A year ago on Christmas morning I attended the Eucharist at St Thomas’s Salisbury, which was then my parish church. There was a new vicar in post and he was celebrating his first Christmas. As is the way with new vicars (at least, some new vicars) he had Ideas, with a capital I. One of these was the expansion of the traditional nativity play. None of the exclusivism of a cast for him: every child present was invited to come in costume, as an angel, a shepherd or a wise man – whatever he or she fancied, or, more likely, whatever his or her harassed parents could rustle up amidst the mad rush of breakfast consumption, lunch preparation and stocking-opening . This being a parish with a lot of children in it, the effect was rather spectacular. There were choirs of angels, great flocks of shepherds, an embarrassment of wise men, and much lusty singing around the manger.
Like Christmas lights in shopping streets, nativity plays are one of this country’s seasonal Aunt Sallies. Someone somewhere will always be found arguing, or appearing to argue, for their inappropriateness to the modern age. I disagree, and rank the nativity play’s detractors alongside Ebenezer Scrooge and those joyless Protestants who tried to ban Christmas pudding over 300 years ago.
Mind you, I also disagree with those who think them merely a convenient vehicle for the channelling of school-age exuberance at this time of year. And I disagree with those who think them just a spectacle for proud parents and grandparents to watch and applaud. That’s quite a lot of disagreement for a festive morning, so let me try to make the case for tinsel and tea-towels, for stuffed sheep and Away in a Manger.
Those who participate in a nativity play do more than learn the words and sing the songs. They live the story, and so they set a pattern for us all. You see, secular traditions of present-giving, party-going and over-eating threaten to overwhelm the story of the angels and shepherds. But a far greater danger arises when that story stops being something that we live and becomes just another tradition, when it takes its place alongside the TV specials and the pantomime as something to be enjoyed at this time of year.
I’m not sure that my colleague in Salisbury went far enough. How much better it would have been if he’d insisted that everyone, whatever their age or status, had come equipped to take part in the nativity play. And be warned – this still-new vicar is capable of having ideas, too. Maybe in twelve months time I’ll be looking out at a crowd of extras from some old-fashioned Biblical television blockbuster. For I believe we are all called to be players in God’s great drama. We are all called to be shepherds and angels and wise men. Is that not the point of the birth we celebrate this morning?
If you are unconvinced allow me to approach this differently, from the perspective of the villains of the story, the perspective of the innkeepers of Bethlehem and of Herod the king. The innkeepers turn away the exhausted couple; they wash their hands of the pregnant teenager. Each of us has had some experience of closing the door on the needy. Herod seeks to destroy the thing that threatens his throne. Each of us has felt undermined by the new, the different, the unexpected. Each of us has sought to choke it at birth. The shadowy underside of the nativity story reflects the shadowy underside of our own stories.
Sadly, perhaps other parallels between the story and our stories are harder to find. The angels set the heaven alight with the joy of their praises. Are we full of joy this morning, or full of anxiety, anxiety at the state of the lunch, or the state of the church, or the state of our investments? The shepherd trusted the angels and left their flocks to the uncertainties of the hillside and the ravages of wolves. Are we full of trust this morning, or full of suspicion, suspicion of one another, or of the mass media and the banks, or of those of different faiths? The wise men persevered on a journey through mountain top and desert waste. Are we set to persevere this morning, set to follow the star wherever it may lead, until we discover the truth of Christ for ourselves? Or does sound as though it might interfere with our carefully manicured plans for the New Year?
So never mind charades: here’s a parlour game for this afternoon, when the nose has been cut off the Stilton, the chocolates have been opened and the port is flowing freely. In 2007 which nativity character did you most closely resemble? And in 2008 which will you seek to imitate? I may be merciful, and may not insist on a dress code of angels’ wings, sparkly crowns and rustic dressing gowns next Christmas. But I hope to see a lively company of players who have made the story real in their communities. Thus, only thus, will Christ be brought to birth for our city, in our time. Amen.
Saturday 29 December 2007
The Eucharist of Christmas Night, 2007
Quietly she holds him, cradled in her arms,
rocking oh so gently, protecting him from harm.
Her tears are flowing freely, off her cheeks they race,
always heading downwards, then dripping from her face.
A mother holds her baby, as close as close can be
and as his eyes stare skyward there’s only her to see.
Tender lines on a mother’s love for her child: they might have been written for Christmas night. But in fact they have as their context not a stable in first century Bethlehem but an estate in twenty-first century Liverpool. They are the work of Stephen Jones, and were written for his son Rhys. And they do not end there, but continue:
Now fast forward eleven years, the scene is much the same.
A mother holds her baby, whispering his name,
ruffling his matted hair, his face covered in blood,
telling him to stay with her and wrapping him in love.
Eleven year old Rhys was murdered in August this year, shot dead as he returned from football. He is just one of the twenty-seven young people who have been killed with guns in this country in 2007, some of whom have lived their short lives, and lost them, only a few miles from this place.
These are uncomfortable truths to contemplate in the candle-lit warmth of Christmas night, hard truths about the life of this city: about its huge wealth and its grinding poverty, its limitless potential and its utter hopelessness, its overweening confidence and its cringing fearfulness. Yet if the birth we have gathered to celebrate has nothing to say to Rhys and the others, if it has nothing to say to our world city and to its bitter divisions, then I believe it has nothing to say.
Can the manger speak to Merseyside? Can the stable speak to Stockwell? What can this night offer a city that is so cynical and so weary?
John tells us that this night the Word is made flesh. This night the world becomes the place to which God is actually present, the place in which God becomes embodied. In other words this is not some forgotten planet in a far-flung corner of an isolated solar system. This is the very place in which God chooses to dwell and in which he chooses to reveal himself to humankind. So the deaths of Rhys and of all the others are of supreme significance. They are the deaths not only of God’s beloved children but also of his beloved brothers, whose human life he begins to share this night in Bethlehem. God’s is the first heart to break when a young life is taken, God’s are the first tears to fall and it is God’s revulsion we share when we contemplate such a crime, such a sin.
Yes, this night the Word is made flesh. But it is such vulnerable flesh, the flesh of a newborn baby, tiny, naked and utterly dependent. God comes not as a weapon-wielding hard-man, subduing the streets of Liverpool and Lambeth before him, but as a child. Thus does God show us what it is to love one another. It is not to bend one another to our own will; it is not to coerce one another into a pattern of behaving and thinking that is really our own. To love one another is to trust one another; it is to place ourselves in one another’s hands. So love needs allies in the world. If firearms are ever to take their place alongside slingshots in the museum of humankind; it poverty is ever to be driven from these shores; and if hope and opportunity are to flourish in place of drug use and gang violence then love needs spokesmen, advocates and activists. Love needs you and me. Tonight we reaffirm our adherence to love’s cause.
So this night speaks to us of God’s love for humanity, and of the precariousness of that love’s endeavour. But can it possibly address the third, despairing stanza of Stephen Jones’s poem?
But the child will never answer, forever to stay young.
Dying in a car park, it’s not where he belongs.
A mother holds her baby, her child, her world, her son,
his life has been robbed from him, she can’t believe he’s gone.
The manger does not hold the Word made flesh for very long, for the Word grows to mature adulthood. Thirty-three years pass, and a day comes when another mother cradles her son’s lifeless body in her arms, wiping the blood and sweat from his face and weeping over him. And then, perhaps only then, do we discover the significance of this night for our broken lives and disturbed times. For we discover that just as the wood of the manger bears Christ’s life to the world so too does the wood of the cross bear Christ’s life to the world: glorious life, life unending, life in all its fullness, life as God had always intended that life should be. Because of the life that begins this night death has no ultimate power over the children of Croxteth Park or over the children of London. It has no power over the young soldiers of Congo or over the orphans of Baghdad, or over any child in any place.
For this night heaven is once more joined to earth, and God comes to dwell with his people and they with him, for all time and beyond all time, full of grace and truth. This night we gaze upon his glory, and we know it to be glory as of a Father’s only Son. Thanks be to God. Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia. Amen.
rocking oh so gently, protecting him from harm.
Her tears are flowing freely, off her cheeks they race,
always heading downwards, then dripping from her face.
A mother holds her baby, as close as close can be
and as his eyes stare skyward there’s only her to see.
Tender lines on a mother’s love for her child: they might have been written for Christmas night. But in fact they have as their context not a stable in first century Bethlehem but an estate in twenty-first century Liverpool. They are the work of Stephen Jones, and were written for his son Rhys. And they do not end there, but continue:
Now fast forward eleven years, the scene is much the same.
A mother holds her baby, whispering his name,
ruffling his matted hair, his face covered in blood,
telling him to stay with her and wrapping him in love.
Eleven year old Rhys was murdered in August this year, shot dead as he returned from football. He is just one of the twenty-seven young people who have been killed with guns in this country in 2007, some of whom have lived their short lives, and lost them, only a few miles from this place.
These are uncomfortable truths to contemplate in the candle-lit warmth of Christmas night, hard truths about the life of this city: about its huge wealth and its grinding poverty, its limitless potential and its utter hopelessness, its overweening confidence and its cringing fearfulness. Yet if the birth we have gathered to celebrate has nothing to say to Rhys and the others, if it has nothing to say to our world city and to its bitter divisions, then I believe it has nothing to say.
Can the manger speak to Merseyside? Can the stable speak to Stockwell? What can this night offer a city that is so cynical and so weary?
John tells us that this night the Word is made flesh. This night the world becomes the place to which God is actually present, the place in which God becomes embodied. In other words this is not some forgotten planet in a far-flung corner of an isolated solar system. This is the very place in which God chooses to dwell and in which he chooses to reveal himself to humankind. So the deaths of Rhys and of all the others are of supreme significance. They are the deaths not only of God’s beloved children but also of his beloved brothers, whose human life he begins to share this night in Bethlehem. God’s is the first heart to break when a young life is taken, God’s are the first tears to fall and it is God’s revulsion we share when we contemplate such a crime, such a sin.
Yes, this night the Word is made flesh. But it is such vulnerable flesh, the flesh of a newborn baby, tiny, naked and utterly dependent. God comes not as a weapon-wielding hard-man, subduing the streets of Liverpool and Lambeth before him, but as a child. Thus does God show us what it is to love one another. It is not to bend one another to our own will; it is not to coerce one another into a pattern of behaving and thinking that is really our own. To love one another is to trust one another; it is to place ourselves in one another’s hands. So love needs allies in the world. If firearms are ever to take their place alongside slingshots in the museum of humankind; it poverty is ever to be driven from these shores; and if hope and opportunity are to flourish in place of drug use and gang violence then love needs spokesmen, advocates and activists. Love needs you and me. Tonight we reaffirm our adherence to love’s cause.
So this night speaks to us of God’s love for humanity, and of the precariousness of that love’s endeavour. But can it possibly address the third, despairing stanza of Stephen Jones’s poem?
But the child will never answer, forever to stay young.
Dying in a car park, it’s not where he belongs.
A mother holds her baby, her child, her world, her son,
his life has been robbed from him, she can’t believe he’s gone.
The manger does not hold the Word made flesh for very long, for the Word grows to mature adulthood. Thirty-three years pass, and a day comes when another mother cradles her son’s lifeless body in her arms, wiping the blood and sweat from his face and weeping over him. And then, perhaps only then, do we discover the significance of this night for our broken lives and disturbed times. For we discover that just as the wood of the manger bears Christ’s life to the world so too does the wood of the cross bear Christ’s life to the world: glorious life, life unending, life in all its fullness, life as God had always intended that life should be. Because of the life that begins this night death has no ultimate power over the children of Croxteth Park or over the children of London. It has no power over the young soldiers of Congo or over the orphans of Baghdad, or over any child in any place.
For this night heaven is once more joined to earth, and God comes to dwell with his people and they with him, for all time and beyond all time, full of grace and truth. This night we gaze upon his glory, and we know it to be glory as of a Father’s only Son. Thanks be to God. Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia. Amen.
Monday 3 December 2007
The First Sunday of Advent 2007
He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead,
and his kingdom will have no end.
Those words conclude what Christians affirm to be true of Jesus Christ when they repeat the Nicene Creed. They sum up the doctrines of the End Times and the Second Coming, in Greek the Eschaton and the Parousia, the doctrines to which Advent points remorselessly, despite the lures of Christmas shopping and cocktail parties.
Perhaps those lures are welcome, not only for their innate attractiveness, but also for their capacity for distracting us from where the season would have us concentrate our gaze. The End Times and the Second Coming are difficult. On the one hand they conjure up images of harmless cranks on mountain tops, Beyond the Fringe-style; on the other they have about them a far from harmless whiff of religious fundamentalism.
Yet there is no avoiding the doctrines of sudden, universal and divinely-determined End Times. They run through our Scriptures like a deep seam. Isaiah’s prophecy evokes a coming era of universal peace and mutual trust. Paul’s epistles exhort their readers to keep awake and live as those on the threshold of a great and unimaginable change. And throughout all four Gospels Jesus speaks of the day of his return.
So the doctrines are genuinely catholic and of unimpeachable orthodoxy: yet for many of us they are far from being preoccupations of our lives of prayer and faith. ‘Jesus is Coming – Look Busy’ has become a comic staple of T-shirts and office plaques.
We are time-poor individuals for whom considering next week’s diary is a luxury, and for whom, to coin a phrase, eternity can wait. We are a pessimistic generation for whom the notion of change for the better is an article of unbelief, and for whom that other phrase, that things can only get better, once so famously coined, is faintly risible.
If we do think about the End Times at all it may be to think of them in terms of the approaching certainty of our own deaths. Many sermons have been preached encouraging us to cultivate familiarity with our mortality. I know. I’ve preached some of them. Yet a distinctive line of liberal theological thought goes farther and identifies (or confuses) our own death with the End Times. They are something we will face when we die, rather than something that will happen once and for all.
Or it may be that we prefer to mythologize the doctrines. We assume that the words can never have been meant to be taken seriously. We infer from them that the return of Jesus and the earthly idyll of Isaiah are metaphors for the self-realization and transformation of the soul. We thus push the doctrines into the safe arena of the spiritual.
These are strategies of avoidance, and strategies to be avoided. They offer an illusory security that Christ never offers.
The first, conflating the universal End Times with our personal end time, seems to offer us some control of our destinies. If we appear before the throne one by one, if we are processed individually, as it were, then we may think we have a much better chance of manipulating the system. There will be less chance of the critical voices of the neighbours we’ve never got on with being heard. We will be held to account for those things for which we ought to be held to account, those that are our personal responsibility, and not for those which are not. We will face God alone and be judged by him alone. There’s something rather appealing in that. We have our own lawyers, our own doctors, sometimes our own priests. Why not our own ultimate hearing before our own personal God?
The answer is that this belies the Baptismal covenant into which we have entered and which binds us inexorably to every other baptized person. In this of all weeks we might reflect on the words of England’s greatest poet of faith, William Blake:
Can I see another’s woe,
And not be in sorrow too.
Can I see another’s grief,
And not seek for kind relief.
Surely as the baptized we live together, die together, and are judged together: as another poet of Anglicanism puts it, ‘No man is an island, entire of itself’.
The second, mythologizing the doctrines, enrols us alongside those early Gnostic Christians for whom the doctrine of Christ’s incarnation was so threatening that they felt compelled to explain it by slashing the world in two: the gross, corrupt physical, and the pure, noble spiritual. At death, said the Gnostics, we are liberated from our mortal bodies and are freed at last from the world and its evil temptations. There’s something rather appealing in this, too. Our age is keen on the spirit. Doctrines labelled ‘spiritual’ have some cachet and are generally regarded as not needing too much explanation.
Yet orthodox faith has never allowed such division. We are created as persons, not as more or less happy coincidences of mind, body and spirit. It is in the embodied person of Jesus that God comes among us, and it is the embodied person of Jesus that is transfigured, raised and glorified. We have no licence for believing that the created world is destined for the eternal scrap-heap; we have every possible licence for believing that God’s purposes embrace the world and intend its redemption.
Faith in the End Times as either purely personal or purely spiritual is not the faith of our tradition. We believe that he will come again in glory. We believe that he will judge the living and the dead. We believe that his kingdom will have no end. We believe in an end that is universal; that is salvific; and that is God’s.
That belief offers those who do not share it an explanation for our lives. Doesn’t it?
Maranatha. Come, Lord Jesus.
Amen.
and his kingdom will have no end.
Those words conclude what Christians affirm to be true of Jesus Christ when they repeat the Nicene Creed. They sum up the doctrines of the End Times and the Second Coming, in Greek the Eschaton and the Parousia, the doctrines to which Advent points remorselessly, despite the lures of Christmas shopping and cocktail parties.
Perhaps those lures are welcome, not only for their innate attractiveness, but also for their capacity for distracting us from where the season would have us concentrate our gaze. The End Times and the Second Coming are difficult. On the one hand they conjure up images of harmless cranks on mountain tops, Beyond the Fringe-style; on the other they have about them a far from harmless whiff of religious fundamentalism.
Yet there is no avoiding the doctrines of sudden, universal and divinely-determined End Times. They run through our Scriptures like a deep seam. Isaiah’s prophecy evokes a coming era of universal peace and mutual trust. Paul’s epistles exhort their readers to keep awake and live as those on the threshold of a great and unimaginable change. And throughout all four Gospels Jesus speaks of the day of his return.
So the doctrines are genuinely catholic and of unimpeachable orthodoxy: yet for many of us they are far from being preoccupations of our lives of prayer and faith. ‘Jesus is Coming – Look Busy’ has become a comic staple of T-shirts and office plaques.
We are time-poor individuals for whom considering next week’s diary is a luxury, and for whom, to coin a phrase, eternity can wait. We are a pessimistic generation for whom the notion of change for the better is an article of unbelief, and for whom that other phrase, that things can only get better, once so famously coined, is faintly risible.
If we do think about the End Times at all it may be to think of them in terms of the approaching certainty of our own deaths. Many sermons have been preached encouraging us to cultivate familiarity with our mortality. I know. I’ve preached some of them. Yet a distinctive line of liberal theological thought goes farther and identifies (or confuses) our own death with the End Times. They are something we will face when we die, rather than something that will happen once and for all.
Or it may be that we prefer to mythologize the doctrines. We assume that the words can never have been meant to be taken seriously. We infer from them that the return of Jesus and the earthly idyll of Isaiah are metaphors for the self-realization and transformation of the soul. We thus push the doctrines into the safe arena of the spiritual.
These are strategies of avoidance, and strategies to be avoided. They offer an illusory security that Christ never offers.
The first, conflating the universal End Times with our personal end time, seems to offer us some control of our destinies. If we appear before the throne one by one, if we are processed individually, as it were, then we may think we have a much better chance of manipulating the system. There will be less chance of the critical voices of the neighbours we’ve never got on with being heard. We will be held to account for those things for which we ought to be held to account, those that are our personal responsibility, and not for those which are not. We will face God alone and be judged by him alone. There’s something rather appealing in that. We have our own lawyers, our own doctors, sometimes our own priests. Why not our own ultimate hearing before our own personal God?
