Sermon preached at the Groes Chapel on Sunday 27th April (Easter 2)

 Retirement has meant I could do something last weekend I hadn’t done for over forty years - take Easter off and not have to take a service anywhere. So Ann and I went to Hereford, checked in to a very nice little hotel on the edge of the city, and attended the Easter service at the cathedral. Easter communion, at 10 o’clock, was attended by - I would guess - mny hundreds of people of all ages, and was beautifully sung, though the clouds of incense around the church might not have suited everyone. The choir was then back in action for choral mattins, billed as 11.30 but not actually starting until close on midday, a traditional service with some wonderful singing, and a very inspiring sermon from the dean. And then we had lunch at the Green Dragon, also very good.

It was lovely to celebrate Easter in the presence of so many people, young as well as old, and to think that Easter and the triumph of love over death, the place of our redemption, the tomb empty not as some kind of one-off but as a demonstration for everyone that the power of death is broken - that this message is still heard and received and acted on.

But then we have today, traditionally Low Sunday, and in many churches (including this one today) we hear about doubting Thomas. Low Sunday when traditionally our churches are not very full at all, and when the certainties behind the alleluias sung a week ago perhaps begin to fray a little, so that we’re no longer quite as sure as we were.

As it happens, the very first church of I had care of as a young curate was dedicated to St Thomas. So I’ve always had something of a soft spot for him. It’s a bit of a shame I think, the way he gets labelled as “doubting”. For the most part the Gospels portray Thomas as a man of firm and quite courageous faith. Still, though, Thomas missed seeing Jesus with the rest of the Eleven, and didn’t really cope with that. It sounded to Thomas something too good to be true, and too much therefore to believe.

That’s how I see it, anyway. I don’t see Thomas doubting in the way a sceptic would. For me, it seems that Thomas very much wanted to believe what the others were telling him. But he hadn’t seen it for himself - so what if they were wrong? What if this was some moment of collective madness, what if his friends had imagined seeing something they really couldn’t have? I find it interesting that Thomas didn’t say, “I can’t believe.” He said, “I won’t believe.” In other words, it wasn’t so much that he found belief impossible, but that he refused to do it. And I think he refused to believe because he couldn’t face the pain there’d be if his hopes were dashed, if it turned out after all not to be true.

And I think that partly because I’ve met a few people like Thomas in my time. I mean, people who find the idea of faith and belief attractive, but don’t feel able (or perhaps, prepared) to take the risk. What risk do you mean, you might ask? Well, for people like Thomas faith is always a risk, because when they say yes to something they give it everything they’ve got. Heart and soul, that’s how I see Thomas. It’s not too big a risk just to give up an hour on a Sunday and put something on the plate. But for Thomas faith meant surrendering the whole of himself.

Jesus knew very well what kind of a man Thomas was. So he appeared to him and showed him the wounds. Jesus appeared so as to convince Thomas of the reality of his resurrection. Touch the wounds in my hands, place your hand in my side, he said, allowing Thomas - who in the end didn’t need to do either of those things - to say the big “yes” of faith, calling Jesus “My Lord and my God.”

And of course, Jesus went on to say, “Blessed are those who have not seen me, and yet believe.” How can those who can’t see Jesus come to faith? Only if they can find the love of Jesus alive and active in the things his Church is doing and saying. Only if the Christians they encounter are saying, like the apostles in our first reading from Acts: “We must obey God rather than men.”

Let’s think about that story for a moment. The Jewish Council, the Sanhedrin, had ordered the apostles not to teach out on the streets and in the Temple precinct. Specifically, they were not to even mention the name of Jesus. And in fact they’d been arrested and locked them up, only to be miraculously released, so that next morning at day break they were straight back on the streets, and back inside the temple, still preaching.

How dare you, say the Jewish elders. How dare you contravene the orders we’ve given. It’s Peter who speaks up on behalf of them all. We are witnesses to what God has done, says Peter, so how can we not speak out? We must obey God rather than men.

Well, that was then, so what about now? All those people in the cathedral last Sunday, and many more besides, since we saw plenty of other people heading into church or chapel as we travelled in and parked up our car - what did Easter mean for them? What will Easter mean for them - not just as a day to celebrate, but as something genuinely life-changing, something that leads them to give themselves, to rearrange their priorities, to truly say, “I will obey God rather than men”?

