started owning us? That’s what happened to the man in the story.

As he tells the story, Jesus invites us into a new way of living, and a new way of relating to the things we own. Paul was saying something similar to those new Christians at Colossae. He wrote, “Put on the new nature which is constantly being renewed in the image of its Creator and brought to know God.” Jesus calls us away from the inward focus of I me my. He invites us to be outgoing and outward-looking. He calls us into a deeper relationship with God and therefore with one another. A new and thankful way of living, marked by generous love and by caring compassion. And the treasure we find there is far greater and much more enduring than anything we might pack into our storehouses and barns.