The answer is that this belies the Baptismal covenant into which we have entered and which binds us inexorably to every other baptized person. In this of all weeks we might reflect on the words of England’s greatest poet of faith, William Blake:
Can I see another’s woe,
And not be in sorrow too.
Can I see another’s grief,
And not seek for kind relief.
Surely as the baptized we live together, die together, and are judged together: as another poet of Anglicanism puts it, ‘No man is an island, entire of itself’.
The second, mythologizing the doctrines, enrols us alongside those early Gnostic Christians for whom the doctrine of Christ’s incarnation was so threatening that they felt compelled to explain it by slashing the world in two: the gross, corrupt physical, and the pure, noble spiritual. At death, said the Gnostics, we are liberated from our mortal bodies and are freed at last from the world and its evil temptations. There’s something rather appealing in this, too. Our age is keen on the spirit. Doctrines labelled ‘spiritual’ have some cachet and are generally regarded as not needing too much explanation.
Yet orthodox faith has never allowed such division. We are created as persons, not as more or less happy coincidences of mind, body and spirit. It is in the embodied person of Jesus that God comes among us, and it is the embodied person of Jesus that is transfigured, raised and glorified. We have no licence for believing that the created world is destined for the eternal scrap-heap; we have every possible licence for believing that God’s purposes embrace the world and intend its redemption.
Faith in the End Times as either purely personal or purely spiritual is not the faith of our tradition. We believe that he will come again in glory. We believe that he will judge the living and the dead. We believe that his kingdom will have no end. We believe in an end that is universal; that is salvific; and that is God’s.
That belief offers those who do not share it an explanation for our lives. Doesn’t it?
Maranatha. Come, Lord Jesus.
Amen.
Monday 12 November 2007
Remembrance Sunday 2007
Sponsored by the Peace Pledge Union, and symbolizing pacifism and non-violence, the White Poppy became enormously controversial about twenty years ago. I remember impassioned debates about its alleged lack of respect for the fallen, and the casting of sharp aspersions upon its wearers’ patriotism. So I was surprised to see one being worn in the parish this week. Surprised, because in the last decade there has been a palpable upsurge in the observance of Remembrance Sunday.
The two minutes silence has returned on Armistice Day, whenever it falls, as well as on the Sunday nearest to it; red poppies decorate the mastheads of certain newspapers as well as the lapels of politicians of all persuasions; and for the first time in its history the Church of England has authorized liturgy for the day. The climate is even less favourable to the white poppy movement today than it was in the mid-80s. Had it ever been thought to have gone away, Remembrancetide is back.
Why is that? Allow me to attribute it to three phenomena. The first is the passage of years and the simple but unimaginable fact that a few years from now no veterans of the Great War will be living. The Great War, of course, gave birth to the Remembrance movement, and its themes and images have dominated it ever since. The particular horrors of the trenches and the poetry that they prompted have held the public imagination captive for nearly a century. Yet soon there will be no living link with that generation.
Then there is the age in which we live. Once again the armed forces of the Crown are serving overseas in difficult and dangerous conditions. Once again we hear of casualties every week and live with the grief and anger of suffering families. Once again, to a greater or lesser extent, we believe our cities at risk of armed violence.
Lastly - and please don’t think me cynical - I suspect that Remembrancetide is growing because it is, or can be, safely secular. Society is multi-cultural, multi-faith, and suspicious of organized religion. Our leaders, or at least their subordinates, have less and less contact with the Churches and consequently less and less understanding of them. They increasingly perceive the symbols and expressions of religious faith as inappropriate focuses around which to gather people. Yet there is precious little other language or ritual available. In these circumstances Remembrancetide meets a number of needs admirably. It brings people together to honour the fallen and to pay tribute to their surviving comrades, causes with which few could disagree. It has its own rites – Binyon’s lines, the silence and the Last Post. And it has no need at all of God, of any God. Of course, the Bishop of London will be at the Cenotaph this morning, but the occasion could proceed perfectly smoothly without the Episcopal veneer he will bring to it. Remembrancetide offers the rare possibility of a unifying and secular liturgy.
If I am right about this then another question is unavoidable. Why do we observe it in Church at all, when civic observances around the country’s plentiful war memorials might seem more appropriate? Are we not colluding with a movement which has its own momentum and is at best agnostic in its approach to the Christian Gospel? Various shades of Church opinion favour a divorce. There are the Christian pacifists, white poppy wearers, who dislike today’s alleged militaristic undertones. At the other end of the scale there are liturgically purist Catholics, who resent today’s interruption of the worship of God, worship which can only be carried out in the prescribed fashion and cannot admit of silences and bugle calls.
Well, I will have none of it. Neither of these opinions is mine. I am glad to be here; I am glad that we are here.
First, I think, because for the Church to retreat from Remembrancetide would be for the Church to do what it has done throughout its history, and always to disastrous effect. To retreat from Remembrancetide would be to retreat from real people and real life. There is a popular desire to honour the dead and show support for those who suffer. The Church can choose to be with people as they do that, or it can choose not to be. It can take flags, drums and the Royal British Legion in its stride, or it can withdraw yet again into its increasingly little ecclesial shell, isolating itself as it has done on so many other issues, and so betraying the radical openness to humanity’s need to which we are called by Jesus Christ.
Secondly, I think, because the Church brings something to Remembrancetide, something of which I hope it is not ashamed. That is prayer. Remembrance here is not an intellectual activity or sentimental self-indulgence. Remembrance here is a part of our vocation as disciples of Jesus Christ, who calls us to pray for his world. We cannot refuse to pray for the fallen in war; or for those who still suffer as a result of war; or for those who are in peril today. We can scarcely refuse to pray for the peace of the world or refuse to pledge ourselves to work for its realization.
Lastly, I think, we are here because there is nowhere else that we can be. War is a failure and a sin, whatever the motives with which it is begun. It has been the cause of unspeakable cruelty and limitless pain; it has been the cause too of the best of which men and women are capable in heroism, forgiveness and sacrifice. Where can we go with the unwieldy mass that is war, the unwieldy mass that is raw human emotion and dire human need, that is filthiest dirt and brightest glory, that is life and death – where can we go but the altar of God? ‘To whom shall we go?’ says Peter, patron of theis Parish, to Jesus ‘You have the words of eternal life’. Here, in the Word made flesh among us, there is hope, dare we say the only hope, for warring humanity. Amen.
Remembrance Sunday,
11 November 2007
The two minutes silence has returned on Armistice Day, whenever it falls, as well as on the Sunday nearest to it; red poppies decorate the mastheads of certain newspapers as well as the lapels of politicians of all persuasions; and for the first time in its history the Church of England has authorized liturgy for the day. The climate is even less favourable to the white poppy movement today than it was in the mid-80s. Had it ever been thought to have gone away, Remembrancetide is back.
Why is that? Allow me to attribute it to three phenomena. The first is the passage of years and the simple but unimaginable fact that a few years from now no veterans of the Great War will be living. The Great War, of course, gave birth to the Remembrance movement, and its themes and images have dominated it ever since. The particular horrors of the trenches and the poetry that they prompted have held the public imagination captive for nearly a century. Yet soon there will be no living link with that generation.
Then there is the age in which we live. Once again the armed forces of the Crown are serving overseas in difficult and dangerous conditions. Once again we hear of casualties every week and live with the grief and anger of suffering families. Once again, to a greater or lesser extent, we believe our cities at risk of armed violence.
Lastly - and please don’t think me cynical - I suspect that Remembrancetide is growing because it is, or can be, safely secular. Society is multi-cultural, multi-faith, and suspicious of organized religion. Our leaders, or at least their subordinates, have less and less contact with the Churches and consequently less and less understanding of them. They increasingly perceive the symbols and expressions of religious faith as inappropriate focuses around which to gather people. Yet there is precious little other language or ritual available. In these circumstances Remembrancetide meets a number of needs admirably. It brings people together to honour the fallen and to pay tribute to their surviving comrades, causes with which few could disagree. It has its own rites – Binyon’s lines, the silence and the Last Post. And it has no need at all of God, of any God. Of course, the Bishop of London will be at the Cenotaph this morning, but the occasion could proceed perfectly smoothly without the Episcopal veneer he will bring to it. Remembrancetide offers the rare possibility of a unifying and secular liturgy.
If I am right about this then another question is unavoidable. Why do we observe it in Church at all, when civic observances around the country’s plentiful war memorials might seem more appropriate? Are we not colluding with a movement which has its own momentum and is at best agnostic in its approach to the Christian Gospel? Various shades of Church opinion favour a divorce. There are the Christian pacifists, white poppy wearers, who dislike today’s alleged militaristic undertones. At the other end of the scale there are liturgically purist Catholics, who resent today’s interruption of the worship of God, worship which can only be carried out in the prescribed fashion and cannot admit of silences and bugle calls.
Well, I will have none of it. Neither of these opinions is mine. I am glad to be here; I am glad that we are here.
First, I think, because for the Church to retreat from Remembrancetide would be for the Church to do what it has done throughout its history, and always to disastrous effect. To retreat from Remembrancetide would be to retreat from real people and real life. There is a popular desire to honour the dead and show support for those who suffer. The Church can choose to be with people as they do that, or it can choose not to be. It can take flags, drums and the Royal British Legion in its stride, or it can withdraw yet again into its increasingly little ecclesial shell, isolating itself as it has done on so many other issues, and so betraying the radical openness to humanity’s need to which we are called by Jesus Christ.
Secondly, I think, because the Church brings something to Remembrancetide, something of which I hope it is not ashamed. That is prayer. Remembrance here is not an intellectual activity or sentimental self-indulgence. Remembrance here is a part of our vocation as disciples of Jesus Christ, who calls us to pray for his world. We cannot refuse to pray for the fallen in war; or for those who still suffer as a result of war; or for those who are in peril today. We can scarcely refuse to pray for the peace of the world or refuse to pledge ourselves to work for its realization.
Lastly, I think, we are here because there is nowhere else that we can be. War is a failure and a sin, whatever the motives with which it is begun. It has been the cause of unspeakable cruelty and limitless pain; it has been the cause too of the best of which men and women are capable in heroism, forgiveness and sacrifice. Where can we go with the unwieldy mass that is war, the unwieldy mass that is raw human emotion and dire human need, that is filthiest dirt and brightest glory, that is life and death – where can we go but the altar of God? ‘To whom shall we go?’ says Peter, patron of theis Parish, to Jesus ‘You have the words of eternal life’. Here, in the Word made flesh among us, there is hope, dare we say the only hope, for warring humanity. Amen.
Remembrance Sunday,
11 November 2007
All Souls 2007
Remember, remember, the Fifth of November,
gunpowder, treason and plot.
I see no reason why gunpowder treason
should ever be forgot.
In England it’s almost impossible to walk to an All Souls night service without sniffing woodsmoke in the air and without hearing the crackle of fireworks far away (or not so far away). Up and down the country people are gathering around bonfires in remembrance of the great conspiracy of 1605.
At the heart of the celebrations are the fireworks, the wonderful combinations of light and sound that entrance both young and old. Their colours light up the night sky; their warmth drives away the seasonal chill; their fizz and sparkle thrill our hearts. And yet, when morning comes, all that is left are the empty cases and cartridges, their bright colours charred and their purpose spent.
Remember, remember. That is why we are here, of course, and as we remember those we love but see no longer the image of fireworks is powerful. The lives of the departed once lit up our skies; the warmth of their company banished our loneliness; the fact of their presence brought joy and meaning to our days. For we who are left behind it is difficult to avoid the sense that this and every day is the morning after Bonfire Night, when the colours of the night before have faded, the rapturous excitement has been banished, and all seems quiet and somehow empty.
Remember, remember. Around the bonfires we remember the story of Guy Fawke. Around the altar we remember the story of Jesus Christ. Around the bonfires we enjoy hot-dogs and baked potatoes. Around the altar we break bread and pour out wine, and around the altar there is never an empty and joyless morning after, for we take bread and wine in the faith that they will bear for us Christ’s living presence.
The remembering we do around the altar is a different sort of remembering, for the one we remember is not trapped by the chains of history. He is here in our midst, and when we gather around his altar we gather with all who have sought him and served him in every age and place. Around his altar heaven and earth are one, and we are one with those we love, because they are one with him.
Remember, remember. Ten years after the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot Richard Baxter was born. His are the words with which I will close. The rhyme with which I began urges us to remember. Baxter tells us how.
As for my friends, they are not lost;The several vessels of thy fleet,Though parted now, by tempests tost,Shall safely in the haven meet.Still we are centred all in thee,Members, though distant, of one head;In the same family we be,By the same faith and spirit led.Before thy throne we daily meetAs joint-petitioners to thee;In spirit we each other greet,And shall again each other see.The heavenly hosts, world without end,Shall be my company above;And thou, my best and surest friend,Who shall divide me from thy love?
Amen.
The Eucharist of All Souls, Friday 2 November 2007
gunpowder, treason and plot.
I see no reason why gunpowder treason
should ever be forgot.
In England it’s almost impossible to walk to an All Souls night service without sniffing woodsmoke in the air and without hearing the crackle of fireworks far away (or not so far away). Up and down the country people are gathering around bonfires in remembrance of the great conspiracy of 1605.
At the heart of the celebrations are the fireworks, the wonderful combinations of light and sound that entrance both young and old. Their colours light up the night sky; their warmth drives away the seasonal chill; their fizz and sparkle thrill our hearts. And yet, when morning comes, all that is left are the empty cases and cartridges, their bright colours charred and their purpose spent.
Remember, remember. That is why we are here, of course, and as we remember those we love but see no longer the image of fireworks is powerful. The lives of the departed once lit up our skies; the warmth of their company banished our loneliness; the fact of their presence brought joy and meaning to our days. For we who are left behind it is difficult to avoid the sense that this and every day is the morning after Bonfire Night, when the colours of the night before have faded, the rapturous excitement has been banished, and all seems quiet and somehow empty.
Remember, remember. Around the bonfires we remember the story of Guy Fawke. Around the altar we remember the story of Jesus Christ. Around the bonfires we enjoy hot-dogs and baked potatoes. Around the altar we break bread and pour out wine, and around the altar there is never an empty and joyless morning after, for we take bread and wine in the faith that they will bear for us Christ’s living presence.
The remembering we do around the altar is a different sort of remembering, for the one we remember is not trapped by the chains of history. He is here in our midst, and when we gather around his altar we gather with all who have sought him and served him in every age and place. Around his altar heaven and earth are one, and we are one with those we love, because they are one with him.
Remember, remember. Ten years after the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot Richard Baxter was born. His are the words with which I will close. The rhyme with which I began urges us to remember. Baxter tells us how.
As for my friends, they are not lost;The several vessels of thy fleet,Though parted now, by tempests tost,Shall safely in the haven meet.Still we are centred all in thee,Members, though distant, of one head;In the same family we be,By the same faith and spirit led.Before thy throne we daily meetAs joint-petitioners to thee;In spirit we each other greet,And shall again each other see.The heavenly hosts, world without end,Shall be my company above;And thou, my best and surest friend,Who shall divide me from thy love?
Amen.
The Eucharist of All Souls, Friday 2 November 2007
Monday 29 October 2007
Simon and Jude, Apostles, 2007
‘So I draw a veil over Mr Ramesh who once, on the feast of St Simon and St Jude (Choral Evensong at six, daily services at the customary hour), put make-up on his eyes and bells on his ankles, and naked except for his little belt danced in the back room of the shop with a tambourine’.
Alan Bennett’s Bed Among the Lentils tells the story of Susan, a Yorkshire vicar’s wife who, caught between her husband’s appallingly glib piety and his parishioners’ fervent self-righteousness, turns quietly to drink. She disgraces herself over lunch with the Bishop, collapses while arranging flowers in the chancel, and only finds redemption, rather unpredictably, in the arms of the young Asian shopkeeper, Mr Ramesh, whose sad wonder at her perpetual inebriation steers her towards sobriety.
Why Alan Bennett chooses today’s feast as the date of a particularly memorable encounter between the vicar’s wife and the obliging shopkeeper is unclear. Bennett well remembers the eccentricities of his Anglican upbringing, of course, and it may be that Simon and Jude are simply names he recalls from some far-off Sunday evening spent flicking through the Prayer Book during a dull sermon. Or it may be that he relishes the sonorous resonance of the double celebration’s title, and the delicious contrast that is inexorably drawn between the solemnity of its Choral Evensong and the unlikely liaison that is taking place simultaneously in the upstairs storeroom of a little shop behind the Leeds Infirmary.
However I am enough of a fan of his to suspect that something else is at work. Alan Bennett has a sublime gift for taking the ordinary and making of it something extraordinary: the trams of his boyhood, his father’s butcher’s shop, the hellfire and damnation of his Sunday School, the genteel pretensions of his aunties. In the looking glass of his writing these become the narratives of our own lives and in his words we see ourselves as this remorseless observer of humanity sees us. As we shall see, he could not have chosen a more appropriate feast than today’s. Perhaps it’s a coincidence. Well, perhaps.
It is customary that the Collect for a Saint’s Day should at least name the saint who it honours. It is customary for the lectionary readings for a Saint’s Day to present some edifying glimpse of the said saint’s life and work. Yet cast your eyes over the Collect for today; scan the readings set, and you will find no trace at all of Simon and Jude. There are paeans to saintly virtues, and exhortations to us to imitate them, but the guests of honour are, as it were, absent from their own party.
This may have something to do with the uncertainty of those guests’ identity. They are honoured as Apostles, and both are probably both among the Twelve. Matthew and Mark list Simon ‘the Cananean’ and Luke ‘Simon the Zealot’, which tells us something about Simon’s Israelite nationalism. Jude is listed by Luke as the son of James. Matthew and Mark do not list him: they both name Thaddaeus, or Lebbaeus, instead. Our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters, never fond of untidiness, honour a conglomeration of the two: St Jude Thaddaeus, a compromise of which Anglicans ought to be proud.
What seems beyond controversy is that both Simon and Jude had namesakes among their fellow apostles who were destined for greater fame - or greater infamy - than were they. Simon the Zealot, of course, was to languish in the shadow cast by Simon the Rock; Judas son of James in that cast by Judas Iscariot. The result is that today we honour third-tier apostles, bargain basement apostles, apostles of whom we know nothing but their names. In fact the Church’s nervousness about Judas Iscariot’s sin was such that it robbed the other Judas of even that small dignity, shortening his name and labelling him Jude for all eternity. It is little wonder that the poor man has ended up appearing in the columns of the Daily Telegraph as the patron saint of lost causes.
So why are we here? We have so little to go on, such tiny biographical detail, such tangled historical roots. Does celebrating unknown saints really matter? Ought we not be proclaiming the Gospel instead?