We are living through testing times - of war, of deep divisions, of the bending and twisting of truth, and stuff that is true and needs to be heard getting labelled as “fake news”, of huge and growing divisions between rich and poor, of the planet itself being changed in ways that may soon become unstoppable. And so often it seems that religion is part of the problem, especially when religion becomes loveless and rigid and divisive. “God is love,” wrote St John, “and those who live in love live in God, and God lives in them.” Easter is the time when we see that love for what it truly is. Love that gives without requiring response; that calls a blessing on enemy and friend alike; that offers us a way home, to the place we should be, to the way we should live. Put simply, the love of God is like Jesus.

And like Jesus, and in Jesus, it breaks for all people and for all time the power of death. Easter calls the Church, whatever it looks like, wherever it is, whatever songs it sings, to see with the eyes of Jesus, to love with the heart of Jesus, and to respond with the blessing arms of Jesus to the very real and urgent needs around us, to the people who are struggling and suffering in our world, with a compassionate desire and readiness to care that mirrors that of our Lord. If your religion excludes, if your religion ignores, if your religion is not Christ-like, then think again, come back to the empty tomb, see for yourself what love is really like.

Thomas met the risen Jesus in the upper room, and was privileged to be given a one-to-one encounter. Today, if people are still to meet the risen Jesus, they will need to find his love shining in a Church that is forgetful of itself, and that recognising the truth of true religion - that the Church has no use or purpose on earth unless it is genuinely there for others, that the Church has no use and purpose on earth unless those who are its members are obeying God, and not men.

We are called to be Easter people - not just at Easter-tide but always. Perhaps, like the apostles of old, never to shut up talking about him, whatever people tell us to do. Although I do quite like the instruction Francis of Assisi is supposed to have given to his friars: “Preach at all times, and where necessary, use words.” We preach with actions more persuasively than we do with words, and I have met the risen Christ on my journey, in some quite remarkable and brave and Spirit-filled people. We know that Jesus challenged, forgave, welcomed, befriended and healed, so where people find these things in his Church today, we know that they’ll also find Jesus, alive, risen, love at work. But sadly it’s also true that where they don’t find them, then perhaps, like Thomas, people who are in their hearts searching and striving for faith, will continue to say, “I will not believe.”

An Easter Reflection

I won't be preaching on Easter Day this year, for the first time in over forty years, but here is a short reflection on the Lucan gospel for Easter morning:

An Easter Gospel: Luke, chapter 24, verses 1 to 12 :-

Very early on the first day of the week the women came to the tomb bringing the spices they had prepared. They found that the stone had been rolled away from the tomb, but when they went inside, they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus. While they stood utterly at a loss, suddenly two men in dazzling garments were at their side. They were terrified, and stood with eyes cast down, but the men said, ‘Why search among the dead for one who is alive? Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be given into the power of sinful men and be crucified, and must rise again on the third day.’ Then they recalled his words and, returning from the tomb, they reported everything to the eleven and all the others. The women were Mary of Magdala, Joanna, and Mary the mother of James, and they, with the other women, told these things to the apostles. But the story appeared to them to be nonsense, and they would not believe them. Peter, however, got up and ran to the tomb, and, peering in, he saw the wrappings and nothing more; and he went home amazed at what had happened.

 

 A Short Reflection

“I suppose people found easier to believe that sort of thing back then,” said someone to me just the other day, as we discussed the Easter story. The implication being that you can’t expect modern, scientific, sceptical, cynical folk to believe that sort of thing so readily today.

Well, it certainly is hard to believe. But as today’s Gospel makes very plain, it was hard to believe back then too. The women came to tell the disciples what had happened when they visited the tomb. But, we read, “the story appeared to them to be nonsense, and they would not believe them.” The piece about Peter running to the tomb doesn’t appear in all ancient texts, and could have been added later, to harmonise with John’s version of the events of Easter Day. But even then, Peter ends up “amazed” rather than convinced; “perplexed” would probably be an equally good translation.

The disciples were in a very dark place that morning. They had followed their Lord into Jerusalem with very definite expectations. They had believed he was the Messiah, and they knew that the Messiah was going to re-found the Kingdom of David. And it hadn’t happened, and he was dead.

Remember, these guys were Jews, good and faithful Jews, looking for the restoration of their kingdom of old. They had not come to Jerusalem expecting to be founding a new religious movement. So how come that’s what happened? Part of the answer to that question has to wait until the very end of the Easter season, day fifty, the Day of Pentecost. But part of it is contained in the news the women brought and the disciples at first failed to believe. The empty tomb.

It’s fairly easy to believe things that you know are possible. But to believe something possible does not change your life, does not start new things happening in your mind and heart, does not send you off in new directions. It’s when you find yourself believing something impossible that that sort of thing happens. There would not be a Church if, on that first Easter Day, the disciples of Jesus hadn’t begun a process that would lead them to believe something impossible.

