The Light of the World

This year Candlemas, the Feast of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple, falls on a Sunday. I would quite like it to have been my final Sunday as a parish priest, but instead it falls two days after my retirement! But I love Candlemas, which brings to an end the great forty days of Christmas and Epiphany, and turns us round to look towards Easter. In our gardens and even in the countryside in sheltered places, the first hesitant signs of Spring can be seen - primroses, a few early crocus flowers, here and there a crumpled celandine, the brighter yellow of aconites, and of course, the snowdrops which in places are great sweeps of white. There will probably still be plenty of wintry stuff ahead, but the lengthening of the days is becoming more and more obvious, the birds are beginning to sing, and we naturally want to look ahead.

 

Throughout Epiphany we’ve been discerning the signs that presented Jesus as the Messiah, the Christ, the one God had promised he would send to set his people free. At the Presentation itself, the official title of this day, we see how Mary and Joseph bring their child to the temple, to do what all good Jewish parents would do for their firstborn son.

For every first born son was “deemed to belong to the Lord,” and so had to be brought to the Temple, presented to the Lord - and then bought back by a gift, a sacrifice: in this case a pair of pigeons, which is what parents who were not particularly well off would offer. And as they come, they’re looking forward, just as we might if we bring a child to be christened. Praying that God will bless them as parents, and bless their child as he grows, and, I guess, wondering what life might have in store for him.

Everything changes when a child is born, and especially when a first child is born: the conversion from couple to family, from lovers to parents, in which your hopes for your child, and your child’s need of you - especially when still an infant - take precedence. Been there, done that! However well you’ve planned and organised, it’s a huge dynamic shift in life, and a challenge too.

For one thing, the stretch of the future before you now goes beyond the span of your own lives and into the span of the life you’ve made. There’ll be joyful times, but also testing times, times too of maybe pain and sorrow. That’s true when any child is born, and when the journey of parenthood begins.

But for this firstborn child there is more. One of the things I especially like about the story is the pivotal presence within it of these two old people, Simeon and Anna. They see that this is the child they’ve been waiting for, that this is the child sent from God to bring salvation for his people. So Simeon tells Mary and Joseph that their child will change not only the shape of their own lives, but the shape of the world as well - not only their future as a family, but the whole course of history. And Mary especially is going to bear some of the pain of this.

Simeon and Anna, despite their age, and despite whatever pains and sorrows the long story of their lives has brought them, are still hoping in God as they see this child, still believing that God is going to do something new. They typify for me some of the people whose quiet and trusting faith and constancy in prayer have been a support and strength for me in my ministry, the sort of people who provide the bedrock of quiet and trusting faith on which to a greater extent than sometimes we realise, the ministry of the Church depends.

But also - in their quite and patient way these two old people, Simeon and Anna, are announcing a revolution. They have been waiting and watching for God to set his people free, for a light which will enlighten everyone. And now they see this work beginning - but beginning in secret. Joseph and Mary will go quietly home to continue their exploration together of what it will mean for them to be parents, to have a family, just like any other family. The child will grow in the ordinary setting of a carpenter’s shop in a provincial town, with work to be done, and brothers and sisters to be born, and years to pass.

Not all revolutions need to be loud or disruptive. And I’m reminded how God’s glory is revealed in love and in service, in kindness and care. Cathedrals and temples are special places - but the work of faith, though it may use them and praise God in them, doesn’t actually need them. The child of Mary and Joseph will teach his friends that they can call God “Our Father” whoever and wherever they are, and know that their prayer is heard. Palaces proclaim the secular power of kings and governors, but true royalty doesn’t need pomp and circumstance, even if it makes for a good show. The child of Mary and Joseph will teach his friends the royalty of service: “Let the greatest among you be the servant of all.”

Wherever people in our world are faithful and kind as they get on with life, care for each other, and contend with the uncertainties and insecurities that surround us, God’s love is affirmed and proclaimed. And the Holy Child, once presented, is for the moment then hidden among those who know what it means to work hard, to struggle to make ends meet, and yet still to show kindness and to praise the Lord.

“Shine as a light in the world, to the glory of God,” I have said so many times at so many christenings during my ministry. As the Spring approaches and the days grow lighter, our hearts respond to those changes. We were made to live in the light, and we’re called to be bringers of light into the dark places of our world, into the dark places of our lives.