The reason that the saints survived in the Church of England through the rigours of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is that the Reformers saw in them useful role models for the instruction of the faithful. According to this standard, Simon and Jude are less than fit for purpose. We can point to no feats of endurance, no words of wise counsel, no selfless example that might shape our lives of faith. Yet if we honour only those who are of use to us; if we respect only those who give to us; if we celebrate only those who add value to our existence, then we do not see humanity as God sees it. We celebrate Simon and Jude because they are Simon and Jude, our distant and unseen forebears in faith. We need no other reason than that. Perhaps our celebrating them will affect our view of countless others around us, whose names we know, whose names we do not know, yet with whom we share this planet, this city, and this building, who appear to give us nothing.
Perhaps it will also transform our view of what we need to know about one another. We would all want to resist the notion that life in the West in 2007 is cheap, yet I wonder whether our resistance would withstand much examination. The voracious appetite for scandal is such that popular culture parades the lives of its celebrities in stomach-churning detail; the voracious appetite for gratification is such that poor women from Eastern Europe are trafficked in huge numbers to fill London’s brothels; the voracious appetite for global power is such that the blood spilt in its pursuit is fast losing its power to shock us. We constantly presume to know one another, to possess one another, to buy and sell one another. Perhaps our celebrating two names will recall us to the sanctity and the mystery of life; perhaps it will recall us to the holy ground upon which we tread when we approach another human being.
And lastly, perhaps it will also reawaken us to the extraordinary vision of the God served by Simon and Jude, the alchemical God whose touch turns the basest material into the purest gold. It is this God who chooses Simon Zealotes as well as Simon Peter; who chooses Judas of Lost Causes alongside Paul of many Epistles; it is this God who chooses us today; this God, whose choice knows no limits and whose imagination knows no bounds.
‘That’s the thing nobody ever says about God’ says Susan, vicar’s wife and reformed alcoholic ‘…he has no taste at all.’ She means it critically, and after her experience of his church, few would blame her. But in God’s tastelessness is our, and the world’s, salvation.
Amen.
Sunday 28 October 2007,
Isaiah 28: 14-16;
John 15: 17-end.
Alan Bennett’s Bed Among the Lentils tells the story of Susan, a Yorkshire vicar’s wife who, caught between her husband’s appallingly glib piety and his parishioners’ fervent self-righteousness, turns quietly to drink. She disgraces herself over lunch with the Bishop, collapses while arranging flowers in the chancel, and only finds redemption, rather unpredictably, in the arms of the young Asian shopkeeper, Mr Ramesh, whose sad wonder at her perpetual inebriation steers her towards sobriety.
Why Alan Bennett chooses today’s feast as the date of a particularly memorable encounter between the vicar’s wife and the obliging shopkeeper is unclear. Bennett well remembers the eccentricities of his Anglican upbringing, of course, and it may be that Simon and Jude are simply names he recalls from some far-off Sunday evening spent flicking through the Prayer Book during a dull sermon. Or it may be that he relishes the sonorous resonance of the double celebration’s title, and the delicious contrast that is inexorably drawn between the solemnity of its Choral Evensong and the unlikely liaison that is taking place simultaneously in the upstairs storeroom of a little shop behind the Leeds Infirmary.
However I am enough of a fan of his to suspect that something else is at work. Alan Bennett has a sublime gift for taking the ordinary and making of it something extraordinary: the trams of his boyhood, his father’s butcher’s shop, the hellfire and damnation of his Sunday School, the genteel pretensions of his aunties. In the looking glass of his writing these become the narratives of our own lives and in his words we see ourselves as this remorseless observer of humanity sees us. As we shall see, he could not have chosen a more appropriate feast than today’s. Perhaps it’s a coincidence. Well, perhaps.
It is customary that the Collect for a Saint’s Day should at least name the saint who it honours. It is customary for the lectionary readings for a Saint’s Day to present some edifying glimpse of the said saint’s life and work. Yet cast your eyes over the Collect for today; scan the readings set, and you will find no trace at all of Simon and Jude. There are paeans to saintly virtues, and exhortations to us to imitate them, but the guests of honour are, as it were, absent from their own party.
This may have something to do with the uncertainty of those guests’ identity. They are honoured as Apostles, and both are probably both among the Twelve. Matthew and Mark list Simon ‘the Cananean’ and Luke ‘Simon the Zealot’, which tells us something about Simon’s Israelite nationalism. Jude is listed by Luke as the son of James. Matthew and Mark do not list him: they both name Thaddaeus, or Lebbaeus, instead. Our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters, never fond of untidiness, honour a conglomeration of the two: St Jude Thaddaeus, a compromise of which Anglicans ought to be proud.
What seems beyond controversy is that both Simon and Jude had namesakes among their fellow apostles who were destined for greater fame - or greater infamy - than were they. Simon the Zealot, of course, was to languish in the shadow cast by Simon the Rock; Judas son of James in that cast by Judas Iscariot. The result is that today we honour third-tier apostles, bargain basement apostles, apostles of whom we know nothing but their names. In fact the Church’s nervousness about Judas Iscariot’s sin was such that it robbed the other Judas of even that small dignity, shortening his name and labelling him Jude for all eternity. It is little wonder that the poor man has ended up appearing in the columns of the Daily Telegraph as the patron saint of lost causes.
So why are we here? We have so little to go on, such tiny biographical detail, such tangled historical roots. Does celebrating unknown saints really matter? Ought we not be proclaiming the Gospel instead?
The reason that the saints survived in the Church of England through the rigours of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is that the Reformers saw in them useful role models for the instruction of the faithful. According to this standard, Simon and Jude are less than fit for purpose. We can point to no feats of endurance, no words of wise counsel, no selfless example that might shape our lives of faith. Yet if we honour only those who are of use to us; if we respect only those who give to us; if we celebrate only those who add value to our existence, then we do not see humanity as God sees it. We celebrate Simon and Jude because they are Simon and Jude, our distant and unseen forebears in faith. We need no other reason than that. Perhaps our celebrating them will affect our view of countless others around us, whose names we know, whose names we do not know, yet with whom we share this planet, this city, and this building, who appear to give us nothing.
Perhaps it will also transform our view of what we need to know about one another. We would all want to resist the notion that life in the West in 2007 is cheap, yet I wonder whether our resistance would withstand much examination. The voracious appetite for scandal is such that popular culture parades the lives of its celebrities in stomach-churning detail; the voracious appetite for gratification is such that poor women from Eastern Europe are trafficked in huge numbers to fill London’s brothels; the voracious appetite for global power is such that the blood spilt in its pursuit is fast losing its power to shock us. We constantly presume to know one another, to possess one another, to buy and sell one another. Perhaps our celebrating two names will recall us to the sanctity and the mystery of life; perhaps it will recall us to the holy ground upon which we tread when we approach another human being.
And lastly, perhaps it will also reawaken us to the extraordinary vision of the God served by Simon and Jude, the alchemical God whose touch turns the basest material into the purest gold. It is this God who chooses Simon Zealotes as well as Simon Peter; who chooses Judas of Lost Causes alongside Paul of many Epistles; it is this God who chooses us today; this God, whose choice knows no limits and whose imagination knows no bounds.
‘That’s the thing nobody ever says about God’ says Susan, vicar’s wife and reformed alcoholic ‘…he has no taste at all.’ She means it critically, and after her experience of his church, few would blame her. But in God’s tastelessness is our, and the world’s, salvation.
Amen.
Sunday 28 October 2007,
Isaiah 28: 14-16;
John 15: 17-end.
Sunday 21 October 2007
The Twentieth Sunday after Trinity
Direct references to organized sport are few and far between in the Bible. On the morning after the trauma of England’s defeat it is difficult for the preacher who wishes to mark the occasion appropriately to derive either inspiration or authority from the pages of Holy Scripture. Or so you might think. As you know, I enjoy a challenge.
The exhausted players and the commiserating supporters might in fact find painful echoes of their recent experience in not one but two passages from this morning’s readings. That from the Old Testament features one of the most famous wrestling matches in history: Jacob’s epic struggle by the Jabbok. This clash of the titans might serve as a metaphor for yesterday’s heroic efforts, but it’s the story’s ending, which has the victor limping past Penuel rubbing his dislocated hip that will bring a rueful smile to the face of rugby fans everywhere.
The Gospel, on the other hand, seems at first a much less promising seam for us to quarry, concentrating as it does upon a dry legal dispute, many miles away from the Stade de France. Pay attention to the language, though, and the kaleidoscope of interpretation shifts. When the unjust judge utters his frustrated cry ‘because this widow bothers me, I will vindicate her’ he actually uses the language of the boxing ring rather than the language of the law-court. Translated strictly the judge exclaims ‘because this widow keeps blacking my eye, I will vindicate her’. I’ll wager there were a few black eyes on the Eurostar last night.
Perhaps I have just established that with a little ingenuity Scripture can be made to say whatever its reader would like it to say. Yet Paul insists to Timothy that it is all inspired by God and therefore profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction and for training. What are we to make of his stricture, when a text is so obviously open to exploitation and abuse?
I don’t believe it will do simply to abandon the stricture, and with it the texts to which Paul applies it. As catholic Christians we revere the written word of God, the Bible, as we revere the living Word of God, Jesus Christ. The twin foci of the liturgy are the proclamation of the Gospel from among you and the sharing of the sacrament among you. In the Eucharist we expect to meet the living Word in broken bread and wine outpoured, but we expect to do so only after we have met him in the written word, broken and shared just as the Eucharistic bread will be broken and shared.
Scripture cannot be set aside and replaced by our habits and convictions. But if we are to read it well then we need to recall that its reading is primarily a communal activity. It is not something that we do alone. The writings that we regard as holy were created in an era when literacy was limited. Paul’s letters were written to be read aloud when Christians gathered to worship in Corinth, or Rome, or Thessaly. The Gospels were anthologies, collections of sayings and stories of Jesus that were remembered and retold when Christians met. None of them were originally designed for private study, for an individual to pore over in the hope that God’s meaning might thereby be revealed to him or her. And although one of the great achievements of the various Reformations was to make Scripture accessible for exactly that kind of study we need always to be cautious when engaging in it, using a commentary, or notes, or the fellowship of a reading group: anything that links our individual reading into the corporate reading of the Church.
Secondly, it is to be read as a whole. There is a huge danger in doing what I did when I began: in other words, of hiving off little bits here and there and inflating their importance. This is proof-texting. It means our approaching the Bible with a fixed idea and looking for something that will back the idea up. That may be an honest and proper use for the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, but in relation to Scripture it is neither honest not proper, however benign our intentions. In the parable we’ve heard this morning Jesus apparently speaks approvingly of an unjust judge, and even draws a parallel between him and God. I suppose it could be turned into a story that is supportive of corrupt and venal officers of the law. It has to be read alongside the overwhelming testimony of the Bible to God’s identification with the causes of justice and truth.
And thirdly it is to be read – and then read again, and again, and again. ‘When the Son of Man comes’ asks Jesus ‘will he find faith on earth?’ Yet the image of faith that today’s readings creates is very distinct. There is the faith of Jacob, who clings to God throughout the livelong night, Jacob who will not let God go so convinced is he that his unknown assailant is the one who has authority to bless him. There is the faith of Paul, who urges young Timothy to be unfailing in his patience and to teach and preach with urgency both in and out of season. And there is the faith of the widow, who returns to the judge day in, day out, clamouring for her rights and refusing to fall silent when they are denied her.
Faith, in other words, does not look neat and tidy. If it were meant to be so then perhaps God would not have sent us his Son at all; perhaps he would have sent us a tract containing a few lines of neat instruction, rather a young man to whom the startling language and unimaginable stories, the mystery and the glory of the holy book around which we gather bear witness.
Faith is a journey, an unfolding relationship. Faith can be hard work. Perhaps the God in whom we have faith knows us rather better than we do ourselves.
Sunday 21 October 2007,
Genesis 32: 22-31;
2 Timothy 3: 14-4:5;
Luke 18: 1-8
The exhausted players and the commiserating supporters might in fact find painful echoes of their recent experience in not one but two passages from this morning’s readings. That from the Old Testament features one of the most famous wrestling matches in history: Jacob’s epic struggle by the Jabbok. This clash of the titans might serve as a metaphor for yesterday’s heroic efforts, but it’s the story’s ending, which has the victor limping past Penuel rubbing his dislocated hip that will bring a rueful smile to the face of rugby fans everywhere.
The Gospel, on the other hand, seems at first a much less promising seam for us to quarry, concentrating as it does upon a dry legal dispute, many miles away from the Stade de France. Pay attention to the language, though, and the kaleidoscope of interpretation shifts. When the unjust judge utters his frustrated cry ‘because this widow bothers me, I will vindicate her’ he actually uses the language of the boxing ring rather than the language of the law-court. Translated strictly the judge exclaims ‘because this widow keeps blacking my eye, I will vindicate her’. I’ll wager there were a few black eyes on the Eurostar last night.
Perhaps I have just established that with a little ingenuity Scripture can be made to say whatever its reader would like it to say. Yet Paul insists to Timothy that it is all inspired by God and therefore profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction and for training. What are we to make of his stricture, when a text is so obviously open to exploitation and abuse?
I don’t believe it will do simply to abandon the stricture, and with it the texts to which Paul applies it. As catholic Christians we revere the written word of God, the Bible, as we revere the living Word of God, Jesus Christ. The twin foci of the liturgy are the proclamation of the Gospel from among you and the sharing of the sacrament among you. In the Eucharist we expect to meet the living Word in broken bread and wine outpoured, but we expect to do so only after we have met him in the written word, broken and shared just as the Eucharistic bread will be broken and shared.
Scripture cannot be set aside and replaced by our habits and convictions. But if we are to read it well then we need to recall that its reading is primarily a communal activity. It is not something that we do alone. The writings that we regard as holy were created in an era when literacy was limited. Paul’s letters were written to be read aloud when Christians gathered to worship in Corinth, or Rome, or Thessaly. The Gospels were anthologies, collections of sayings and stories of Jesus that were remembered and retold when Christians met. None of them were originally designed for private study, for an individual to pore over in the hope that God’s meaning might thereby be revealed to him or her. And although one of the great achievements of the various Reformations was to make Scripture accessible for exactly that kind of study we need always to be cautious when engaging in it, using a commentary, or notes, or the fellowship of a reading group: anything that links our individual reading into the corporate reading of the Church.
Secondly, it is to be read as a whole. There is a huge danger in doing what I did when I began: in other words, of hiving off little bits here and there and inflating their importance. This is proof-texting. It means our approaching the Bible with a fixed idea and looking for something that will back the idea up. That may be an honest and proper use for the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, but in relation to Scripture it is neither honest not proper, however benign our intentions. In the parable we’ve heard this morning Jesus apparently speaks approvingly of an unjust judge, and even draws a parallel between him and God. I suppose it could be turned into a story that is supportive of corrupt and venal officers of the law. It has to be read alongside the overwhelming testimony of the Bible to God’s identification with the causes of justice and truth.
And thirdly it is to be read – and then read again, and again, and again. ‘When the Son of Man comes’ asks Jesus ‘will he find faith on earth?’ Yet the image of faith that today’s readings creates is very distinct. There is the faith of Jacob, who clings to God throughout the livelong night, Jacob who will not let God go so convinced is he that his unknown assailant is the one who has authority to bless him. There is the faith of Paul, who urges young Timothy to be unfailing in his patience and to teach and preach with urgency both in and out of season. And there is the faith of the widow, who returns to the judge day in, day out, clamouring for her rights and refusing to fall silent when they are denied her.
Faith, in other words, does not look neat and tidy. If it were meant to be so then perhaps God would not have sent us his Son at all; perhaps he would have sent us a tract containing a few lines of neat instruction, rather a young man to whom the startling language and unimaginable stories, the mystery and the glory of the holy book around which we gather bear witness.
Faith is a journey, an unfolding relationship. Faith can be hard work. Perhaps the God in whom we have faith knows us rather better than we do ourselves.
Sunday 21 October 2007,
Genesis 32: 22-31;
2 Timothy 3: 14-4:5;
Luke 18: 1-8
Monday 15 October 2007
Nineteenth Sunday after Trinity
‘Muslims and Christians together make up well over half of the world’s population. Without peace and justice between these two religious communities, there can be no meaningful peace in the world. The future of the world depends on peace between Muslims and Christians’.
That assertion, as startling as it is sonorous, heads a letter issued this week to the leaders of the Christian churches by representatives of global Islam. It seeks common ground between the writings that our two traditions call holy, and identifies a basis for peace and understanding between Christian and Muslim.
The letter’s authors find that basis in the shared conviction that God is one and that humankind is called to love him, citing both the New Testament and the Qu’ran in support. Jesus Christ teaches that the Shema, the ancient prayer of Israel, is the greatest of the Commandments: ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is One. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ And the first Shahadah of Islam is comparable: ‘there is no God but God’. The Qu’ran teaches ‘devote yourself to God with a complete devotion’. The similarity is plain.
Love of neighbour constitutes a second foundation stone of this basis. The letter rehearses Jesus Christ’s commandment ‘you shall love your neighbour as yourself’ alongside that of the prophet Muhammad: ‘none of you has faith until you love for your neighbour what you love for yourself’.
So, in the light of what the letter’s authors term the ‘Two Commandments of love’, Muslims invite Christians to come together, to come to a common word.
I suspect that what I have disclosed of the letter’s contents will come as little surprise to you. Perhaps you are already aware of the agreement of the faiths as to these essentials; perhaps you think such agreement bland and unspecific; perhaps you are unconvinced of its cash value. Or perhaps you are even of the opinion that the opening statement, with which I began and which is the essential rationale for the letter, can be criticized. It perhaps overstates the potential for damage of conflict that is properly inter-religious rather than economic or geopolitical. It perhaps plays unwittingly into the hands of those who seek to caricature our present status as that of combatants in a war on terror. It almost certainly miscalculates wildly the numbers of those who can be called Christians in any real sense.
I am no scholar of Islam, but it seems to me that three features of the letter merit our particular attention. The first is the collective authorship. It is the work of one hundred and thirty-eight Muslim scholars and academics, whose diversity must call us to listen. They come from north Africa, eastern Europe, north America, Asia and, crucially, from the Gulf and Middle Eastern states, and so the letter appears genuinely comprehensive in its origins.
Secondly, the letter is clear in its bold suggestion that the prophet Muhammad did not bring anything fundamentally or essentially new to God’s revelation. It instead surmises that in calling the faithful to love the one God the prophet of Islam restated and alluded to the Hebrew Bible’s commandment to love the one God.
And, thirdly, it has little truck with those of any tradition who use or sponsor violence to achieve their ends. It states ‘…to those who relish conflict and destruction for their own sake or reckon that ultimately they stand to gain through them, we say that our very eternal souls are all also at stake if we fail to sincerely make every effort to make peace and come together in harmony’. It has little truck with Muslims who seek to make enemies of Christians and reminds its readers that in the words of the Qu’ran Christians and Jews are ‘people of the Scripture’, among whom ‘there is a staunch community who recite the revelations of God, falling prostrate before him. They believe in God and in the Last Day, and enjoin right conduct and forbid indecency, and vie with one another in good works. These are of the righteous’.