They had some work ahead - firstly they had to believe in the facts themselves, in what the women had reported: that the tomb was empty and that the body that had been laid there was no longer dead.  But then they had to believe in what that meant: in what it meant for them, in what it could mean for the world - that this wasn’t a one-off resuscitation of one amazingly good man, but the opening of a gate through which all people of faith could follow him.  And then they had to understand that this wasn’t God putting right the mistakes and disasters of Good Friday, and repairing what had gone wrong there - it was what Jesus has always intended should happen, it was what had always been planned.

In nature, endings turn into beginnings all the time. Every birth, every breaking of the shell of an egg as the chick appears, is the ending of something and a new beginning. Trees are clothed with leaves, hedgerows fill with flowers, the chrysalis is opened and a butterfly emerges, the body frame of the nymph splits to allow the adult dragonfly to crawl out and extend its wings. Perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised, at this time of year especially, that for this little band of defeated and downcast disciples, what had felt like the end of everything was turning into something so new and so wonderful it was beyond all their imaginings.

But it would take time, time that begins this morning, with the women telling a story the disciples could not at first believe. We shall greet today with alleluias, but they, to begin with, greeted it with amazement and perplexity.

My "Nature Notes" for May

 Enjoying the Birdsong

Many of you reading this may already have come across Merlin - not the wizard, nor the bird, but a handy app supplied by Cornell University that allows your mobile phone to hear and identify bird songs. I’ve found it very helpful, although it isn’t entirely foolproof. On a walk along the canal towpath Merlin told me I was listening to a Zitting Cisticola, which might well have been a first for Montgomeryshire. It’s a small brown warbler that can be found in southern Europe, but not here.  Merlin also suggested I was listening to a Chough at Powis Castle, but I doubt there were any nearer than the hills above Holyhead - it will have been a Jackdaw.

But it’s still a useful aid, and identified lots of singing birds when taken to Llyn Coed y Dinas a week or so before Easter. Not the one I’d hoped to hear, though - a Reed Warbler. They were still to arrive, though a Chiffchaff came down to inspect the reeds just in front of the hide instead.  Two Swallows were swooping across the water, and not all the winter visitors had departed - two drake Widgeon and one female were cruising the right hand side of the pool.

Two days later I came back for a second look. I’d seen my third Swallow of the year as I walked the canal towpath, but all of a sudden the pool when I arrived there was a flurry of Sand Martins, small brown members of the same family, nesting usually in sand banks along the river. They are among the earliest summer migrants to arrive.

I noticed a Herring Gull on the island constantly flying almost vertically upwards and then down again. Through my glasses I could see what it was doing. Having acquired some sort of clam, probably a freshwater mussel, it was repeatedly flying up with it and dropping it, hoping to crack the shell.  It took seven or eight tries, but at last, success.

Birds on the lake included Greylag and Canada Geese, Coots and Moorhens, quite a gang of Cormorants, Tufted Ducks, plenty of Mallard and a pair of Teal. The Wigeon were not to be seen, buta Great Crested Grebe appeared from behind the island, a lovely bird once hunted and killed for its feathers, used to decorate ladies’ hats and dresses.  No Merlin this time, but I could identify Robins, Wrens, Blue and Great Tits, Blackbird, Chiffchaff and Blackcap.  Two white farmyard geese on the island shepherded a party of seven fluffy goslings towards the water, then back towards the shelter of the trees, seeing off a couple of Canada Geese that got too close. They’ll have kept an eye on that Herring Gull, too.

Two Buzzards happened over, and one had the idea of settling on a tree on the far side of the pool, only to be unceremoniously driven off by the resident pair of Carrion Crows.  Crows themselves can of course also be on the receiving end of attacks like that - last year I watched a pair of Jackdaws dive-bombing a Carrion Crow that had entered what they regarded as their airspace. The Buzzard drifted away, pretending not to be bothered.

A pair of Oystercatchers, distinctive black and white waders with a bright red beak, had settled on the island, and maybe are nesting there, or planning to.  There are not many oysters to catch in these parts, but this is a bird that is increasingly found inland.  Last year I watched a couple (maybe the same birds) prospecting the area around the pens at the Smithfield, so they’re clearly fairly flexible as regards sources of food.  Meanwhile, another wader appeared, on the small island in front of the hide - a Common Sandpiper, busily probing the muddy shore, all the while bobbing its rear end up and down.  This is a much smaller bird than the Oystercatcher, clothed in soft grey and white. Suddenly it took off, flying close to the water right across the pool with some sharp zig-zag swerves before landing on the larger island.

