Sunday 20 January 2013, Third Sunday of Epiphany

"Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him."

But what did they believe? That their friend had miraculous power over the DNA of creation? Probably. In the turning of water into wine they had witnessed something otherwise inexplicable. That their friend was the Anointed One for whom their people had been waiting?   Possibly. The abundant provision of wine was one of the signs of the Messianic age that their prophets had foretold. Or that their friend was God Incarnate, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity? Certainly not. It took the church several decades to work that out.

It's not that any of the three beliefs are wrong, judged from the standpoint of later Christian doctrine; it's not that any of the three beliefs contradicts the others. But they differ, and their difference might prompt us to reflect upon what we believe. "His disciples believed in him", and belief in Jesus is as much a cornerstone of twenty-first century faith as it was of first-century faith. We believe in Jesus. What do we believe?

In my last weeks as Vicar of St Peter's I promise that I will try to refrain from graciously  bestowing upon you the fruits of the immense wisdom I have gained in the last six years; and if I break my promise then I'm sure you'll correct me. But perhaps I might share with you four distinct times of my life, and four distinct ways in which I have believed in Jesus.

The first is my childhood, when Jesus was as real to me as King Alfred the Great or Admiral Lord Nelson, two other favourite historical characters who dominated my imagination. I read countless books about all of them. I knew their stories. I knew their characters. I even knew what they looked like - of course! I had little idea of their chronology - I felt badly cheated when my father told me that he did not remember the Battle of Trafalgar. I had little idea of their significance - although I knew that Jesus's was to be found in church rather than at the fireside where Alfred burned the cakes. But I knew that they were real, unlike Batman or the Famous Five. I believed in Jesus. He was the one who turned water into wine. My belief lacked a reasoned foundation; my belief was limited in scope; but it was a belief.

The second is when I was an undergraduate. It was the mid-1980s. The miners' movement had been crushed but the student movement, as we liked to call it, was on the march: against apartheid, for gay rights, against the American missile bases, for the Sandinistas. I studied political thought, was impressed by Lenin's monograph The State and Revolution and became a passionate Marxist. That lasted a fortnight. In this fevered milieu Christianity was neither right-on nor cool. My belief in Jesus needed a different basis and it found one. Jesus had been an anti-capitalist agitator. (If only he had realized it!) 'Love one another' he had said: what he had really meant was, obviously, 'peace, bread and land'. He was a class warrior, a radical. I believed in Jesus. He gave wine to those whose vessels were empty. My belief lacked doctrinal content; my belief was selective in its scope; but it was a belief.

The third is when I was an ordinand at theological college. I arrived there from a career in the law, a career which had shown me justice and mercy in operation. I arrived there full of questions about the justice of the atonement effected by God in Christ. I did not understand how the wrath of a supposedly merciful Father could be satisfied by the death of his guiltless Son. I knew our judges could do rather better. I found the answer in the Anglican divines of the twentieth century, in Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy and Bill Vanstone. They taught me to look for Jesus in the dock rather than on the bench; in the trenches rather than in the battalion headquarters; on the shop floor rather than in the boardroom. They taught me that in Jesus we see God: not the rebellious, campaigning God of my undergraduate days, but rather a vulnerable God, a victim God, a God who identifies absolutely with the grief and misery of creation. I believed in Jesus. He turned water into vast quantities of wine and demonstrated thereby God's reckless love for the world. My belief lacked any notion of glory; my belief was earth-bound in its scope; my belief nailed Jesus to the world and thus overlooked the call of heaven; but it was a belief.

The fourth is in my six years as Vicar of St Peter's Eaton Square. It has been one of my chiefest privileges to baptize many here, to be the agent of God's gratuitous love for his people. It has been my enormous privilege to see many respond to their baptism, to see people responding to God's gratuitous love for them - not by becoming, or by  trying to become, something that they are not, but by becoming, or trying to become, what they already are. Jesus is the one whose mortal body shines with celestial light on the mountain of his Transfiguration. Jesus is the one whose life lives within us from the moment that we are. Jesus is the one whose light is kindled within us in the sacrament of baptism. By his incarnation Jesus has gathered into one things earthly and heavenly. He has become human that we might become divine. I believe in Jesus. He is the one whose life and death and resurrection have changed the water of mortality into the wine of eternity. My belief lacks...well, I'm not yet sure what it lacks. Tell me. Or invite me back in a few years time. I'll have worked it out, and I'll believe something new.