Those three features persuade me that in this letter we have more than a series of worn-out platitudes whose repetition will do little to change the face of God’s earth. In the diversity of authorship, in the acknowledgment of our common ancestry in the Abrahamic tradition, and in its rejection of violence it seems to me that we have received a peace-offering. It might serve as a new basis for the treatment of religious minorities, whether Christian or Muslim. It might lead to a re-casting of the fear and suspicion with which we have come to view one another.
For this morning, of course, we heard retold the story of a Syrian warrior, the forbear perhaps of those who bring bloodshed and division to the Middle East today. It is the story of an Arab who seeks healing at the hands of his Israelite enemy, who is asked to undress and bathe seven times in the waters of a foreign stream. It is the story of a man who, in his willingness to submit to a strange jurisdiction, and in his nakedness before something he does not understand, is made whole in body and brought to a knowledge of the truth.
Dare we follow him into those unknown waters, or will we remain in the security of a chariot parked safely on the river-bank? Amen.
Sunday 14 October 2007
2 Kings 5: 1-5, 7-15c;
2 Timothy 2: 8-15;
Luke 17: 11-19.
That assertion, as startling as it is sonorous, heads a letter issued this week to the leaders of the Christian churches by representatives of global Islam. It seeks common ground between the writings that our two traditions call holy, and identifies a basis for peace and understanding between Christian and Muslim.
The letter’s authors find that basis in the shared conviction that God is one and that humankind is called to love him, citing both the New Testament and the Qu’ran in support. Jesus Christ teaches that the Shema, the ancient prayer of Israel, is the greatest of the Commandments: ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is One. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ And the first Shahadah of Islam is comparable: ‘there is no God but God’. The Qu’ran teaches ‘devote yourself to God with a complete devotion’. The similarity is plain.
Love of neighbour constitutes a second foundation stone of this basis. The letter rehearses Jesus Christ’s commandment ‘you shall love your neighbour as yourself’ alongside that of the prophet Muhammad: ‘none of you has faith until you love for your neighbour what you love for yourself’.
So, in the light of what the letter’s authors term the ‘Two Commandments of love’, Muslims invite Christians to come together, to come to a common word.
I suspect that what I have disclosed of the letter’s contents will come as little surprise to you. Perhaps you are already aware of the agreement of the faiths as to these essentials; perhaps you think such agreement bland and unspecific; perhaps you are unconvinced of its cash value. Or perhaps you are even of the opinion that the opening statement, with which I began and which is the essential rationale for the letter, can be criticized. It perhaps overstates the potential for damage of conflict that is properly inter-religious rather than economic or geopolitical. It perhaps plays unwittingly into the hands of those who seek to caricature our present status as that of combatants in a war on terror. It almost certainly miscalculates wildly the numbers of those who can be called Christians in any real sense.
I am no scholar of Islam, but it seems to me that three features of the letter merit our particular attention. The first is the collective authorship. It is the work of one hundred and thirty-eight Muslim scholars and academics, whose diversity must call us to listen. They come from north Africa, eastern Europe, north America, Asia and, crucially, from the Gulf and Middle Eastern states, and so the letter appears genuinely comprehensive in its origins.
Secondly, the letter is clear in its bold suggestion that the prophet Muhammad did not bring anything fundamentally or essentially new to God’s revelation. It instead surmises that in calling the faithful to love the one God the prophet of Islam restated and alluded to the Hebrew Bible’s commandment to love the one God.
And, thirdly, it has little truck with those of any tradition who use or sponsor violence to achieve their ends. It states ‘…to those who relish conflict and destruction for their own sake or reckon that ultimately they stand to gain through them, we say that our very eternal souls are all also at stake if we fail to sincerely make every effort to make peace and come together in harmony’. It has little truck with Muslims who seek to make enemies of Christians and reminds its readers that in the words of the Qu’ran Christians and Jews are ‘people of the Scripture’, among whom ‘there is a staunch community who recite the revelations of God, falling prostrate before him. They believe in God and in the Last Day, and enjoin right conduct and forbid indecency, and vie with one another in good works. These are of the righteous’.
Those three features persuade me that in this letter we have more than a series of worn-out platitudes whose repetition will do little to change the face of God’s earth. In the diversity of authorship, in the acknowledgment of our common ancestry in the Abrahamic tradition, and in its rejection of violence it seems to me that we have received a peace-offering. It might serve as a new basis for the treatment of religious minorities, whether Christian or Muslim. It might lead to a re-casting of the fear and suspicion with which we have come to view one another.
For this morning, of course, we heard retold the story of a Syrian warrior, the forbear perhaps of those who bring bloodshed and division to the Middle East today. It is the story of an Arab who seeks healing at the hands of his Israelite enemy, who is asked to undress and bathe seven times in the waters of a foreign stream. It is the story of a man who, in his willingness to submit to a strange jurisdiction, and in his nakedness before something he does not understand, is made whole in body and brought to a knowledge of the truth.
Dare we follow him into those unknown waters, or will we remain in the security of a chariot parked safely on the river-bank? Amen.
Sunday 14 October 2007
2 Kings 5: 1-5, 7-15c;
2 Timothy 2: 8-15;
Luke 17: 11-19.
Monday 8 October 2007
Harvest Thanksgiving, Sunday 7 October 2007
How deliciously ironic that something so inoffensive, so nostalgic, so quintessentially English as the parish Harvest Thanksgiving should provide irrefutable evidence that there’s something in historical materialism. Marx’s doctrine was first propounded to me over twenty years ago at an undergraduate party, by someone who had had too much to drink. ‘You see’ he declaimed ‘the worker may have a vocation to make a chair. But under capitalism he will only ever screw legs onto chairs on a production line’. Those words came back to haunt me this week as I watched schoolchildren (and their parents and grandparents) depositing dried pasta, muesli and disposable razor blades around the altar steps. All of them were undoubtedly alienated from the means of production, distribution and exchange – although, it has to be said, they evinced little sign of despair at their plight.
Harvest in London in 2007 is a rite in search of a meaning. Its origin is often traced to Robert Hawker, the splendidly eccentric Victorian vicar of a Cornish village. On one occasion Father Hawker dressed up as a mermaid (history records neither the occasion nor the excuse); on another he excommunicated his cat for catching mice on Sunday. A more lasting innovation was his Harvest Thanksgiving, instituted in 1843. Hawker and his contemporaries served a largely rural and agrarian community. There was a sporting chance that those who came to the chancel steps came bearing the crops that they had grown themselves. The Mosaic injunction to the Israelites to bring sheaves of the first fruits of the harvest to offer to God had a meaningful resonance, which changing patterns of residence, employment and consumption have stifled. Thanksgiving to the Creator for the harvest was a response to God from those whose lives and livelihoods were intimately bound up with the vagaries of the weather and the health of the soil.
Those bonds have disappeared, and so contemporary celebrations of Harvest have sought to invest it with contemporary relevance. There is nothing objectionable in that. Hawker himself established the Harvest Thanksgiving in a deliberate attempt to capitalize on the thoroughly secular (and I suspect rather bibulous) harvest home celebrations that occupied his farmer parishioners in the autumn. Over the years the Church has been skilled at appropriating existing celebrations and putting them to her (or rather, to God’s use). So in parishes around the country Harvest will be used as a season to ponder the environmental crisis with which many believe we are threatened. In others it will be used to draw attention to the inequities of global trade and to make the case for international exchange that is freer and fairer. And in others it will be used to comment upon the costs and risks of modern food mass-production: indeed, our school’s celebration on Friday included a re-telling of the story of the Enormous Turnip, no doubt a chilling allegorical warning against the menace of genetically-modified root vegetables.
There’s nothing wrong with any of those emphases. Each is a valid, indeed inescapable Christian concern. But perhaps we might remind ourselves why it is that on this of all Sundays we bring bars of soap and tubes of toothpaste into Church. Surely they are not the first fruits of our lives, the first fruits that we are asked to offer to God: surely those first fruits are more than bags of rice and tins of baked beans. How are we tending the acreage of our souls – what are we bringing to the altar and offering to God in prayer, in worship, and in the nurture of our faith? How are we ploughing the furrow of work and relationships that is set before us – what are we bringing to the altar and offering to God in changed behaviour, in new honesty, humility and transparency to one another? How are we disbursing the produce of our fields, the resources at our disposal – what are we bringing to the altar and offering to God in time spent with and for others, skills given to and for others, help given to and for others? In short, what harvest is God set to reap in you and in me?
Of course we today give God thanks for the harvest and for the goodness with which he crowns the year; of course we pledge ourselves to be good stewards of the earth and to safeguard the inheritance of our children; of course we affirm our longing to see hunger and thirst banished from this planet. But we recognize too that our bringing of gifts is at risk of becoming what therapists call displacement activity, a sop to tender conscience or a nod to quaint tradition. Our bringing of gifts is instead a tangible and sacramental symbol of the transformation that the Lord of the Harvest is bringing about in us, and of our consequent determination to transform the lives of others. Today our efforts will feed the hungry. But what will we do tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that? Let there be no end to our thanksgiving for the harvest. Amen.
Harvest in London in 2007 is a rite in search of a meaning. Its origin is often traced to Robert Hawker, the splendidly eccentric Victorian vicar of a Cornish village. On one occasion Father Hawker dressed up as a mermaid (history records neither the occasion nor the excuse); on another he excommunicated his cat for catching mice on Sunday. A more lasting innovation was his Harvest Thanksgiving, instituted in 1843. Hawker and his contemporaries served a largely rural and agrarian community. There was a sporting chance that those who came to the chancel steps came bearing the crops that they had grown themselves. The Mosaic injunction to the Israelites to bring sheaves of the first fruits of the harvest to offer to God had a meaningful resonance, which changing patterns of residence, employment and consumption have stifled. Thanksgiving to the Creator for the harvest was a response to God from those whose lives and livelihoods were intimately bound up with the vagaries of the weather and the health of the soil.
Those bonds have disappeared, and so contemporary celebrations of Harvest have sought to invest it with contemporary relevance. There is nothing objectionable in that. Hawker himself established the Harvest Thanksgiving in a deliberate attempt to capitalize on the thoroughly secular (and I suspect rather bibulous) harvest home celebrations that occupied his farmer parishioners in the autumn. Over the years the Church has been skilled at appropriating existing celebrations and putting them to her (or rather, to God’s use). So in parishes around the country Harvest will be used as a season to ponder the environmental crisis with which many believe we are threatened. In others it will be used to draw attention to the inequities of global trade and to make the case for international exchange that is freer and fairer. And in others it will be used to comment upon the costs and risks of modern food mass-production: indeed, our school’s celebration on Friday included a re-telling of the story of the Enormous Turnip, no doubt a chilling allegorical warning against the menace of genetically-modified root vegetables.
There’s nothing wrong with any of those emphases. Each is a valid, indeed inescapable Christian concern. But perhaps we might remind ourselves why it is that on this of all Sundays we bring bars of soap and tubes of toothpaste into Church. Surely they are not the first fruits of our lives, the first fruits that we are asked to offer to God: surely those first fruits are more than bags of rice and tins of baked beans. How are we tending the acreage of our souls – what are we bringing to the altar and offering to God in prayer, in worship, and in the nurture of our faith? How are we ploughing the furrow of work and relationships that is set before us – what are we bringing to the altar and offering to God in changed behaviour, in new honesty, humility and transparency to one another? How are we disbursing the produce of our fields, the resources at our disposal – what are we bringing to the altar and offering to God in time spent with and for others, skills given to and for others, help given to and for others? In short, what harvest is God set to reap in you and in me?
Of course we today give God thanks for the harvest and for the goodness with which he crowns the year; of course we pledge ourselves to be good stewards of the earth and to safeguard the inheritance of our children; of course we affirm our longing to see hunger and thirst banished from this planet. But we recognize too that our bringing of gifts is at risk of becoming what therapists call displacement activity, a sop to tender conscience or a nod to quaint tradition. Our bringing of gifts is instead a tangible and sacramental symbol of the transformation that the Lord of the Harvest is bringing about in us, and of our consequent determination to transform the lives of others. Today our efforts will feed the hungry. But what will we do tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that? Let there be no end to our thanksgiving for the harvest. Amen.
Monday 17 September 2007
Parish Vision Sunday, 16 September 2007
When I arrived at college more than twenty years ago I found stuffed into my pigeon-hole (alongside summonses to see my tutor, invitations to join the Communist Party and flyers for the university Morris men) a publication called The Little Blue Book. This was full of biological and anatomical information designed to guide the innocent undergraduate through the perils and snares of the fleshpots of Cambridge in the mid-1980s (rather tame and unlikely fleshpots, it must be said). The Little Blue Book was received with derision. It treated its audience with contempt and told them nothing that they did not already know.
Today we launch our very own Little Blue Book. My hope is that it does not provoke among you the response that its similarly coloured but otherwise unrelated predecessor provoked among my contemporaries, even if the appearance of a new Vicar with a new Plan invites comparisons with (on the one hand) Stalin’s megalomaniac schemes and (on the other) the worst sort of modern management culture, all jargon and targets with nothing of merit or substance.
What our Little Blue Book, our Mission Action Plan, does is identify four priorities for the life of the Parish in the next five years, and make creative suggestions about what we might do to realize them. It is not my personal scheme. It has emerged through the combined efforts of PCC members (thanks to them) working together. It is not utterly comprehensive. There are of course areas of our life upon which it does not touch. It is not yet complete. It will need your input and approval. Finally, it is not a museum piece in waiting, to be agreed with rapture one week and then left to gather dust the next. It will be a living document, to which we return for strategic guidance, and which we will revisit and refresh whenever necessary.
It begins, of course, with worship, which is at the heart of our common life, and it sets us the challenge of offering all who come here the possibility of an encounter with almighty God. Worship can strike a spark in people’s souls; it can bring them to their knees, turn them around and send them out transformed. Different kinds of worship achieve that common end for different kinds of worshippers. We serve a diverse and eclectic community, and what this parish has learned is that one size does not fit all. Some encounter God through the fine music of this Eucharist, and some through the preaching (or they used to, at any rate). Some encounter God through the less-than-sedate welcome of the Family Eucharist and through the space that it makes for every individual, whatever their age. Both acts of worship are valid; neither is a junior partner; each plays its own part in our mission, and we must ensure continually that each is of the highest possible quality. Hence the trial change in timings of which you are already aware.
Our diversity is our strength, but so too is our unity. The Plan recommends that we should occasionally worship together as a parish family, in a new liturgy that attempts to reflect our breadth and strength, and that gives us all the new experience of belonging together. And because we believe that worship can have a profound effect upon the worshipper (and particularly worship offered in surroundings such as these) we want to look for new ways of allowing people to experience it, whether in seasonal Choral Evensong or a candle-lit jamboree for children at the beginning of Advent.
Growth in faith, the nurture of the spark that worship strikes, has a distinguished pedigree in the parish, and the Plan wants to develop it, placing a fresh emphasis on our learning instead of on your instruction. Growth in faith is not the ecclesiastical equivalent of taking up flower-arranging or acquiring a fourth classical language. It is not something done for our personal entertainment; and it is not something optional. It is an integral part of the pilgrim journey of every baptized person; it is part of our formation as the people of God, of our growing together into the full stature that our heavenly Father wishes and wills for us. An opportunity for growth is vital at every stage of faith’s journey, particularly so at its beginning, or before its beginning, in the realm of exploration and questioning. If we don’t provide those opportunities then someone else will and we will be missing a trick. This will sound familiar, but such opportunities must be different for different people: opportunities for reading and study, of course, but also for conversation and shared laughter, through our being together around a glass of wine as well as together receiving from the chalice.
If the spark is lit and if the flame is fed it will shed light all around. It will shed light on the miseries of injustice and exploitation that disfigure God’s world, and so it will pose a challenge. The third priority of the Plan is the role of our Church in the World. When Jesus returns to the synagogue in Nazareth he reads from the prophecy of Isaiah, and declares its promises fulfilled in him: release for captives, sight for the blind and liberty for the oppressed. That is our task too: the Church, I have always believed, exists to change the world, not just the condition of men’s souls. So perhaps we might become a more environmentally conscious Church, taking seriously our stewardship of creation corporately and severally. Perhaps we might better recollect our obligations to the worldwide Church through a genuine partnership with another congregation in a less affluent part of the Communion. Perhaps we might select a local project with the young or with the homeless and use our resources to make a real difference to it. Perhaps, surrounded as we are by embassies from every corner of the globe, we might play our part in the struggle for human rights and human dignity. Perhaps we might build the kingdom of heaven in Victoria and Belgravia; perhaps we might make a start, at the very least.
And undergirding everything is our fourth priority: our resources, our building, our staff and our finances. Without attention to these then all our hopes and dreams will crumble: with appropriate attention then there will be nothing that we cannot achieve in God’s name. We want to budget for year-on-year increases in our income from giving, and for year-on-year increases in our giving away. Thus will we fund the realization of our hopes, demonstrate our commitment to the self-giving way of the cross, play a full part in the life of the Diocese, and secure our future.
So let me offer you a vision of the Church that we might be a few years from now:
- a Church with more than one substantial and growing congregation, out of which vocations to accredited ministry are grown regularly;
- a Church whose liturgy and worship are a beacon for the national Church, to which pilgrims come in search of the transcendent God;
- a Church which is a centre for the spiritual growth of those who are its regular members and those who are not;
- a Church that has profound links into its geographical setting and sponsors a midweek worshipping presence in Victoria Street;
- a Church acknowledged as an agent in its community’s transformation.
Together, through the grace of God, we can make the vision a reality. Amen to that. Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.
Sunday 16 September 2007,
Parish Vision Sunday
Today we launch our very own Little Blue Book. My hope is that it does not provoke among you the response that its similarly coloured but otherwise unrelated predecessor provoked among my contemporaries, even if the appearance of a new Vicar with a new Plan invites comparisons with (on the one hand) Stalin’s megalomaniac schemes and (on the other) the worst sort of modern management culture, all jargon and targets with nothing of merit or substance.
What our Little Blue Book, our Mission Action Plan, does is identify four priorities for the life of the Parish in the next five years, and make creative suggestions about what we might do to realize them. It is not my personal scheme. It has emerged through the combined efforts of PCC members (thanks to them) working together. It is not utterly comprehensive. There are of course areas of our life upon which it does not touch. It is not yet complete. It will need your input and approval. Finally, it is not a museum piece in waiting, to be agreed with rapture one week and then left to gather dust the next. It will be a living document, to which we return for strategic guidance, and which we will revisit and refresh whenever necessary.
It begins, of course, with worship, which is at the heart of our common life, and it sets us the challenge of offering all who come here the possibility of an encounter with almighty God. Worship can strike a spark in people’s souls; it can bring them to their knees, turn them around and send them out transformed. Different kinds of worship achieve that common end for different kinds of worshippers. We serve a diverse and eclectic community, and what this parish has learned is that one size does not fit all. Some encounter God through the fine music of this Eucharist, and some through the preaching (or they used to, at any rate). Some encounter God through the less-than-sedate welcome of the Family Eucharist and through the space that it makes for every individual, whatever their age. Both acts of worship are valid; neither is a junior partner; each plays its own part in our mission, and we must ensure continually that each is of the highest possible quality. Hence the trial change in timings of which you are already aware.