And then I heard it - a jumble of chatter and churring from somewhere in the reeds just in front of me. Can you really call this birdsong - at times almost musical, but at others quite definitely not? I couldn’t see anything, but it had to be my first Reed Warbler of the year, freshly arrived from its winter quarters in Africa. More will join it in the coming weeks.  At last I noticed a reed stem swaying, and was able - briefly - to see the bird itself as it climbed higher. A true herald of summer.

A Palm Sunday sermon, given at Dovaston United Reformed Church

Have you ever considered how little we really know about Jesus? I was browsing along the shelves in Waterstones the other day - other bookshops are available - and I spent a bit of time looking at the section that contained biographies. There were lots of them, each one telling the story of someone with, to a greater or lesser degree, celebrity status. I would have learned things about the home background, the likes and dislikes, the schooling of whoever I chose to read about. There would have been a description, a photo or two of course, details of jobs, relationships, the wider family. A good biographer can really make his or her subject live on the page.

We have four writers, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, who tell us about Jesus. John was one of the twelve disciples, one of the three among those twelve who was specially close to Jesus. Matthew’s Gospel bears the name of one of the Twelve and may have at its heart words from Matthew himself. An ancient source tells us that Mark was Peter’s secretary, while Luke was of course a companion of Paul. These were all people who knew Jesus or knew people who knew Jesus. But they don’t give us what a modern biographer would give us. They don’t tell the full story. It can be frustrating - we’d like perhaps to know more.

But the Gospels are proclamation, not biography. They’re not interested in telling the sort of life story a modern biographer would do. Those sort of details are not important to them. What is important is salvation - that our own lives are saved by what this man did, by what this man gave. And the one thing they do give us in detail - along with the stories of teachings and parables and miracles and prayer - is the story of his death. We’re not told how many times Jesus may have quietly visited Jerusalem at the various times of festival; but now, as the great Passover festival draws near, the story of the death of Jesus begins in each of the Gospels with Jesus travelling with pilgrims from far and wide to the Holy City, and with the very deliberate and dramatic public entrance to the city he chooses to make. The great drama begins.

For in entering the city as he did, Jesus was openly declaring himself as Messiah. The crowds around him knew this - these would have been people who’d travelled as he had from Galilee, where they’d heard him preach, seen him heal the sick, been delighted at the power and freshness of his teaching. And now, right in front of their eyes, he was fulfilling the prophecy of  Zechariah, who had said that the king God would send to save his people would enter Jerusalem meek and riding on a donkey.

And this had all been very carefully prepared, by people other than the Twelve disciples. Two of them were sent to collect a donkey that had been made ready. They were expected; those standing around as they got there knew someone would be calling to collect the beast.

A clue in my crossword puzzle last week was “shout of praise”, and the answer was “hosanna”. But in fact the people shouting hosanna as Jesus rode by weren’t just shouting praise. Hosanna is more than just a sort of hooray - it’s a prayer, something along the lines of “Lord, save us!” It’s a welcome and a praise shout, but it’s also a plea to the one who is our Saviour.

These were a people living under subjugation, who wanted their freedom, who wanted the kingdom of David to be restored, who wanted the Romans out, and probably the family of Herod too, who wanted a kingdom of Israel like it had been in olden days. And probably the disciples of Jesus at that point wanted the same thing. And the people of Jerusalem itself, the people of status and influence, the Temple priests and their friends and supporters - and of course the Roman governor and his officers - these people would also be thinking along the same lines. What was this upstart claimant to the throne of David, what was he going to try to do? The Passover was a revolutionary festival, it was all about God setting his people free. A crowd of Galileans all singing freedom songs was not good news for Pontius Pilate, or for Annas and Caiaphas and their friends. They didn’t want the boat rocked.

Only Jesus himself knew that he was entering Jerusalem to die there. He was indeed coming to the Holy City to take a throne and to found a kingdom, but his kingdom would not be the one the crowds expected. He would indeed win a great victory in Jerusalem, but to all those looking on, on the day we call Good Friday, to friend and enemy alike, that victory would look like a defeat. It was impossible that the one God would send could die; it was a scandalous thing that the Messiah could be crucified. Jesus had tried to tell his disciples, but they hadn’t grasped what he was saying, couldn’t understand it, couldn’t accept it. Jesus would be more alone than anyone ever could be, on the way of the Cross. And as the shouts of hosanna surrounded him, he knew it would be the end of him, to enter Jerusalem. But he still did it.