Perhaps I'll call Jesus as my best friend. Perhaps I'll call him my King and perhaps I won't grit my teeth as I do so. Perhaps I'll have fallen in love with him (although I rather doubt it). Whatever I believe about Jesus, inexorably he calls me, inexorably he draws me, and there is no refusing. I believe in Jesus. Amen.

The Epiphany 2013

'The Epiphany' states the Book of Common Prayer 'or the Manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles'. It's a resonant title for today's feast, and one that has endured: the contemporary Collect we have prayed speaks still of God's Son being manifested to the peoples of the earth.  Yet there are two ways in which the title troubles me. First, when something is manifested it is displayed or shown. Too heavy an emphasis on manifestation - on display, on show -  can trap us into thinking of this as the day when Christ is unveiled, rather like a new work of art. The curtain is drawn back and  -  ta-dah - here he is! And secondly, in the coming of the Magi, I wonder if the Christ really is manifested to the Gentiles. I wonder if he is actually manifested to three Gentiles, to Melchior, Balthazar and Caspar.

There's a growing sense in which even the formal title, Epiphany, lends additional weight and authority to the understanding of manifestation as sudden unveiling.   It's used with increasing regularity in personal memoirs and self-searching recollections. "I had an epiphany when..."; "it was a little epiphany as...". Such phrases inevitably presage the dawning of a new realization or the discovery of a forgotten truth. The epiphanic moment when I knew she loved me; the Manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles: both suggest something that is sudden and once-for-all; whereas what we celebrate is something rather different. We celebrate a moment, yes, a moment when three men, three Magi, did something very strange. They flung themselves down before an unknown child and his mother. They paid him the homage due only to the king of kings. They offered him rare and precious gifts, laden with meaning. Now...why did they do that?

The answer is not that in that moment a covering was cast dramatically aside revealing the Christ for all to see. The answer is not that they experienced the sort of epiphany (small 'e') beloved of self-indulgent autobiographers. The answer is that they had come to the end of a journey. The Epiphany we celebrate does not hit us between the eyes with unavoidable and self-evident truth in the light of which nothing will ever be the same again: ta-dah.  The Epiphany invites us to begin a journey towards truth, a journey of our own.

The Magi's journey begins with their skill in astrology. They study the heavens, and their study alerts them to something: to a change, to a hitherto unknown astral presence, to a new star. Their study is informed and enlivened by what we might call faith, by a willingness to look beyond their discovery and see in it a sign of something with universal significance. So they set out to discover that something for themselves. The journey is long and costly. They leave behind comfort and familiarity. They enter a realm where their learning is pagan; they go among a people to whom they are outsiders. They travel to a place where their language and diet and appearance mark them out as strangers.

And they are changed by the experience. St Matthew doesn't tell us as much but if you doubt it, go and see The Hobbit - an Unexpected Journey. Remember how Tolkien's unlikely antihero, Bilbo Baggins, is changed by the quest upon which he is unwillingly entered without tobacco or pocket handkerchiefs. Travels change the traveller. It is their astrological wisdom and their willingness to believe beyond the limits of that wisdom that compel them to set out. It is their reliance upon what lies beyond wisdom, reliance forced upon them by their journey, that compel them to worship the child. The Epiphany is more Journey's End than Brief Encounter.

And this, I think, explains why in the coming of the Magi the Christ is manifested to three Gentiles. For we forget at our peril that others fail to see him as he is. The unnamed Magi to whom the names Melchior, Balthazar and Caspar have been given do not feature in our credal statements, unlike their fellow Gentile, Pontius Pilate. Pilate sees Jesus as the Magi see Jesus, yet he sees nothing but a Jewish prisoner condemned by his own people, arguably worthy of pity, but certainly not worthy of worship. In the governor's palace Christ is present before him, just as in the house in Bethlehem Christ is present before the Magi, yet Christ is not manifested to him as he is to them. But Pilate has not journeyed. He does not look at the things of earth with a willingness to see the things of heaven; he has not left behind comfort and familiarity; he has not ventured out in reliance only upon the wisdom that lies beyond his own wisdom. 'What is truth?' he asks. He probably doubts that such wisdom exists.