At Candlemas, we begin to look forward to the testing time of Lent, to the cross on which this King will be enthroned, and then to Easter Day, when the Paschal candle is lit with the shout of “The light of Christ!” May that light be kindled in us, and may we be witnesses to it: in kindness and in love may we be bringers of light in the name of the one hailed in the very Jewish setting of the Temple by Simeon and Anna - but presented there as the one who will be not only the glory of Israel, but the Light of the World.

 

Walking on a January Morning

 

On one of the bright sunny mornings we had early in January, I decided to walk out through the castle park and down to the canal at Belan Locks, and then take the canal towpath back to Morrison’s, where I could pick up my daily paper.  It was a cold morning, but the air was as clear as crystal, and resident birds are already beginning to sing by January. Robins of course sing all the year round, and they were loud and insistent in the defence of their winter territories.

A delightfully musical twittering as I rounded the corner of a coppice turned out to be goldfinches, reflecting brightly in the sun.  A pair of bullfinches sped away along the hedge as I neared the stile between two fields, the male an astonishingly bright deep pink in the chest, and both with their trademark chubbiness, dark wings and bright white on the wings and above the tail as they flew.  I reached the locks and was met by a grey wagtail, the longest-tailed of our wagtails, constantly wagging of course.  The name “grey” seems inappropriate in the summer, when the colours that dominate are its black throat and bright yellow underparts, but they do come across as rather duller and greyer in winter.

A flash of white glimpsed across the hedgerow as I began to walk the towpath turned out to be a couple of little egrets, which really are a dazzling white, especially on a morning like this one. Little egrets are increasingly common in these parts, much smaller than grey herons, and distinguished by their long thin black bills, and their legs which, rather charmingly, are black but with yellow feet.  Last winter I often encountered a great white egret along this section of canal - this is about the same size as a grey heron. Not today though.

A wren fizzed across the canal and vanished into the reeds on the other side. I haven’t seen as many of these on winter walks this year as I did last winter, but they find the reeds and hedges along the canal a useful source of insect food.  Magpies and jackdaws were squabbling in a nearby field, and blue tits and house sparrows danced through hedgerow trees. A small and very agile group of little birds as I drew closer to Welshpool turned out to be lesser redpolls, little finches that are almost as acrobatic as tits.

But then the bird that absolutely made my day: a kingfisher, perched on a small branch on the opposite side of the canal, like a brightly multicoloured jewel in the sun. The blue of a kingfisher is iridescent: in ordinary light it’s slatey and dull, but the sun turns it into something else completely. It was quite still, and I watched it for maybe two or three minutes, not daring even to raise my binoculars. Then two young mums with pushchairs came chatting along the pavement on the road side, and the kingfisher was off, a glowing arrow of blue. Sadly, I don’t suppose they even noticed.

A Harvest Sermon

 

Readings: Psalm 67; Joel 2.21-27; Matthew 6.25-33

 

Harvest Festival each year gives us the chance to say thank you to God as the great giver of life, and to praise him for his gifts. The harvest we bring in from our fields and gardens, and even from our supermarket shelves, is something for which we should always be thankful. In our first reading, from the prophet Joel in the Old Testament, we’re reminded that we’re richly blessed by God. “You shall eat in plenty and be satisfied and praise the name of the Lord your God,” says the prophet. “You shall know that I am in the midst of Israel and that I, the Lord, am your God and there is no other.” God is with those who honour his name; God is with those who seek to do his will, who fix their hearts on him.

And in our Gospel reading Jesus talks about the need for those who follow him to turn away from petty anxieties and worries. He tells us, “Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear.”

Earlier in that chapter, verse  24, Jesus has already told his listeners that no one can serve two masters. “You can’t serve both God and Mammon,” he tells them; Mammon is money and earthly possessions, and it’s also earthly popularity and status. If what we’re mostly thinking about is how much we can earn, and if our hearts are full of greed, then the imperative of faith - “Love the Lord your God, and your neighbour as yourself” - goes begging.