And the manner of his entry was guaranteed to stir things up. He would go into the Temple and angrily cleanse it, throwing out the tables of the money changers and the dealers in pigeons - and in doing so fulfil another Old Testament prophecy, this time from Malachi. What we see here is Jesus being deliberately provocative. He’s forcing the hands of those who held power, forcing them to take action. For his disciples, what happened in Jerusalem must at the time have felt like utter failure, like everything going wrong. But as they reflected in the light of Easter, they would see that in reality Jesus had been in charge all along, forcing the issue.

And this begins today with the King who rides a donkey into the city he claims as his own. Just as Jesus chose to make this provocative statement, so he also chose a particular fulfilment of prophecy that says something about what he was in fact entering the city to do. A king claiming victory would surely enter the city on a warhorse, to seize what was now his, to plunder the wealth of his enemies, to take charge. These days he’d no doubt be accompanied by tanks and other weaponry: showing off his power, making clear who was now in charge.

But Jesus chose to enter his city as a servant. Conquering kings come to take what is now theirs by right of victory. But  Sunday  Jesus entered Jerusalem not to take anything, but to give everything.

So the story of the death of Jesus, while it’s not about filling in all the biographical details, is where we’re told what we really need to know: what changed the lives of those first disciples, and has gone on changing lives ever since. People may have expected the Messiah to come into the Holy City to exercise earthly power and authority. Some of them were longing for this to happen, others wanted to make sure it didn’t. But Jesus was riding a donkey, a beast of burden. Jesus comes as the servant-king.

He enters Jerusalem to show in God’s city the full breadth of God’s love. He comes to give it all away. He comes to lay down his life. This morning I’ve done something I rarely did as an active Anglican minister: I’ve preached a sermon on Palm Sunday. Usually on this day in my own churches I would not have preached, but we would simply have read in full from one of the Gospels the story of the death of Jesus, the story of the Passion. When you get home after this service, why not do the same? Look up Luke’s version of the Passion Story, and read it quietly and prayerfully, for this is where we discover the truth about Jesus - all we really need to know about him, about our servant-King. And having read it, just be prayerfully open to whatever God may be saying to you about living today in the light of the one who died for love of our love. And in whom we find the way to life in all its fullness.

My "Nature Notes" article for April

 

Last month I wrote a bit about pets and wildlife, and there’s no doubt that some pets, some of the time, can be a threat to the animals and birds that share our space. But there are many other threats besides, to do with how we live and how we human beings plan our environment. There’s no escaping the huge numbers of creature killed on our roads, for example - on a short journey of no more than ten miles recently, I counted more than twenty roadkill pheasants before I gave up. Pheasants are not a native bird, and estimates of the numbers released by shoots etc each year vary between 35 and 50 million birds - so that’s another way in which human activity impacts on our wild environment. Roadkill attracts magpies and crows (and red kites and buzzards), and is one factor contributing to the probably artificially high number of magpies. So the trail goes on . . .

As a regular litter-picker, I am perhaps more aware than most of the huge amount of litter simply dropped on the streets of the average town, however many bins there are available.  Pigeons, gulls and many other birds find food among the rubbish, as do, when you’re not looking, mice, rats and urban foxes. But litter is also dangerous: broken glass, and tins mangled by mowers when left on urban grass or in country fields, are two obvious examples. But there are others: I was told not long ago of a hedgehog attracted by the yoghurt in a plastic pot, that died because, having got in, it couldn’t get out, because its prickles caught against the sides of the pot.  Hedgehogs, by the way, should never be given milk - it is quite harmful to them.

Smokers seem routinely to feel that it’s OK simply to drop their cigarettes where they’ve been smoking. It isn’t. It’s messy and makes our streets unsightly (and don’t even get me started on chewing gum), but what’s dropped also contains poisonous chemicals.

But, as I’ve written before, even we kind people who provide food in our gardens for local birds can be a cause of harm.  Most garden birds would, away from our towns, be woodland species; their natural behaviour is to find sources of food, make the most of it while it lasts, and then move on. In our gardens, though, the food source never runs out - we keep refilling the feeders. And sometimes we get a bit competitive, not wanting “our” garden birds to decamp to the garden of our neighbour down the road. 

But because that means birds are visiting the same place more often than they would in the wild, diseases like trichomonosis (sometimes called “fat finch disease”, though it seems to have migrated to garden birds from urban pigeons) and salmonella can be spread at feeders and birdbaths.  If you see a bird that is lethargic, seems larger and more puffed up than normal, hanging around looking sad and not feeding, that’s probably a case of this horrible fatal disease. Greenfinches seem particularly susceptible.  It’s best then probably to remove all feeders for a time and make sure the whole area is sterilized.  Infected birds vomit up food that contains the parasite.  In general, a good thorough and regular clean of everything is enough, but you can buy antiseptic products too.