Our diversity is our strength, but so too is our unity. The Plan recommends that we should occasionally worship together as a parish family, in a new liturgy that attempts to reflect our breadth and strength, and that gives us all the new experience of belonging together. And because we believe that worship can have a profound effect upon the worshipper (and particularly worship offered in surroundings such as these) we want to look for new ways of allowing people to experience it, whether in seasonal Choral Evensong or a candle-lit jamboree for children at the beginning of Advent.
Growth in faith, the nurture of the spark that worship strikes, has a distinguished pedigree in the parish, and the Plan wants to develop it, placing a fresh emphasis on our learning instead of on your instruction. Growth in faith is not the ecclesiastical equivalent of taking up flower-arranging or acquiring a fourth classical language. It is not something done for our personal entertainment; and it is not something optional. It is an integral part of the pilgrim journey of every baptized person; it is part of our formation as the people of God, of our growing together into the full stature that our heavenly Father wishes and wills for us. An opportunity for growth is vital at every stage of faith’s journey, particularly so at its beginning, or before its beginning, in the realm of exploration and questioning. If we don’t provide those opportunities then someone else will and we will be missing a trick. This will sound familiar, but such opportunities must be different for different people: opportunities for reading and study, of course, but also for conversation and shared laughter, through our being together around a glass of wine as well as together receiving from the chalice.
If the spark is lit and if the flame is fed it will shed light all around. It will shed light on the miseries of injustice and exploitation that disfigure God’s world, and so it will pose a challenge. The third priority of the Plan is the role of our Church in the World. When Jesus returns to the synagogue in Nazareth he reads from the prophecy of Isaiah, and declares its promises fulfilled in him: release for captives, sight for the blind and liberty for the oppressed. That is our task too: the Church, I have always believed, exists to change the world, not just the condition of men’s souls. So perhaps we might become a more environmentally conscious Church, taking seriously our stewardship of creation corporately and severally. Perhaps we might better recollect our obligations to the worldwide Church through a genuine partnership with another congregation in a less affluent part of the Communion. Perhaps we might select a local project with the young or with the homeless and use our resources to make a real difference to it. Perhaps, surrounded as we are by embassies from every corner of the globe, we might play our part in the struggle for human rights and human dignity. Perhaps we might build the kingdom of heaven in Victoria and Belgravia; perhaps we might make a start, at the very least.
And undergirding everything is our fourth priority: our resources, our building, our staff and our finances. Without attention to these then all our hopes and dreams will crumble: with appropriate attention then there will be nothing that we cannot achieve in God’s name. We want to budget for year-on-year increases in our income from giving, and for year-on-year increases in our giving away. Thus will we fund the realization of our hopes, demonstrate our commitment to the self-giving way of the cross, play a full part in the life of the Diocese, and secure our future.
So let me offer you a vision of the Church that we might be a few years from now:
- a Church with more than one substantial and growing congregation, out of which vocations to accredited ministry are grown regularly;
- a Church whose liturgy and worship are a beacon for the national Church, to which pilgrims come in search of the transcendent God;
- a Church which is a centre for the spiritual growth of those who are its regular members and those who are not;
- a Church that has profound links into its geographical setting and sponsors a midweek worshipping presence in Victoria Street;
- a Church acknowledged as an agent in its community’s transformation.
Together, through the grace of God, we can make the vision a reality. Amen to that. Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.
Sunday 16 September 2007,
Parish Vision Sunday
Tuesday 11 September 2007
St Peter's Eaton Square Mission Action Plan 2007-20012 (proposed)
ST PETER’S EATON SQUARE
PROPOSED MISSION ACTION PLAN 2007-2012
OUR PARISH VALUES
St Peter’s Eaton Square strives to be an inclusive parish of the Church of England,
offering inspiring worship to Almighty God, deepening its discipleship
of Jesus Christ, working for his world’s transformation, and extending hospitality to all
THE PARISH MISSION PRIORITIES AGREED BY THE PCC
Ø Worship
Ø Discipleship and Evangelization
Ø Church in the World
Ø Resourcing our Mission
A: WORSHIP
1). The Eucharist on Sunday
We want the offering of worship of God to be at the heart of our common life as a parish, and we want it to offer to all who participate in it the possibility of a transforming encounter with God. We value the integrity of each of our three acts of worship on Sunday morning. We believe that each has the potential to appeal to a part of the diverse and eclectic community that we serve. We therefore propose to maintain the early morning Prayer Book Eucharist; the Family Eucharist; and the Sung Eucharist. We see these as partners, equal but different, in our offering of worship, and therefore in our mission.
Ø a). In response to the exponential growth that is occurring in the Family Eucharist, in order to create a less hurried space between the Family and Sung Eucharists, and in order to allow the clergy to spend valuable time with both congregations we propose that for a trial period the Family Eucharist should begin at 9.45 am and the Sung Eucharist at 11.15 am. The trial will begin on Sunday 28 October 2007, will run for three months and will then be assessed and evaluated, allowing the congregations the opportunity to comment.
Ø b). In response to the range of liturgical material now available we propose to review the liturgy of the Family Eucharist and the Sung Eucharist to determine how each might be enhanced and better serve the needs of its congregations.
Ø c). In response to the age (and quality) of the present Family Eucharist hymn books we will investigate the material that is now available and purchase replacements.
2). Children’s provision
Our children are part of today’s church, and we are determined to give them a good experience of church life, a proper introduction to worship, and to relate to them as full and equal partners in our common life.
Ø a). We propose the refurbishment of the Welcome Room so that it lives up to its name and provides a comfortable environment for parents and their children who need to spend a short time away from either the Family or the Sung Eucharist.
Ø b). We propose that a video link be considered so that those in the Welcome Room can follow the progress of the service in Church.
3). The Parish Eucharist
We believe in the integrity of our three acts of worship: we believe also that the people of God should learn to worship together on occasion.
Ø a). We therefore propose that three times a year the Family Eucharist and the Sung Eucharist be replaced by a Parish Eucharist at 10.30. This will be a new liturgy: with a congregational Mass setting; contributions from both our choirs; two Scripture readings; a mixed serving team, and a short homily.
Ø b). We propose that the Parish Eucharist might be celebrated at Candlemas, Petertide and Harvest Thanksgiving.
4). Additional acts of worship
We wish to provide other opportunities for worship outside the Sunday mornings with which we are familiar, to give our congregations different experiences of the church and to broaden our appeal to those who do not yet worship with us regularly.
Ø a). We are committed to the business carol service and the Good Friday workshop.
Ø b). We propose introducing a Christingle service in Advent; carol-singing in Cardinal Walk; and occasionally choral evensong. We propose introducing at least one ‘outdoor’ act of worship as an act of witness and mission, such as the beating of the parochial bounds at Rogationtide.
Ø c). We will continue to review this commitment and to introduce new opportunities for worship.
5). Miscellaneous
We would also like to propose:
Ø a). A review of the present PA system in the church, to determine whether we might be better served by its replacement;
Ø b). The recruitment of more servers, and the possibility of mixed child/adult serving teams at each of the principal Sunday Eucharists;
Ø c). The recruitment and training of more lay readers, intercessors and Lay Eucharistic Ministers.
6). Implementation
We want to establish a forum for the continuing review of our worship, a forum which will also take responsibility for overseeing the implementation of the PCC’s decisions.
Ø We therefore propose the establishment of a PCC Worship sub-committee, to be convened by one of the parish clergy. Its membership should comprise the Director of Music, the Family Eucharist organist, two lay members of the PCC and two other lay members. Its membership, remit and terms of reference should be established by the PCC and reviewed by them.
B: DISCIPLESHIP & EVANGELIZATION
1). Learning for our wider community
We want to provide as many opportunities as we can for people to cross our threshold and feel welcome among us. We want them to have a sense of belonging with us. We want to offer every opportunity for them to enquire about the Christian faith and to explore it for themselves.
Ø a). We propose the introduction of two St Peter’s Lectures each year, with speakers and topics likely to attract a wide audience. We propose that such lecture evenings incorporate an act of worship for those who would value it, and that they include a follow-up opportunity for discussion.
Ø b). We propose the introduction at St Peter’s of an introductory course on the Christian faith, such as Emmaus. We recognize that such a course will need to be repeated if it is to gain momentum and attract a following, and acknowledge that maintaining this will be a substantial commitment.
Ø c). We propose to look for other opportunities to increase learning and participation in learning. We will be mindful of our multi-layered community and its different needs, and will attempt to respond to them by, for example, running a ‘Questions children ask us’ course for parents
Ø d). We propose the development of attractive and accessible materials describing our faith and our worship that can be handed out to all who enter our building (such as concert-goers, for example).
2). Learning for our congregation
We are committed to the development of the discipleship of those who already worship with us, at whatever stage of the journey of life and faith they may be.
Ø a). We propose the use of Sunday mornings after the Family Eucharist as a time to offer parallel learning and study for adults and children. This might begin as a trial on a few specified Sundays in the year, and then grow into something more regular. It might be combined with a social occasion: a lunch/barbeque for those attending. Again, we acknowledge that this will be a substantial commitment and require considerable investment of clergy (and volunteers’ time).
Ø b). We believe that experiences of pilgrimage and retreat are valuable and will look for ways to extend these. We will offer to send Year 6 at our school on a day pilgrimage to Canterbury in the summer term, and we will offer to provide chaplaincy on their week away at Sayer’s Croft. We will incorporate an element of pilgrimage into all candidates’ preparation for confirmation. We will offer one Quiet Day out of London in 2008, and will look for an opportunity to create a day’s Family Pilgrimage as well. We will repeat the PCC retreat in 2008.
Ø c). We will not overlook the need to develop the learning of those members of our congregations whose needs will not be met either by Emmaus or by the Sunday morning learning proposal.
Ø d). We will take seriously our congregations’ need for spiritual development, looking for ways to offer teaching on prayer and the different traditions of spirituality in our faith.
3). Communicating our common life and our common faith
While we need to communicate information and make data about our life and worship available to all we need also to communicate our faith in terms that will enable others to explore it more readily.
Ø a). We want to enhance our capacity to communicate electronically. This we believe to be more environmentally friendly and more in tune with the needs and habits of those we serve. We propose the creation of a comprehensive database of e-mail addresses from those on our mailing lists
Ø b). We will seek advice on the best software available to facilitate the re-launch of our website. We will identify a person to act as webmaster; and we will identify a person (or group) who will take responsibility for editing the site’s content.
Ø c). We will seek to identify a proactive Directing Editor for the Parish Magazine, who will take responsibility for the shape and content of each month’s edition.
Ø d). We will refresh Cross Keys and re-launch it as more professional-looking item for general distribution to our community.
4). Working with young people
We believe that through our involvement with St Peter’s CE Primary School we make good provision for the needs of our children. We are conscious that with the exceptions of the Family Eucharist voluntary choir and the serving team we offer little provision for young people, either those at the secondary school transition stage, or those in their mid-teens.
Ø We will consult with the young people in our congregations and ascertain how we might better serve their needs.
5). Proclaiming the Gospel
We need to take responsibility afresh for our geographical parish and for its diverse business community, looking for opportunities to give its members a sense of belonging in their parish church, and to share the Christian faith with them.
Ø a). We will seek to establish better and closer relations with the business community in Belgravia, building on contacts and relationships that already exist and actively seeking to create new ones.
Ø b). We wish to see a visible Anglican presence in the former parish of Christ Church Westminster, and are committed to researching the demography and habits of the area and establishing a fresh expression of church there.
6). Implementation
We want to establish a body that oversees the implementation of the Discipleship & Evangelization recommendations that ultimately appear in the Mission Action Plan. This body will take on the work previously done by the Education Committee and the Information Group.
Ø We propose the creation of a Discipleship & Evangelization Committee, to be convened by one of the parish clergy. Its membership should comprise three lay members of the PCC and three other lay members. Its membership, remit and terms of reference should be established by the PCC and reviewed by them.
C: CHURCH IN THE WORLD
1). A socially conscious Church
We are mindful that when Jesus Christ addressed the synagogue in Nazareth he declared the fulfilment of Isaiah’s ancient prophecy: good news for the poor, release for captives, sight for the blind and freedom for the oppressed. We accept his imperatives as our imperatives and are determined to work for his world’s transformation and the building of the Kingdom.
Ø a). we reaffirm our target of spending 10% of total church expenditure on external causes, and will work towards this by setting intermediate targets (eg 5% by 2010, 7% by 2012, 8% by 2014)
Ø b). we will focus our giving more closely, picking one local (eg youth project) and one international cause (eg relationship with overseas community) to support over the long term; we will ensure proper communication with beneficiaries so we can respond to their bigger needs; in other giving, we will choose causes for which our level of finance will have a genuine impact
Ø c). we will attempt to integrate social action into the life of the church, eg adopting an Amnesty International prisoner of conscience or by linking with a St Peter’s in the Holy Land; we will take steps to provide petitions or action cards for people to sign at end of services and church meetings
Ø d). we will explore ways of expanding the immediate social mission of the church in the community, eg expanding our provision of vouchers as alms to the needy, volunteering at the Passage or other local charities, and by increasing support for older members of the community
Ø e). we will ensure the green audit (below) includes reference to social issues as well, eg use of fairly traded as well as green goods. We will consider a possible revival of the harvest festival Traidcraft stall
2). An environmentally responsible Church
We take seriously all threats to the health and well-being of God’s creation and wish to play our part in preserving and enhancing it for this and future generations
Ø a). we will conduct a green self-audit of the church, using one of the free kits available via the Church of England’s ‘Shrinking the Footprint’ campaign.
Ø b). we will designate one Sunday each year as Green Sunday, with appropriate teaching and resources
Ø c). we will include ‘green tips’ as a regular feature in all our communications
Ø d). we will encourage the young people of our congregations to take an active part in this work, eg by creating a 40-year time capsule to be planted in the church grounds, or by setting up a children’s/youth environmental group
Ø e). we will involve ourselves in national action on climate change, e.g. through the Operation Noah campaign or other suitable church-based action
Ø f). we will work towards a St Peter’s entry for the Green Church Awards in 2008
3). A thinking Church
We want to see these Church in the World mission priorities embedded and integral to the life of faith in our parish and not as optional extras to it
Ø a). we will communicate our social action ever more effectively, so as to engage the entire congregation and broader parish with these priorities, underlining the centrality of this action to the Christian message
Ø b). we will explore the possibility of an annual lecture/debate/dinner from (a) high-profile figure(s) on contemporary social issues
Ø c). we will ensure children’s involvement, particularly from older children, via a Junior PCC or via activities such as young persons’ debates on topical issues
Ø d). we will learn from others, actively seeking out examples of good practice in other churches and ask for input from external advisory groups where necessary
4). Implementation
We want to establish a body that oversees the implementation of the Church in the World recommendations that ultimately appear in the Mission Action Plan. This body will take on and expand the work previously done by the Mission Committee.
Ø We propose the creation of a Church in the World Committee, to be convened by a lay member of the PCC. Its membership should comprise three members of the PCC and three other lay members. Its membership, remit and terms of reference should be established by the PCC and reviewed by them.
D: RESOURCING OUR MISSION
We recognize that our parish has inherited valuable resources both material and financial. We will act as prudent stewards of these in order that God’s mission in this place may flourish and that we may achieve what we set out to achieve in his name.
1). Objectives for 2007-2012
We identify the following as key objectives for the next five years:
Ø a). we will continue to work for the long-term financial security and self-sufficiency of the Parish
Ø b). we will seek to maximize income from congregational giving; donations; investments, and; rentals
Ø c). we will fund the St Peter’s Mission Action Plan
Ø d). we will enable the Parish to contribute to the Church’s mission within and beyond the Parish and as a full participant in the Diocese of London
2). Policies and Procedures
Ø a). we will prepare, agree and implement comprehensive financial policies and procedures for the prudent management of the Parish’s assets. These policies will have as their aim maximising the Parish’s net income from all available sources; properly controlling and reviewing all costs and expenditure whilst being mindful of the Parish’s commitment to environmentally friendly and ethical policies; maintaining the value of the Parish’s capital and long-term investments and assets.
Ø b). we will prepare, agree and implement comprehensive financial procedures, which will include: regular financial reporting to the PCC; routine preparation of appropriate budgets and cash flows and, when appropriate, zero-base reviews of expenditure; regular review of all management systems and risk assessments; responsibility for staffing matters, including reviewing annual performance reviews and remuneration; following best practice in accounting and financial management
3). Giving
Ø a). we will raise congregational awareness of the Church’s finances through greater transparency and communication
Ø b). we will continue to build and encourage an effective targeted stewardship campaign, aimed at increasing congregational giving and general support for the work of the Parish
Ø c). we will agree annual targets for both congregational giving to the Parish and the Parish’s donations
4). Budgeting
Ø a). we will plan and budget for the ongoing and periodic maintenance of the Church buildings and budget to ensure that the Repair Fund is maintained at a sufficient level
Ø b). we will review rental and other income generating activities to achieve maximum net returns
5). Implementation
We want to establish a body that oversees the implementation of the Resourcing our Mission recommendations that ultimately appear in the Mission Action Plan. This body will take on and expand the work previously done by the Finance Committee. It will not act as the Standing Committee of the PCC
Ø We propose the creation of a Resources Committee, to be convened by a lay member of the PCC. Its membership should comprise three members of the PCC and three other lay members. Its membership, remit and terms of reference should be established by the PCC and reviewed by them.
PROPOSED MISSION ACTION PLAN 2007-2012
OUR PARISH VALUES
St Peter’s Eaton Square strives to be an inclusive parish of the Church of England,
offering inspiring worship to Almighty God, deepening its discipleship
of Jesus Christ, working for his world’s transformation, and extending hospitality to all
THE PARISH MISSION PRIORITIES AGREED BY THE PCC
Ø Worship
Ø Discipleship and Evangelization
Ø Church in the World
Ø Resourcing our Mission
A: WORSHIP
1). The Eucharist on Sunday
We want the offering of worship of God to be at the heart of our common life as a parish, and we want it to offer to all who participate in it the possibility of a transforming encounter with God. We value the integrity of each of our three acts of worship on Sunday morning. We believe that each has the potential to appeal to a part of the diverse and eclectic community that we serve. We therefore propose to maintain the early morning Prayer Book Eucharist; the Family Eucharist; and the Sung Eucharist. We see these as partners, equal but different, in our offering of worship, and therefore in our mission.
Ø a). In response to the exponential growth that is occurring in the Family Eucharist, in order to create a less hurried space between the Family and Sung Eucharists, and in order to allow the clergy to spend valuable time with both congregations we propose that for a trial period the Family Eucharist should begin at 9.45 am and the Sung Eucharist at 11.15 am. The trial will begin on Sunday 28 October 2007, will run for three months and will then be assessed and evaluated, allowing the congregations the opportunity to comment.