Those words about not loving both God and Mammon are a comment on how life is for us human beings. Because we have free will, we can choose where our loyalties lie. I believe God made us; you don’t have to. The Bible instructs us that loyalty to God should be our choice, and that those who give to God what he asks of us - loyalty, praise, kindness and care for our neighbour - will receive his blessing. We don’t have to follow that instruction. But if our first love is for earthly possessions, then that will get in the way of our loving God. We may not want it to or mean it to, but it will. That’s just how life is. No-one can serve two masters.

The current aim of our government is wealth creation, they tell us. We need a growth rate of at least 2½% in order to get the economy going as it should, and pay for the services we need. I’m not an economist, so I’ll not comment on either figures or theory, other than to say that we live on a planet of finite resources, so we can’t all go on growing for ever. And that the flip side of a focus on creating wealth is that not everyone gets it. For many it may mean opportunity being reduced, or wiped away altogether.

Just at the moment there’s some very real anxiety and fear around, people worried about how to meet daily needs; and not only in our urban areas, though maybe it’s more noticeable there, but even in small rural communities. We’re told by our Lord not to be anxious, or, more strictly, not to be distracted by cares. But we also have to live with the fact that standards of living aren’t guaranteed.

Though in some ways anxiety can be a good thing. It reminds us we can’t deal with all that life throws at us just on our own. We need help, and we need to be help. Jesus said, “Whenever two or three gather together in my name, there am I in your midst.” Our experience of Church, week by week anyway, is very often of being just two or three gathered together. We can be anxious about that, too. We may want to be help, but what can we do, small as we are?

But small can be beautiful. Jesus spoke to huge crowds, but he began his Church with a dozen disciples and a few friends. The Kingdom of God that Jesus spoke of happens if just one person looks to her neighbour and not only to herself, and whenever anyone acts with a kindness that says to the other person, “You’re important too.” So, for me, every harvest festival is a celebration not only of God’s goodness in giving us the fruits of the earth in their season, but also of human kindness. 

Yesterday I was talking to the children in school about friends, and asking them what the most important things were about having friends and being friends. A hand went up right in the front row, class 1, tiny tots. Class 1 children often don’t answer the question you’ve asked, and instead tell you about their cat, or what they had for breakfast, or where they like to go on holiday. But I thought I’d better ask, anyway. And this little lass just said, “Sharing.” What a simple and brilliant answer! Harvest celebrates God’s good gifts - and the human graft and effort that turns those gifts into a harvest safely gathered in; but it also reminds to share them.

“Look at the birds of the air,” said Jesus: “they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them.” And it’s when we remember God as creator, as the author of all things, as the Lord of the Harvest - who gives us what we need to grow and thrive - that we’re inspired and led to use that harvest well, to use it kindly, to share.

And it doesn’t take a big church, or a lot of people, or even a youthful age-range, to start that ball rolling. Two or three gathered together can do it, for when we work for the values of the Kingdom, when we’re loving God and loving our neighbour as ourselves, then it’s not just us, for God is with us too.

A small church I know was mentioned to me as “punching above its weight”, in terms of the pastoral work it offered. I mentioned that comment to its Rector when I happened to meet him. He shook his head. “No,” he said, “we’re just travelling with Jesus where he’s told us to go.”

At our Harvest Festival, let’s thank God for the land, for those who farm it, and for all the myriad people whose hard work keeps us fed and housed and comfy. And let’s thank God for his love, shown to the world in Jesus Christ. And then may that thankfulness lead us to individual and collective acts of love and service that bring relief and help and love to where we are, and help make our world a bright place. Finally, know that God will bless us all as we journey together, and as we journey with him.

A Sermon on the Twelfth Sunday after Trinity (4th September - evening)

Readings: Deuteronomy 30.15-end, and Luke 14:25-33

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Some words from tonight’s first reading, from the Book of Deuteronomy in the Old Testament: “Today I offer you the choice of life and good, or death and evil.”  The setting for these stark words is Moses preparing the people of Israel to cross over into the Promised Land to which the Lord has led them. And now, says Moses, “You must love the Lord your God and walk in his ways, keep his commandments, decrees and laws.”  And if they do, God will bless them.

But there’s no room for a half-hearted response. The challenge Moses lays before them is this: If you’re not fully up for life in this new land, then you should stay this side of the river. God has brought you to this land, and if you’re going to cross the river to claim it, then with all your heart you must be committed to serve him and to keep his commands.

I was reading the other day on the sports pages about a star player who’d been dropped for the Saturday game. But he’s our best player, fans were saying. Not surprisingly, the coach was challenged as to why he’d dropped him. “I’ve the highest regard for his skills,” the coach insisted, “but his head’s not in the right place, his heart’s not in it - he’s not in the right place to play and I shan’t play him till he is. Just now, he can’t give me the commitment I need. It isn’t how good he is, it’s whether he can play his part in a team game.”

Ability isn’t enough, unless there’s also commitment. You need to be on-side, and part of the team. Moses said to the people that they must turn to the Lord with all their heart and soul and mind and strength. Let me connect that to the really hard thing Jesus said at the beginning of our second reading: “Unless you hate your father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, you can’t be my disciple.”  That really jars, doesn’t it? How can he ask us to hate our own kith and kin?  What sort of a Christian would hate their own nearest and dearest? Surely what God want from us is to be loving and caring and dutiful, as parents, as partners, as siblings? Doesn’t the commandment say, “Honour your father and mother”?

Yes, he does of course; and in fact what Jesus is saying - though in quite a tough way - is much the same thing as Moses: to do with commitment. What Jesus is saying is that nothing must come before our allegiance to God, not even our duty to those we love most in the world. Of course we should be caring and dutiful parents, children, siblings, friends - but these things follow from our duty to God, they don’t take precedence over it.

And while of course none of us should act badly, spitefully or without care to those who have a right to expect our love, not even the closest relationship, not even our love of our own life, should be allowed to stand in the way of the first call placed upon us if we’re disciples of Jesus, which is to love the Lord our God with all our heart and soul and mind and strength. As William Ruskin said many years ago: “He who gives God but second place in his life, gives him no place.”

So just as Moses told the people not to cross the river unless they were totally ready to serve the Lord in the land he was giving them, Jesus now says “Don’t come with me unless you’re totally ready to put what my Father asks of you before everything else." Religion can’t be just a hobby, because God asks us to offer him “ourselves, our souls and bodies” - in other words, to hold nothing back.

And while we may express this offering of ourselves in being in church and coming to God in prayer, Jesus tells us we must take up our cross to follow him. That’s about everything we do: our use of time, our allocation of money, our thought for others, our care for the world and for the environment, and the moral standards we set and keep to.

Religion on its own can even become a godless thing - perverted and misused by false prophets who use their power for their own ends. So we get cults and religious extremism - and even mainstream churches aren’t totally immune. There’ll always be - in every faith - those who set themselves up in God’s place, those who misappropriate the enthusiasm and desire of those who want to believe and to serve.

And I think that’s why Jesus spoke about taking up the cross. He warned his friends that others would claim his name, and would try to lead folk astray. So how do we test the truth of what we’re told and taught? The way of the cross is the test of truth. God’s love is cross shaped, God’s love offers peace and healing and understanding, forgiveness and compassion and justice. It is inclusive, it invites everyone in, and it’s sacrificial, it gives, it doesn’t take. And any word that leads us away from those things cannot be the true word of God, however plausibly it’s preached. In Philippians chapter 2 verse 6 the apostle Paul wrote that Jesus was by his very nature God, and yet he humbled himself, taking the form of a servant. There’s the test we should apply, whether we’re looking inwardly at our own selves, or reflecting on the teaching others give us. 

To “love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul, with all your mind and strength” is of course the first part of the Summary of the Law; and the second section naturally follows: “Love your neighbour as yourself.” You must love God before all else, Jesus tells us, but the true love for God will be cross-shaped, reaching up to God, and also reaching out, to be proved in our care for others, and in our readiness to live generous and giving lives. 

Here we are on the Lord’s Day, and once again that simple yet profound and crucial question is posed, as we look to the challenge of being Christian disciples through this new week of opportunity and challenge: Are we up for this, or not?  Will we cross the river, will we accept the cross? Moses said: “It’s your choice - life and good, or death and evil.” Our Servant King died on a cross to make us his people, and to open the way to a new Promised Land. So are we people of the cross, or are we not? And are we committed to him, does he have our full attention, and our complete allegiance? As the old hymn puts it, “Jesus speaks, and speaks to me - say, poor sinner, lov’st thou me?”