Ø b). In response to the range of liturgical material now available we propose to review the liturgy of the Family Eucharist and the Sung Eucharist to determine how each might be enhanced and better serve the needs of its congregations.
Ø c). In response to the age (and quality) of the present Family Eucharist hymn books we will investigate the material that is now available and purchase replacements.
2). Children’s provision
Our children are part of today’s church, and we are determined to give them a good experience of church life, a proper introduction to worship, and to relate to them as full and equal partners in our common life.
Ø a). We propose the refurbishment of the Welcome Room so that it lives up to its name and provides a comfortable environment for parents and their children who need to spend a short time away from either the Family or the Sung Eucharist.
Ø b). We propose that a video link be considered so that those in the Welcome Room can follow the progress of the service in Church.
3). The Parish Eucharist
We believe in the integrity of our three acts of worship: we believe also that the people of God should learn to worship together on occasion.
Ø a). We therefore propose that three times a year the Family Eucharist and the Sung Eucharist be replaced by a Parish Eucharist at 10.30. This will be a new liturgy: with a congregational Mass setting; contributions from both our choirs; two Scripture readings; a mixed serving team, and a short homily.
Ø b). We propose that the Parish Eucharist might be celebrated at Candlemas, Petertide and Harvest Thanksgiving.
4). Additional acts of worship
We wish to provide other opportunities for worship outside the Sunday mornings with which we are familiar, to give our congregations different experiences of the church and to broaden our appeal to those who do not yet worship with us regularly.
Ø a). We are committed to the business carol service and the Good Friday workshop.
Ø b). We propose introducing a Christingle service in Advent; carol-singing in Cardinal Walk; and occasionally choral evensong. We propose introducing at least one ‘outdoor’ act of worship as an act of witness and mission, such as the beating of the parochial bounds at Rogationtide.
Ø c). We will continue to review this commitment and to introduce new opportunities for worship.
5). Miscellaneous
We would also like to propose:
Ø a). A review of the present PA system in the church, to determine whether we might be better served by its replacement;
Ø b). The recruitment of more servers, and the possibility of mixed child/adult serving teams at each of the principal Sunday Eucharists;
Ø c). The recruitment and training of more lay readers, intercessors and Lay Eucharistic Ministers.
6). Implementation
We want to establish a forum for the continuing review of our worship, a forum which will also take responsibility for overseeing the implementation of the PCC’s decisions.
Ø We therefore propose the establishment of a PCC Worship sub-committee, to be convened by one of the parish clergy. Its membership should comprise the Director of Music, the Family Eucharist organist, two lay members of the PCC and two other lay members. Its membership, remit and terms of reference should be established by the PCC and reviewed by them.
B: DISCIPLESHIP & EVANGELIZATION
1). Learning for our wider community
We want to provide as many opportunities as we can for people to cross our threshold and feel welcome among us. We want them to have a sense of belonging with us. We want to offer every opportunity for them to enquire about the Christian faith and to explore it for themselves.
Ø a). We propose the introduction of two St Peter’s Lectures each year, with speakers and topics likely to attract a wide audience. We propose that such lecture evenings incorporate an act of worship for those who would value it, and that they include a follow-up opportunity for discussion.
Ø b). We propose the introduction at St Peter’s of an introductory course on the Christian faith, such as Emmaus. We recognize that such a course will need to be repeated if it is to gain momentum and attract a following, and acknowledge that maintaining this will be a substantial commitment.
Ø c). We propose to look for other opportunities to increase learning and participation in learning. We will be mindful of our multi-layered community and its different needs, and will attempt to respond to them by, for example, running a ‘Questions children ask us’ course for parents
Ø d). We propose the development of attractive and accessible materials describing our faith and our worship that can be handed out to all who enter our building (such as concert-goers, for example).
2). Learning for our congregation
We are committed to the development of the discipleship of those who already worship with us, at whatever stage of the journey of life and faith they may be.
Ø a). We propose the use of Sunday mornings after the Family Eucharist as a time to offer parallel learning and study for adults and children. This might begin as a trial on a few specified Sundays in the year, and then grow into something more regular. It might be combined with a social occasion: a lunch/barbeque for those attending. Again, we acknowledge that this will be a substantial commitment and require considerable investment of clergy (and volunteers’ time).
Ø b). We believe that experiences of pilgrimage and retreat are valuable and will look for ways to extend these. We will offer to send Year 6 at our school on a day pilgrimage to Canterbury in the summer term, and we will offer to provide chaplaincy on their week away at Sayer’s Croft. We will incorporate an element of pilgrimage into all candidates’ preparation for confirmation. We will offer one Quiet Day out of London in 2008, and will look for an opportunity to create a day’s Family Pilgrimage as well. We will repeat the PCC retreat in 2008.
Ø c). We will not overlook the need to develop the learning of those members of our congregations whose needs will not be met either by Emmaus or by the Sunday morning learning proposal.
Ø d). We will take seriously our congregations’ need for spiritual development, looking for ways to offer teaching on prayer and the different traditions of spirituality in our faith.
3). Communicating our common life and our common faith
While we need to communicate information and make data about our life and worship available to all we need also to communicate our faith in terms that will enable others to explore it more readily.
Ø a). We want to enhance our capacity to communicate electronically. This we believe to be more environmentally friendly and more in tune with the needs and habits of those we serve. We propose the creation of a comprehensive database of e-mail addresses from those on our mailing lists
Ø b). We will seek advice on the best software available to facilitate the re-launch of our website. We will identify a person to act as webmaster; and we will identify a person (or group) who will take responsibility for editing the site’s content.
Ø c). We will seek to identify a proactive Directing Editor for the Parish Magazine, who will take responsibility for the shape and content of each month’s edition.
Ø d). We will refresh Cross Keys and re-launch it as more professional-looking item for general distribution to our community.
4). Working with young people
We believe that through our involvement with St Peter’s CE Primary School we make good provision for the needs of our children. We are conscious that with the exceptions of the Family Eucharist voluntary choir and the serving team we offer little provision for young people, either those at the secondary school transition stage, or those in their mid-teens.
Ø We will consult with the young people in our congregations and ascertain how we might better serve their needs.
5). Proclaiming the Gospel
We need to take responsibility afresh for our geographical parish and for its diverse business community, looking for opportunities to give its members a sense of belonging in their parish church, and to share the Christian faith with them.
Ø a). We will seek to establish better and closer relations with the business community in Belgravia, building on contacts and relationships that already exist and actively seeking to create new ones.
Ø b). We wish to see a visible Anglican presence in the former parish of Christ Church Westminster, and are committed to researching the demography and habits of the area and establishing a fresh expression of church there.
6). Implementation
We want to establish a body that oversees the implementation of the Discipleship & Evangelization recommendations that ultimately appear in the Mission Action Plan. This body will take on the work previously done by the Education Committee and the Information Group.
Ø We propose the creation of a Discipleship & Evangelization Committee, to be convened by one of the parish clergy. Its membership should comprise three lay members of the PCC and three other lay members. Its membership, remit and terms of reference should be established by the PCC and reviewed by them.
C: CHURCH IN THE WORLD
1). A socially conscious Church
We are mindful that when Jesus Christ addressed the synagogue in Nazareth he declared the fulfilment of Isaiah’s ancient prophecy: good news for the poor, release for captives, sight for the blind and freedom for the oppressed. We accept his imperatives as our imperatives and are determined to work for his world’s transformation and the building of the Kingdom.
Ø a). we reaffirm our target of spending 10% of total church expenditure on external causes, and will work towards this by setting intermediate targets (eg 5% by 2010, 7% by 2012, 8% by 2014)
Ø b). we will focus our giving more closely, picking one local (eg youth project) and one international cause (eg relationship with overseas community) to support over the long term; we will ensure proper communication with beneficiaries so we can respond to their bigger needs; in other giving, we will choose causes for which our level of finance will have a genuine impact
Ø c). we will attempt to integrate social action into the life of the church, eg adopting an Amnesty International prisoner of conscience or by linking with a St Peter’s in the Holy Land; we will take steps to provide petitions or action cards for people to sign at end of services and church meetings
Ø d). we will explore ways of expanding the immediate social mission of the church in the community, eg expanding our provision of vouchers as alms to the needy, volunteering at the Passage or other local charities, and by increasing support for older members of the community
Ø e). we will ensure the green audit (below) includes reference to social issues as well, eg use of fairly traded as well as green goods. We will consider a possible revival of the harvest festival Traidcraft stall
2). An environmentally responsible Church
We take seriously all threats to the health and well-being of God’s creation and wish to play our part in preserving and enhancing it for this and future generations
Ø a). we will conduct a green self-audit of the church, using one of the free kits available via the Church of England’s ‘Shrinking the Footprint’ campaign.
Ø b). we will designate one Sunday each year as Green Sunday, with appropriate teaching and resources
Ø c). we will include ‘green tips’ as a regular feature in all our communications
Ø d). we will encourage the young people of our congregations to take an active part in this work, eg by creating a 40-year time capsule to be planted in the church grounds, or by setting up a children’s/youth environmental group
Ø e). we will involve ourselves in national action on climate change, e.g. through the Operation Noah campaign or other suitable church-based action
Ø f). we will work towards a St Peter’s entry for the Green Church Awards in 2008
3). A thinking Church
We want to see these Church in the World mission priorities embedded and integral to the life of faith in our parish and not as optional extras to it
Ø a). we will communicate our social action ever more effectively, so as to engage the entire congregation and broader parish with these priorities, underlining the centrality of this action to the Christian message
Ø b). we will explore the possibility of an annual lecture/debate/dinner from (a) high-profile figure(s) on contemporary social issues
Ø c). we will ensure children’s involvement, particularly from older children, via a Junior PCC or via activities such as young persons’ debates on topical issues
Ø d). we will learn from others, actively seeking out examples of good practice in other churches and ask for input from external advisory groups where necessary
4). Implementation
We want to establish a body that oversees the implementation of the Church in the World recommendations that ultimately appear in the Mission Action Plan. This body will take on and expand the work previously done by the Mission Committee.
Ø We propose the creation of a Church in the World Committee, to be convened by a lay member of the PCC. Its membership should comprise three members of the PCC and three other lay members. Its membership, remit and terms of reference should be established by the PCC and reviewed by them.
D: RESOURCING OUR MISSION
We recognize that our parish has inherited valuable resources both material and financial. We will act as prudent stewards of these in order that God’s mission in this place may flourish and that we may achieve what we set out to achieve in his name.
1). Objectives for 2007-2012
We identify the following as key objectives for the next five years:
Ø a). we will continue to work for the long-term financial security and self-sufficiency of the Parish
Ø b). we will seek to maximize income from congregational giving; donations; investments, and; rentals
Ø c). we will fund the St Peter’s Mission Action Plan
Ø d). we will enable the Parish to contribute to the Church’s mission within and beyond the Parish and as a full participant in the Diocese of London
2). Policies and Procedures
Ø a). we will prepare, agree and implement comprehensive financial policies and procedures for the prudent management of the Parish’s assets. These policies will have as their aim maximising the Parish’s net income from all available sources; properly controlling and reviewing all costs and expenditure whilst being mindful of the Parish’s commitment to environmentally friendly and ethical policies; maintaining the value of the Parish’s capital and long-term investments and assets.
Ø b). we will prepare, agree and implement comprehensive financial procedures, which will include: regular financial reporting to the PCC; routine preparation of appropriate budgets and cash flows and, when appropriate, zero-base reviews of expenditure; regular review of all management systems and risk assessments; responsibility for staffing matters, including reviewing annual performance reviews and remuneration; following best practice in accounting and financial management
3). Giving
Ø a). we will raise congregational awareness of the Church’s finances through greater transparency and communication
Ø b). we will continue to build and encourage an effective targeted stewardship campaign, aimed at increasing congregational giving and general support for the work of the Parish
Ø c). we will agree annual targets for both congregational giving to the Parish and the Parish’s donations
4). Budgeting
Ø a). we will plan and budget for the ongoing and periodic maintenance of the Church buildings and budget to ensure that the Repair Fund is maintained at a sufficient level
Ø b). we will review rental and other income generating activities to achieve maximum net returns
5). Implementation
We want to establish a body that oversees the implementation of the Resourcing our Mission recommendations that ultimately appear in the Mission Action Plan. This body will take on and expand the work previously done by the Finance Committee. It will not act as the Standing Committee of the PCC
Ø We propose the creation of a Resources Committee, to be convened by a lay member of the PCC. Its membership should comprise three members of the PCC and three other lay members. Its membership, remit and terms of reference should be established by the PCC and reviewed by them.
Monday 10 September 2007
Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity
‘And Hogwarts…but he knew that his Horcrux there was safe, it would be impossible for Potter to enter Hogsmeade without detection, let alone the school. Nevertheless, it would be prudent to alert Snape to the fact that the boy might try to re-enter the castle…to tell Snape why the boy might return would be foolish, of course; it had been a great mistake to trust Bellatrix and Malfoy: didn’t their stupidity and carelessness prove how unwise it was, ever, to trust?’
Yes, the Vicar’s summer reading was, as this congregation would expect, irretrievably high-brow. I take comfort in the knowledge that I was not the first among you to devour Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (I am looking in the direction of two senior members of the PCC. They know who they are). In reading that particular passage to you I give nothing away, so if the book’s six hundred pages are a peak as yet unscaled you have nothing to fear. The seventh novel in the series reads as a three-cornered struggle between the hero, Harry, the arch-villain Lord Voldemort and the saintly but departed Albus Dumbledore. Yet in those few lines JK Rowling bares Voldemort’s very soul, uncovering both the originating root and the inexorable consequence of his malevolence. For Voldemort is utterly alone, consumed with a hideous vanity, and incapable of confidence in or reliance on any other living being.
Saint Paul’s letter to Philemon, one of the shortest books in the New Testament, also reads as a triangular human drama, although at that point the preacher ought to stop looking for similarities between it and the realm of Rubeus Hagrid and Luna Lovegood. The first player is Paul himself: at the time of writing an old man and a prisoner. The second is Philemon, Paul’s friend, to whom the letter is addressed; and the third is the subject of the letter and its probable bearer too, the slave Onesimus, whose Greek name means ‘useful’. Philemon has despatched his slave to care for Paul while he languishes in prison; the letter accompanies Onesimus as he returns to his master, his service of the apostle complete.
A momentous change has occurred during the time that Onesimus has spent with Paul. The slave, writes Paul, has become his child. He has become the slave’s father. Now, as Onesimus returns to Philemon, Paul urges his friend to receive him as a slave no longer, but instead as a beloved brother. Something radical has happened, something that has burst the ties of convention and habit and rendered them redundant. It is something that compels the elderly Paul to accept the pagan slave as his own child, and that compels him to ask his friend to treat Onesimus, hitherto his property, as his equal.
What has happened is spelt out by Paul in clever wordplay that no English translation can ever adequately explain. Before the change, he writes, the supposedly useful Onesimus had in fact been useless. Since the change he has begun to live up to his name by becoming truly useful. The Greek word for ‘useless’ is achristos. What is concealed from our ears is that achristos, useless, is also, a-christos, ‘without Christ’. When he was without Christ Onesimus was useless: now, writes Paul, he is truly useful. Onesimus has been baptized.
It is this that has wrought the transformation in his relations with Paul and with Philemon. His baptism means that he is no longer a heathen or a slave. He is the dear son of one; he is the brother of the other. Baptism has brought solidarity out of hierarchy. It is to this that Jesus is pointing when he addresses the multitudes in the stark terms that open this morning’s Gospel: ‘if anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and bothers and sisters…he cannot be my disciple’. In Christ a whole new set of relationships is forged: in him the unthinkable becomes the reality.
No prison walls surround us but we come together as Paul and Onesimus must have done, to baptize with water, and to break bread. And today a transformation will take place just as it did in that far-off cell. It may be difficult to discern. There are miracles, after all, and miracles. The child we baptize this morning will return home the same bundle of mischief her family knows and loves. But although the water will dry and the oil will fade the change will be real. In a few moments she will take her place as a member of the body of Christ, one with every one of us who has been baptized, one with the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Pope and the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, one with Philemon and Onesimus, one with Paul himself. And in a few years she will take her place at the altar, where the baptized recall their unity by feeding on the one bread and drinking from the one cup, those living symbols of the presence of Christ, the Christ who is the ground of their unity.
As with all good novelists, JK Rowling’s books tell us truths about ourselves and about the society we inhabit. Voldemort’s arrogant isolation spells disaster for the wizarding world, and our suspiciousness and refusal to trust, which he might applaud, spell disaster for ours, as the headlines from Liverpool and Basra and Praia da Luz attest every day. The choice before us is the choice that Moses puts to the Israelites: ‘I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse; therefore choose life, that you and your descendants may live…’
In choosing the Christ we choose one another for we choose the unity and interdependence of baptism. In choosing the Christ we choose life. Amen.
Sunday 9 September 2007
Deuteronomy 30: 15-end;
Philemon 1-21;
Luke 14: 25-33
Yes, the Vicar’s summer reading was, as this congregation would expect, irretrievably high-brow. I take comfort in the knowledge that I was not the first among you to devour Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (I am looking in the direction of two senior members of the PCC. They know who they are). In reading that particular passage to you I give nothing away, so if the book’s six hundred pages are a peak as yet unscaled you have nothing to fear. The seventh novel in the series reads as a three-cornered struggle between the hero, Harry, the arch-villain Lord Voldemort and the saintly but departed Albus Dumbledore. Yet in those few lines JK Rowling bares Voldemort’s very soul, uncovering both the originating root and the inexorable consequence of his malevolence. For Voldemort is utterly alone, consumed with a hideous vanity, and incapable of confidence in or reliance on any other living being.
Saint Paul’s letter to Philemon, one of the shortest books in the New Testament, also reads as a triangular human drama, although at that point the preacher ought to stop looking for similarities between it and the realm of Rubeus Hagrid and Luna Lovegood. The first player is Paul himself: at the time of writing an old man and a prisoner. The second is Philemon, Paul’s friend, to whom the letter is addressed; and the third is the subject of the letter and its probable bearer too, the slave Onesimus, whose Greek name means ‘useful’. Philemon has despatched his slave to care for Paul while he languishes in prison; the letter accompanies Onesimus as he returns to his master, his service of the apostle complete.
A momentous change has occurred during the time that Onesimus has spent with Paul. The slave, writes Paul, has become his child. He has become the slave’s father. Now, as Onesimus returns to Philemon, Paul urges his friend to receive him as a slave no longer, but instead as a beloved brother. Something radical has happened, something that has burst the ties of convention and habit and rendered them redundant. It is something that compels the elderly Paul to accept the pagan slave as his own child, and that compels him to ask his friend to treat Onesimus, hitherto his property, as his equal.
What has happened is spelt out by Paul in clever wordplay that no English translation can ever adequately explain. Before the change, he writes, the supposedly useful Onesimus had in fact been useless. Since the change he has begun to live up to his name by becoming truly useful. The Greek word for ‘useless’ is achristos. What is concealed from our ears is that achristos, useless, is also, a-christos, ‘without Christ’. When he was without Christ Onesimus was useless: now, writes Paul, he is truly useful. Onesimus has been baptized.
It is this that has wrought the transformation in his relations with Paul and with Philemon. His baptism means that he is no longer a heathen or a slave. He is the dear son of one; he is the brother of the other. Baptism has brought solidarity out of hierarchy. It is to this that Jesus is pointing when he addresses the multitudes in the stark terms that open this morning’s Gospel: ‘if anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and bothers and sisters…he cannot be my disciple’. In Christ a whole new set of relationships is forged: in him the unthinkable becomes the reality.
No prison walls surround us but we come together as Paul and Onesimus must have done, to baptize with water, and to break bread. And today a transformation will take place just as it did in that far-off cell. It may be difficult to discern. There are miracles, after all, and miracles. The child we baptize this morning will return home the same bundle of mischief her family knows and loves. But although the water will dry and the oil will fade the change will be real. In a few moments she will take her place as a member of the body of Christ, one with every one of us who has been baptized, one with the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Pope and the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, one with Philemon and Onesimus, one with Paul himself. And in a few years she will take her place at the altar, where the baptized recall their unity by feeding on the one bread and drinking from the one cup, those living symbols of the presence of Christ, the Christ who is the ground of their unity.
As with all good novelists, JK Rowling’s books tell us truths about ourselves and about the society we inhabit. Voldemort’s arrogant isolation spells disaster for the wizarding world, and our suspiciousness and refusal to trust, which he might applaud, spell disaster for ours, as the headlines from Liverpool and Basra and Praia da Luz attest every day. The choice before us is the choice that Moses puts to the Israelites: ‘I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse; therefore choose life, that you and your descendants may live…’
In choosing the Christ we choose one another for we choose the unity and interdependence of baptism. In choosing the Christ we choose life. Amen.
Sunday 9 September 2007
Deuteronomy 30: 15-end;
Philemon 1-21;
Luke 14: 25-33
Wednesday 15 August 2007
Tenth Sunday after Trinity
You have only one more week to go and see Anthony Gormley’s exhibition Blind Light at the Hayward Gallery. It closes next Sunday, and if you haven’t already bought a ticket then I urge you to do so.
The feature that’s caught the public imagination is a rectangular glass box filled with cloud-like mist. Into this the visitor walks. It’s a remarkable experience. The fog immediately swirls around; visibility drops to a matter of inches; and sound becomes disoriented and dislocated. Twenty-five are allowed in at any one time, but once you are in you wouldn’t know if two Premier League football teams were in there with you. Engulfed in the mist, sense is rendered useless and the visitor wanders alone.
Outside the Hayward is a rather different box, comprising water jets springing up from the floor to a height of eight feet. These are arranged so as to make up walls of water around the four sides of the box, with internal walls to make up four rooms. The walls spring up and then subside at random, so the visitor can enter when an external wall is down, and suddenly find himself a prisoner within. Then an internal wall subsides and he can move quickly to the next room. There’s a skill in choosing the right move, and in moving sufficiently quickly to avoid a soaking (a skill which may visitors plainly did not possess).
Abram’s exchange with God, heard as our Old Testament reading this morning, marks a paradigm shift in the history of ancient Israel. At such moments things change: the collective narrative or self-consciousness of a community turns a page. I suppose that the Berlin Wall provides us with two such moments in our own times, in its creation and in its demolition. In this exchange Abram hears God’s promise that he will be the father of many, and he believes it. His readiness to believe becomes the cornerstone of the covenant between Israel and Yahweh and also the crux of the European Reformations. Abram’s faith is credited to him as righteousness. So our faith is credited to us as righteousness. We are justified by faith, and by faith alone.
Which, of course, leaves us with the ticklish question of what faith really is. To some, it’s a word that represents a visit to Anthony Gormley’s box. Faith means flailing around in a world of misty uncertainty. For others it represents the ducking and diving of the water installation. Faith means the calculated (and rather cynical) judgement of how best to avoid a drenching. And for others it does not represent anything that can be illustrated by a sculpture. Faith means acknowledging, perhaps from the comfort of one’s own armchair, the irrefutable truth that Anthony Gormley does have an exhibition in London at present. Faith is the assent of the human intellect to a proposition put before it.
Yet for the author of the letter to the Hebrews faith represents none of these. The letter looks back to that paradigm shift in the nation’s life, the moment of Abram’s exchange with Yahweh. Faith for the letter’s author means Abram leaving his father’s land and venturing into the unknown. It means Abram sojourning under canvas in the land he has been promised. It means Abram eventually receiving the gift of a child despite his old age. In other words, faith is what happens when God’s promise invites and invokes a response. Faith involves movement from God, and movement from us.
So the third caricature, of faith as intellectual assent, must bite the dust immediately. We can believe in all sorts of things, in the sense of admitting their existence or allowing their efficacy: flying saucers, perhaps, or the superiority of a 1984 vintage, or world peace. But our lives are changed by none of these; they cost us nothing if they remain at the level of dispassionate mental activity. In no sense are they are they a matter of faith. Had Abram simply believed in God in the sense that you or I believe that the chemical formula for water is H2O then I don’t suppose he would ever have left Ur of the Chaldeans.
Nor will the second caricature - faith as a game of risk, of dodging from room to room and evading the water jets - detain us for long. The second sentence of today’s Gospel dispels any notion of faith as insurance, as a self-serving exercise in threat management. The words of Jesus are stark: in response to God’s promise, he urges, ‘sell your possessions and give alms’. That is faith. There is little room for the tactically faithful.
And as for the first caricature: well, there’s not much fog about what Jesus teaches. He’s quite clear. Those who follow him are to live lives of expectant watchfulness, lives lived in the knowledge not simply that God is, but that he is likely to tap us on the shoulder as he did our ancestor Abram. Coming as suddenly as a thief in the night, he will ask of us that we too make hard choices and real sacrifices.
But perhaps I have misread the symbolism of those two works of art. Perhaps they have something to teach us about the life of faith after all. Perhaps through the water box we could learn the attentiveness of which Jesus speaks. We watch for the moment when we can move. A wall of water subsides, and we cross quickly to the next room. Thus are we called to keep a constant look-out and to follow where God leads, his children moving perpetually forwards, just as did Abraham and Moses. Perhaps through the mist box we could learn the faithfulness of the one in whom we have faith. As we plunge into the fog of Blind Light we see not as a stumbling journey into the unknown, but a reception into the mystery of the divine. The cloud is not hostile; it is a welcoming companion. It is, in fact, the presence of God, surrounding us on every side and accompanying us as we discern our path, set our feet upon it, and walk the path of faith. Amen.
Sunday 12 August 2007
Genesis 15: 1-6;
Hebrews 11: 1-3, 8-16;
Luke 12: 32-40
The feature that’s caught the public imagination is a rectangular glass box filled with cloud-like mist. Into this the visitor walks. It’s a remarkable experience. The fog immediately swirls around; visibility drops to a matter of inches; and sound becomes disoriented and dislocated. Twenty-five are allowed in at any one time, but once you are in you wouldn’t know if two Premier League football teams were in there with you. Engulfed in the mist, sense is rendered useless and the visitor wanders alone.
Outside the Hayward is a rather different box, comprising water jets springing up from the floor to a height of eight feet. These are arranged so as to make up walls of water around the four sides of the box, with internal walls to make up four rooms. The walls spring up and then subside at random, so the visitor can enter when an external wall is down, and suddenly find himself a prisoner within. Then an internal wall subsides and he can move quickly to the next room. There’s a skill in choosing the right move, and in moving sufficiently quickly to avoid a soaking (a skill which may visitors plainly did not possess).
Abram’s exchange with God, heard as our Old Testament reading this morning, marks a paradigm shift in the history of ancient Israel. At such moments things change: the collective narrative or self-consciousness of a community turns a page. I suppose that the Berlin Wall provides us with two such moments in our own times, in its creation and in its demolition. In this exchange Abram hears God’s promise that he will be the father of many, and he believes it. His readiness to believe becomes the cornerstone of the covenant between Israel and Yahweh and also the crux of the European Reformations. Abram’s faith is credited to him as righteousness. So our faith is credited to us as righteousness. We are justified by faith, and by faith alone.
Which, of course, leaves us with the ticklish question of what faith really is. To some, it’s a word that represents a visit to Anthony Gormley’s box. Faith means flailing around in a world of misty uncertainty. For others it represents the ducking and diving of the water installation. Faith means the calculated (and rather cynical) judgement of how best to avoid a drenching. And for others it does not represent anything that can be illustrated by a sculpture. Faith means acknowledging, perhaps from the comfort of one’s own armchair, the irrefutable truth that Anthony Gormley does have an exhibition in London at present. Faith is the assent of the human intellect to a proposition put before it.
Yet for the author of the letter to the Hebrews faith represents none of these. The letter looks back to that paradigm shift in the nation’s life, the moment of Abram’s exchange with Yahweh. Faith for the letter’s author means Abram leaving his father’s land and venturing into the unknown. It means Abram sojourning under canvas in the land he has been promised. It means Abram eventually receiving the gift of a child despite his old age. In other words, faith is what happens when God’s promise invites and invokes a response. Faith involves movement from God, and movement from us.
So the third caricature, of faith as intellectual assent, must bite the dust immediately. We can believe in all sorts of things, in the sense of admitting their existence or allowing their efficacy: flying saucers, perhaps, or the superiority of a 1984 vintage, or world peace. But our lives are changed by none of these; they cost us nothing if they remain at the level of dispassionate mental activity. In no sense are they are they a matter of faith. Had Abram simply believed in God in the sense that you or I believe that the chemical formula for water is H2O then I don’t suppose he would ever have left Ur of the Chaldeans.
Nor will the second caricature - faith as a game of risk, of dodging from room to room and evading the water jets - detain us for long. The second sentence of today’s Gospel dispels any notion of faith as insurance, as a self-serving exercise in threat management. The words of Jesus are stark: in response to God’s promise, he urges, ‘sell your possessions and give alms’. That is faith. There is little room for the tactically faithful.
And as for the first caricature: well, there’s not much fog about what Jesus teaches. He’s quite clear. Those who follow him are to live lives of expectant watchfulness, lives lived in the knowledge not simply that God is, but that he is likely to tap us on the shoulder as he did our ancestor Abram. Coming as suddenly as a thief in the night, he will ask of us that we too make hard choices and real sacrifices.
But perhaps I have misread the symbolism of those two works of art. Perhaps they have something to teach us about the life of faith after all. Perhaps through the water box we could learn the attentiveness of which Jesus speaks. We watch for the moment when we can move. A wall of water subsides, and we cross quickly to the next room. Thus are we called to keep a constant look-out and to follow where God leads, his children moving perpetually forwards, just as did Abraham and Moses. Perhaps through the mist box we could learn the faithfulness of the one in whom we have faith. As we plunge into the fog of Blind Light we see not as a stumbling journey into the unknown, but a reception into the mystery of the divine. The cloud is not hostile; it is a welcoming companion. It is, in fact, the presence of God, surrounding us on every side and accompanying us as we discern our path, set our feet upon it, and walk the path of faith. Amen.
Sunday 12 August 2007
Genesis 15: 1-6;
Hebrews 11: 1-3, 8-16;
Luke 12: 32-40
Tuesday 14 August 2007
Ninth Sunday after Trinity
It’s an unlikely contingency, but if I’m ever asked to complete one of those questionnaires that appears in the Sunday supplements then I shall enjoy being scandalous. My answers about when and where I was most happy, and about with whom I would most like to have dinner will pass unnoticed. But when I am asked ‘do you believe in life after death?’ I shall fix the interviewer with a steely glaze and say ‘I believe in life’.
I shall do that because I believe that there’s a pernicious myth abroad about the faith of Christians that I should like to nail. It is that ours is a life-denying religion that exalts death; a religion that is so intent on what lies beyond the grave that it all too easily neglects what precedes it.
In his best-seller The God Delusion Richard Dawkins tells the story of the moment that Cardinal Hume told the Abbot of Ampleforth of his approaching death. The Abbot apparently replied ‘Congratulations! That’s brilliant news! I wish I was coming with you’. Dawkins concludes that the Abbot was a sincere man of faith, and concludes also that, as professed Christians do not on the whole react in such a fashion to such tidings, their profession can offer them little consolation, and that it therefore cannot really be sincere.
What Dawkins has touched upon is the conviction that Christians must infinitely prefer death to life; that the promised rewards of heaven must far outshine the inconveniences of the present and dazzle us with their lustre; and that our eyes are so firmly fixed on the far horizon that there is no chance of their slipping earthwards and lighting upon the miseries (or the beauties) of our time.
And the parable that comprises our Gospel reading this morning seems to give comfort to that critical view of the faith. God speaks to the rich man, telling him that he is to die, and almost mocking the labours of his life. ‘The things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ The rich man has given no thought to his own mortality and he will pay for it. The message seems clear. What really counts is what lies beyond death, when all else is forgotten.
A conclusion not dissimilar emerges from the Old Testament reading. When I complete my Sunday supplement questionnaire it is very unlikely that I will say that I want to have dinner with the Preacher of Ecclesiastes, who has a special line in doom-laden self-righteousness. If the rich man of Christ’s parable has though insufficiently about his own death it appears that the Preacher has thought of little else. So constantly has he dwelt on it that he has reached the famous and oft-repeated conclusion ‘vanity of vanities; all is vanity’. What is the cause of his grumbling? That when he dies he will no longer be able to benefit from the fruits of his life’s exertions; that, to coin a phrase, he can’t take it with him when he goes. The result is that the Preacher despises life; just as it might appear that the rich man of the parable is being urged to despise life; and just as Richard Dawkins and co. would like to think that we do today.
Were that to be the case, were we despisers of life, then there would be a number of immediate implications. One would be that Christians would cease to care about the thousands who will perish this week because they have no access to clean drinking water. Why would that matter if heaven beckons so urgently? Another would be that Christians would set about consuming the earth’s resources with feckless impunity. Why would the climate or our delicate ecosystems matter if global meltdown is in fact the gateway to Paradise? A third would be that Christians would begin to think again about the ethics of their response to abortion, euthanasia, capital punishment and war. Why would a response to any of those seem so difficult if we thought as Dawkins and many others seem to think we think?
In the face of an apparent pincer movement from Gospel and Old Testament St Paul does not appear to be of much help. After all, today’s passage from Colossians opens with the words ‘Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth’. Perhaps Dawkins has a point, and perhaps, if we are serious about any of this at all, we ought to go and sit on a mountain top imploring the Lord to finish the job quickly. But we do Paul an injustice if we stop reading at that point. Continue, and we get into an exhaustive moral instruction of his readers. We are advised against anger and foul talk; against lies and impurity, slander and covetousness. Why, we must ask, why does any of this matter? If our minds are properly fixed on things above then why should they be troubled by these questions of behaviour? Surely they slip into irrelevance once our hearts are engaged on loftier business?
Well, no, they do not slip into irrelevance. They do not, and this explains my heretical answer to the Sunday supplement question. They do not because, as Paul says ‘you have died, and your life is hid with Christ in God’. We have died the death of baptism, and in so dying we have received the new life that is God’s gracious gift to his people. The new life has begun; the new life is now. It has no end. It will be changed by death, of course, but it will not be ended by it.
Hence I feel discomfort at declaring my belief in life after death, and hence also I have a passion for declaring my belief in life and in the sanctity of life: in the potential for holiness of every life. Of course the starving of Africa matter; of course the threats to our planet’s survival matter; of course the debates over morality matter. They matter to Christians because it is in life today that God makes himself known; in life tomorrow that we will grow into our full stature as his children; and in life everlasting that we will stand before his throne. Amen.
Sunday 5 August 2007
Ecclesiastes 1: 2, 12-14, 18-23;
Colossians 3: 1-11;
Luke 12: 13-21.
I shall do that because I believe that there’s a pernicious myth abroad about the faith of Christians that I should like to nail. It is that ours is a life-denying religion that exalts death; a religion that is so intent on what lies beyond the grave that it all too easily neglects what precedes it.
In his best-seller The God Delusion Richard Dawkins tells the story of the moment that Cardinal Hume told the Abbot of Ampleforth of his approaching death. The Abbot apparently replied ‘Congratulations! That’s brilliant news! I wish I was coming with you’. Dawkins concludes that the Abbot was a sincere man of faith, and concludes also that, as professed Christians do not on the whole react in such a fashion to such tidings, their profession can offer them little consolation, and that it therefore cannot really be sincere.
What Dawkins has touched upon is the conviction that Christians must infinitely prefer death to life; that the promised rewards of heaven must far outshine the inconveniences of the present and dazzle us with their lustre; and that our eyes are so firmly fixed on the far horizon that there is no chance of their slipping earthwards and lighting upon the miseries (or the beauties) of our time.
And the parable that comprises our Gospel reading this morning seems to give comfort to that critical view of the faith. God speaks to the rich man, telling him that he is to die, and almost mocking the labours of his life. ‘The things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ The rich man has given no thought to his own mortality and he will pay for it. The message seems clear. What really counts is what lies beyond death, when all else is forgotten.
A conclusion not dissimilar emerges from the Old Testament reading. When I complete my Sunday supplement questionnaire it is very unlikely that I will say that I want to have dinner with the Preacher of Ecclesiastes, who has a special line in doom-laden self-righteousness. If the rich man of Christ’s parable has though insufficiently about his own death it appears that the Preacher has thought of little else. So constantly has he dwelt on it that he has reached the famous and oft-repeated conclusion ‘vanity of vanities; all is vanity’. What is the cause of his grumbling? That when he dies he will no longer be able to benefit from the fruits of his life’s exertions; that, to coin a phrase, he can’t take it with him when he goes. The result is that the Preacher despises life; just as it might appear that the rich man of the parable is being urged to despise life; and just as Richard Dawkins and co. would like to think that we do today.
Were that to be the case, were we despisers of life, then there would be a number of immediate implications. One would be that Christians would cease to care about the thousands who will perish this week because they have no access to clean drinking water. Why would that matter if heaven beckons so urgently? Another would be that Christians would set about consuming the earth’s resources with feckless impunity. Why would the climate or our delicate ecosystems matter if global meltdown is in fact the gateway to Paradise? A third would be that Christians would begin to think again about the ethics of their response to abortion, euthanasia, capital punishment and war. Why would a response to any of those seem so difficult if we thought as Dawkins and many others seem to think we think?
In the face of an apparent pincer movement from Gospel and Old Testament St Paul does not appear to be of much help. After all, today’s passage from Colossians opens with the words ‘Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth’. Perhaps Dawkins has a point, and perhaps, if we are serious about any of this at all, we ought to go and sit on a mountain top imploring the Lord to finish the job quickly. But we do Paul an injustice if we stop reading at that point. Continue, and we get into an exhaustive moral instruction of his readers. We are advised against anger and foul talk; against lies and impurity, slander and covetousness. Why, we must ask, why does any of this matter? If our minds are properly fixed on things above then why should they be troubled by these questions of behaviour? Surely they slip into irrelevance once our hearts are engaged on loftier business?
Well, no, they do not slip into irrelevance. They do not, and this explains my heretical answer to the Sunday supplement question. They do not because, as Paul says ‘you have died, and your life is hid with Christ in God’. We have died the death of baptism, and in so dying we have received the new life that is God’s gracious gift to his people. The new life has begun; the new life is now. It has no end. It will be changed by death, of course, but it will not be ended by it.
Hence I feel discomfort at declaring my belief in life after death, and hence also I have a passion for declaring my belief in life and in the sanctity of life: in the potential for holiness of every life. Of course the starving of Africa matter; of course the threats to our planet’s survival matter; of course the debates over morality matter. They matter to Christians because it is in life today that God makes himself known; in life tomorrow that we will grow into our full stature as his children; and in life everlasting that we will stand before his throne. Amen.
Sunday 5 August 2007
Ecclesiastes 1: 2, 12-14, 18-23;
Colossians 3: 1-11;
Luke 12: 13-21.
Eighth Sunday after Trinity 2007
An aspiring comic scriptwriter could do worse than study the book of Genesis. He could do far worse. For the dialogue that comprises our first reading this morning is a brilliant example of the comic writer’s art. The subject is the sin of Sodom and God’s planned destruction of the city. Abraham is perturbed at the possible loss of innocent life amidst the conflagration, and petitions the Almighty on behalf of hapless humanity.
In the conversation that ensues two features are remarkable. The first is the boldness of Abraham, who has no hesitation in addressing God directly. He argues with him and urges him to change tack. The second is the responsiveness of God, who listens and is won over. He is susceptible to the pleas of a mortal, and changes his mind.
In the hands of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, say, it could be a very funny sketch. Yet let’s leave aside for a moment the arresting image of Abraham, sitting on a park bench, tweaking the sleeve of the Omnipotent’s raincoat. What we are left with is a pattern of behaviour that is familiar. Humanity pleads; God listens. The plea is repeated; God acts. That pattern of plea and response is how we commonly understand our prayer.
It is, after all, a pattern that Jesus appears to commend. He it is who tells the parable of the friend who bangs on the door at midnight asking for three loaves of bread (some friend, we might think). The door is locked, the householder is in bed, and his children are with him. It’s not a promising scenario for the socially embarrassed and bread deprived friend. Yet, says Jesus, his persistence in asking eventually compels the householder to get up, disturb the children, unlock the door and hand over what he has been asked for. His perseverance is rewarded.
‘Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened’. According to the Gospel of Luke Jesus endorses that Genesis pattern of prayer. Humanity pleads; God listens. The plea is repeated; God acts.
I suspect that I’m not alone in feeling dissatisfied with the pattern. All too often it just doesn’t seem to work. Our prayers do not secure what we pray for: witness the agony of the McCann family, for whom the smug advice we were offered as children about God sometimes saying ‘no’ or ‘not yet’ must seem insulting. The pattern also betrays a rather odd image of God as a sort of auctioneer, selling his divine influence to the highest bidder, as it were, to the one who’s prayed longest and hardest.
So let me suggest a return to the comparison with which I began, between the Genesis dialogue and a comic script. One of the conceits of comedy is that the audience knows the truth which is concealed from the characters. The same is true of Abraham’s conversation. He is concerned that God may destroy the innocent along with the guilty. He embarks upon a negotiation, bartering God down, and securing his agreement that if as few as ten righteous are found then Sodom will not be destroyed. Abraham is no doubt mightily pleased with his efforts. Yet we the audience already know the outcome – don’t we? We know that God is just: more than that, that he is perfectly just. We know that he would be incapable of destroying innocent life.
What is actually revealed to us in the dialogue is Abraham, not God. What is revealed is Abraham’s credulity, his willingness to believe or suspect evil of God. What is revealed is the falseness of his humility. What is revealed is his presumption, his arrogant belief that he is more moral than God. Abraham’s questions - Abraham’s prayer - are about Abraham.
And the same comedic conceit runs through the Gospel. Jesus has taught his disciples to call God Father, and puts to them those famous rhetorical questions about fish and eggs, snakes and scorpions. The questions are what Dick Cheney would call ‘no-brainers’. We know the answers – don’t we? We know that our loving Father will never hurt us or trap us; we know that he eternally wants what is best for us. The teaching of Jesus sheds light only upon those who will not or cannot accept that, upon those who lay their own meanness or trickery, or that of others, at God’s door. Again, prayer reveals to us more about the one who prays than about the one to whom prayer is offered.
God is unchanging. He is not susceptible to our chaotic desires, treasured longings and fevered requests. As Paul writes to the Colossians, the earthly authorities, with their ethics and their strictures, have been disarmed. They have been set aside by Christ and nailed to the cross, symbol both of God’s love for the world and of the truth that in the world love is destined to suffer before it prevails.
Once we have grasped that prayer is about we who offer it than the one to who we offer it; once we have grasped that in Christ God has defeated the power of despair and death; then we understand our prayer anew. What will our prayer reveal about us? We must bang on the door throughout the night, not because by so doing we will eventually grind God down and persuade him to stir himself, but rather because in our patient, persistent waiting we will discover something of our own helplessness before God. We must ask for fish and for eggs. We will not change his mind about his giving them to us. God does not need to be persuaded that peace in Iraq is desirable or that an end to the English floods would be welcome. But when we pray for these things we unite ourselves to the suffering of our neighbours and find within ourselves the power to be God’s agents of transformation in the world he loves so dearly.
Michael Mayne, formerly Dean of Westminster, a priest remarkable for his holiness and his humanity writes about prayer in this way: ‘ … I have come to understand the heart of it as a disciplined taking of time to remind ourselves of who we are and whose we are, in which the one necessary element is stillness’. Amen.
Sunday 29 July 2007,
Genesis 18: 20-32;
Colossians 2: 6-15;
Luke 11: 1-13.
In the conversation that ensues two features are remarkable. The first is the boldness of Abraham, who has no hesitation in addressing God directly. He argues with him and urges him to change tack. The second is the responsiveness of God, who listens and is won over. He is susceptible to the pleas of a mortal, and changes his mind.
In the hands of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, say, it could be a very funny sketch. Yet let’s leave aside for a moment the arresting image of Abraham, sitting on a park bench, tweaking the sleeve of the Omnipotent’s raincoat. What we are left with is a pattern of behaviour that is familiar. Humanity pleads; God listens. The plea is repeated; God acts. That pattern of plea and response is how we commonly understand our prayer.
It is, after all, a pattern that Jesus appears to commend. He it is who tells the parable of the friend who bangs on the door at midnight asking for three loaves of bread (some friend, we might think). The door is locked, the householder is in bed, and his children are with him. It’s not a promising scenario for the socially embarrassed and bread deprived friend. Yet, says Jesus, his persistence in asking eventually compels the householder to get up, disturb the children, unlock the door and hand over what he has been asked for. His perseverance is rewarded.
‘Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened’. According to the Gospel of Luke Jesus endorses that Genesis pattern of prayer. Humanity pleads; God listens. The plea is repeated; God acts.
I suspect that I’m not alone in feeling dissatisfied with the pattern. All too often it just doesn’t seem to work. Our prayers do not secure what we pray for: witness the agony of the McCann family, for whom the smug advice we were offered as children about God sometimes saying ‘no’ or ‘not yet’ must seem insulting. The pattern also betrays a rather odd image of God as a sort of auctioneer, selling his divine influence to the highest bidder, as it were, to the one who’s prayed longest and hardest.
So let me suggest a return to the comparison with which I began, between the Genesis dialogue and a comic script. One of the conceits of comedy is that the audience knows the truth which is concealed from the characters. The same is true of Abraham’s conversation. He is concerned that God may destroy the innocent along with the guilty. He embarks upon a negotiation, bartering God down, and securing his agreement that if as few as ten righteous are found then Sodom will not be destroyed. Abraham is no doubt mightily pleased with his efforts. Yet we the audience already know the outcome – don’t we? We know that God is just: more than that, that he is perfectly just. We know that he would be incapable of destroying innocent life.
What is actually revealed to us in the dialogue is Abraham, not God. What is revealed is Abraham’s credulity, his willingness to believe or suspect evil of God. What is revealed is the falseness of his humility. What is revealed is his presumption, his arrogant belief that he is more moral than God. Abraham’s questions - Abraham’s prayer - are about Abraham.
And the same comedic conceit runs through the Gospel. Jesus has taught his disciples to call God Father, and puts to them those famous rhetorical questions about fish and eggs, snakes and scorpions. The questions are what Dick Cheney would call ‘no-brainers’. We know the answers – don’t we? We know that our loving Father will never hurt us or trap us; we know that he eternally wants what is best for us. The teaching of Jesus sheds light only upon those who will not or cannot accept that, upon those who lay their own meanness or trickery, or that of others, at God’s door. Again, prayer reveals to us more about the one who prays than about the one to whom prayer is offered.
God is unchanging. He is not susceptible to our chaotic desires, treasured longings and fevered requests. As Paul writes to the Colossians, the earthly authorities, with their ethics and their strictures, have been disarmed. They have been set aside by Christ and nailed to the cross, symbol both of God’s love for the world and of the truth that in the world love is destined to suffer before it prevails.
Once we have grasped that prayer is about we who offer it than the one to who we offer it; once we have grasped that in Christ God has defeated the power of despair and death; then we understand our prayer anew. What will our prayer reveal about us? We must bang on the door throughout the night, not because by so doing we will eventually grind God down and persuade him to stir himself, but rather because in our patient, persistent waiting we will discover something of our own helplessness before God. We must ask for fish and for eggs. We will not change his mind about his giving them to us. God does not need to be persuaded that peace in Iraq is desirable or that an end to the English floods would be welcome. But when we pray for these things we unite ourselves to the suffering of our neighbours and find within ourselves the power to be God’s agents of transformation in the world he loves so dearly.
Michael Mayne, formerly Dean of Westminster, a priest remarkable for his holiness and his humanity writes about prayer in this way: ‘ … I have come to understand the heart of it as a disciplined taking of time to remind ourselves of who we are and whose we are, in which the one necessary element is stillness’. Amen.
Sunday 29 July 2007,
Genesis 18: 20-32;
Colossians 2: 6-15;
Luke 11: 1-13.
Sixth Sunday after Trinity 2007
When I was training to be a barrister one of the lessons I learned was that in court one should never ask a question to which one does not know the answer. It’s a pretty reliable guide to not getting caught out in front of the jury, but, I have to say, it’s a pretty dire prospectus for life.
I am an ex-lawyer who is married to a lawyer and so I suppose I feel qualified to cast a critical eye over members of my former profession (not that the absence of such a qualification inhibits others from doing the same). The lawyer who questions Jesus is instantly recognizable character and, I fear, an instantly dislikeable one. Legal training has plainly changed very little over the centuries. He knows the answers to both his questions. Neither is designed to elicit truth or broaden understanding. The first is a test: ‘what shall I do to inherit eternal life?’ The supplementary - ‘and who is my neighbour?’ - is asked out of a desire to justify himself. He brings to his questions a lethal mix of intellectual vanity and emotional insecurity. His desire to trap the teacher combines with his need of reassurance. Which of us is not familiar with at least one of those deep stirrings of the heart?
‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself’. The assumption of first-century Jews mirrored that of their ancestors in the days of the book of Leviticus, which is the source of the quote. Their assumption was that people do love themselves, that such love is a basic instinct of survival. Yet we, I suspect, are uncomfortable with that. Self-love is unattractive. Justifiable pride easily tips into overweening arrogance and modest self-assertion into extravagant self-aggrandisement. Yet I wonder whether this discomfort at the excesses of self-love masks a profound reality about our condition and about that of our interior selves.
Luke the Evangelist is referred to in Scripture as a physician, and although he is honoured as the patron saint of doctors we have no reason to believe that he was a psychologist. He was certainly not a writer blessed with the insights of modern psychology. These insights, which have influenced all sorts of therapies and theories, reveal that often, perhaps all too often, we do not love ourselves very much. We are not, by and large, consumed with self-loathing, it is true, a complex that some parts of the Christian tradition have done a shameful amount to encourage. But many of us, very many of us take easy refuge in the sorts of intellectual strategies and character traits that the lawyer who questions Jesus displays. These are our way of papering over the chasm that yawns at the very heart of our being, the chasm of nagging suspicion and persistent belief that, really and truly, we are not worthy of love.
This is an unspoken conviction with staggering implications. One in particular casts its long shadow over the Christian church and propels us into ceaseless, dizzying action. We ourselves are not worthy of love, of course, but so many others are. We tire ourselves in running after them and meeting their imagined and imaginary needs. But what we are actually doing is running away from our selves, and filling our diaries, minds and hearts with empty activism. I can think of at least one priest of whom it was said that he cared greatly, and for many: you could tell those for whom he cared because they had a hunted look. This is the inexorable path to exhaustion, defeat and despair.
It is not the path of the Good Samaritan, the fictional character created by Jesus in response to the lawyer’s hollow questioning. What is it that enables the Samaritan to cross the road when the priest and the Levite have passed by on the other side? He ignores the purity laws that have kept them at a safe distance. He disregards the racial codes that put enmity between his kind and the Jews. He does not consider his personal safety in what is so evidently bandit country. He dismounts, crosses to the helpless victim, and lavishes attention on him which far exceeds what is immediately necessary. Why?
It is not that he is well-intentioned, which is what makes Margaret Thatcher’s 1980 comment on the parable so extraordinarily crass. It is not automatic response of a do-gooder. The Samaritan crosses the road when the others do not because he loves the helpless victim as he loves himself. Cultic laws and racial segregations mean nothing to him. Personal safety and freedom from ridicule mean nothing to him. They mean nothing to him because he loves himself in the best and noblest sense of that divine command. He is not at war with himself or running away from himself: he has nothing to prove and nothing to suppress. He is at peace; and so he is set free to minister to another.
In our first reading Moses speaks to the children of Israel and explains to them that God’s word is not something that they need to chase after. It does not lie beyond the sea; it is not concealed within heaven’s vault. ‘It is very near you’ he says ‘it is in your mouth and in your heart’. The lawyer correctly identifies the greatest of God’s commandments. Their observance begins with our looking at ourselves, just as our ancestors in the faith Paul, Timothy and Epaphras must have looked at themselves. Their observance begins with our seeing there what God sees there: a person worthy of his love and therefore worthy of our love. And their observance begins with our using our confidence in that love to re-shape the world around us. Amen.
Sunday 15 July 2007
Deuteronomy 30: 9-14;
Colossians: 1: 1-14;
Luke 10: 25-37
I am an ex-lawyer who is married to a lawyer and so I suppose I feel qualified to cast a critical eye over members of my former profession (not that the absence of such a qualification inhibits others from doing the same). The lawyer who questions Jesus is instantly recognizable character and, I fear, an instantly dislikeable one. Legal training has plainly changed very little over the centuries. He knows the answers to both his questions. Neither is designed to elicit truth or broaden understanding. The first is a test: ‘what shall I do to inherit eternal life?’ The supplementary - ‘and who is my neighbour?’ - is asked out of a desire to justify himself. He brings to his questions a lethal mix of intellectual vanity and emotional insecurity. His desire to trap the teacher combines with his need of reassurance. Which of us is not familiar with at least one of those deep stirrings of the heart?
‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself’. The assumption of first-century Jews mirrored that of their ancestors in the days of the book of Leviticus, which is the source of the quote. Their assumption was that people do love themselves, that such love is a basic instinct of survival. Yet we, I suspect, are uncomfortable with that. Self-love is unattractive. Justifiable pride easily tips into overweening arrogance and modest self-assertion into extravagant self-aggrandisement. Yet I wonder whether this discomfort at the excesses of self-love masks a profound reality about our condition and about that of our interior selves.
Luke the Evangelist is referred to in Scripture as a physician, and although he is honoured as the patron saint of doctors we have no reason to believe that he was a psychologist. He was certainly not a writer blessed with the insights of modern psychology. These insights, which have influenced all sorts of therapies and theories, reveal that often, perhaps all too often, we do not love ourselves very much. We are not, by and large, consumed with self-loathing, it is true, a complex that some parts of the Christian tradition have done a shameful amount to encourage. But many of us, very many of us take easy refuge in the sorts of intellectual strategies and character traits that the lawyer who questions Jesus displays. These are our way of papering over the chasm that yawns at the very heart of our being, the chasm of nagging suspicion and persistent belief that, really and truly, we are not worthy of love.
This is an unspoken conviction with staggering implications. One in particular casts its long shadow over the Christian church and propels us into ceaseless, dizzying action. We ourselves are not worthy of love, of course, but so many others are. We tire ourselves in running after them and meeting their imagined and imaginary needs. But what we are actually doing is running away from our selves, and filling our diaries, minds and hearts with empty activism. I can think of at least one priest of whom it was said that he cared greatly, and for many: you could tell those for whom he cared because they had a hunted look. This is the inexorable path to exhaustion, defeat and despair.
It is not the path of the Good Samaritan, the fictional character created by Jesus in response to the lawyer’s hollow questioning. What is it that enables the Samaritan to cross the road when the priest and the Levite have passed by on the other side? He ignores the purity laws that have kept them at a safe distance. He disregards the racial codes that put enmity between his kind and the Jews. He does not consider his personal safety in what is so evidently bandit country. He dismounts, crosses to the helpless victim, and lavishes attention on him which far exceeds what is immediately necessary. Why?
It is not that he is well-intentioned, which is what makes Margaret Thatcher’s 1980 comment on the parable so extraordinarily crass. It is not automatic response of a do-gooder. The Samaritan crosses the road when the others do not because he loves the helpless victim as he loves himself. Cultic laws and racial segregations mean nothing to him. Personal safety and freedom from ridicule mean nothing to him. They mean nothing to him because he loves himself in the best and noblest sense of that divine command. He is not at war with himself or running away from himself: he has nothing to prove and nothing to suppress. He is at peace; and so he is set free to minister to another.
In our first reading Moses speaks to the children of Israel and explains to them that God’s word is not something that they need to chase after. It does not lie beyond the sea; it is not concealed within heaven’s vault. ‘It is very near you’ he says ‘it is in your mouth and in your heart’. The lawyer correctly identifies the greatest of God’s commandments. Their observance begins with our looking at ourselves, just as our ancestors in the faith Paul, Timothy and Epaphras must have looked at themselves. Their observance begins with our seeing there what God sees there: a person worthy of his love and therefore worthy of our love. And their observance begins with our using our confidence in that love to re-shape the world around us. Amen.
Sunday 15 July 2007
Deuteronomy 30: 9-14;
Colossians: 1: 1-14;
Luke 10: 25-37
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