In these weeks of Epiphany God opens up the stall he has pitched in our midst and makes clear what he is claiming and what he is offering. At his Baptism Christ is revealed as the only Son of the Father; at the wedding in Cana Christ is revealed as the Alpha and Omega of all creation; at the coming of the Magi Christ is revealed as the sovereign Lord of all peoples. God is here; Christ is here; Love is here; but we are not there, not all of us, not yet. We have a journey before us, a journey that is both internal and external, a journey that will test the wisdom we have been given, a journey in which guiding stars will come and in which guiding stars will go, a journey which will take us beyond the secure and beyond the comfortable, a journey in which all too often the only certainty is our lack of certainty. It is our faithfulness to the journey - not our seeking after glory - that will lead us to worship the Christ. Amen.

Christmas 2012

"And she gave birth to her first born son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn"

Perhaps it's strange that, among all the extraordinary sights and sounds of that far-off night, the new baby's first clothes are remembered. He is wrapped in bands of cloth, in swaddling clothes. It's rather quaint and romantic-sounding: in fact it means that he is trussed up like a Christmas turkey, a practice which has gone in and out of fashion over the years. When it's been in fashion it's been said to protect the child by ensuring that its limbs grow straight and strong. Swaddling exerts a measure of control over the changes that growth will bring.

Perhaps it's strange that his first clothes are remembered - but then perhaps it's strange that the clothes that were intended to be his last are also remembered. The lifeless adult body is taken from the wooden cross, just as the lively infant body was once taken from the wooden feeding trough. It is wrapped in cloth again: a final swaddling. It's intended, like the first swaddling, to protect the body and shield it from harm, to exert a measure of control over the changes that decay will bring.

Yet the babe of Bethlehem does not remained swaddled for very long. The bound limbs are flexed. The swaddling clothes are abandoned. He learns to roll over and crawl, to walk and run, to climb and sail.  The lifeless body does not remain swaddled for long, either. When his friends come to the rock-hewn tomb to honour him they find him gone. The sign that he has gone is that the cloths have been abandoned and are lying on the floor.  He has outgrown them, just as he has outgrown the swaddling bands. The layers of protection have been cast aside. He has been set free.

A brief look at the Mothercare catalogue suggests that swaddling is currently out of fashion: mercifully, the urge to protect children is not, and after the horror of Newtown Connecticut it's to be hoped that it will climb the political agenda, in the United States at least. Yet the urge to swaddle is not just something we experience in relation to children. We experience it in relation to ourselves too, from the airbags in our cars via the intruder alarms in our homes to the precisely drafted phrases of our prenuptial agreements. We swaddle our lives in protective wrapping as surely as Mary swaddles the child who lies in the manger.  And while airbags and alarms and agreements may be entirely sensible and healthy there is other swaddling that is not. The brief authority that we borrow from the job we do or the income we enjoy; the demands that we convince ourselves are made upon us by dependent families or needy friends; the personal tragedies that we constantly deny; the self-medication in which we we indulge as we reach for the wine glass or secure the adrenaline rush: all these swaddle us and suffocate us, with layer upon layer of deceit and obfuscation. All these conceal our true identities.

Christ may come to us swaddled, but Christ does not come to swaddle us. He does not come to offer us protection from the bumps, bruises, crises and conflicts that our lives will bring. He does not come to control the change that will befall us. He does not come to give us layers of clothing or layers of make-up, layers that disguise our reality. Christ does not come so that we might appear to be something other than we are. He comes so that we might fully be what we most truly are.

The bands of cloth are a warning. They show us the lengths to which we will go to cover ourselves up, to hide ourselves from ourselves, to control our surroundings and manage our futures. But for the child to grow and flourish the swaddling must be abandoned; for the risen Christ to walk free the grave clothes must be discarded. So what swaddles you? What keeps you from being the person you really are, the person God would have you be? Tonight God sends you a child to remind you that you are a child.

We are not the layers of protection we have accumulated. Life lived well compels us to strip these layers away, the layers we treasure, the layers we cling to so tightly, the layers that we think make us more intelligent, more interesting, more successful, more attractive. Life lived well compels us to peel away the identities we have constructed and the defences we have built. Life lived well compels us to abandon the habits to which we are addicted and the thought patterns into which we slip so easily. To live well is to know ourselves as God knows us, and to know ourselves as beloved of God as surely as is the child in the manger.  Life lived well begins tonight, as we gaze upon the swaddled Christ.

You are already the child of God. You do not have to be anything else. You have only to be who you already are. Amen.

Christ the King,25 November 2012

"There are female bishops in heaven, where God's really in charge. It's slower than it should be, but it'll come". A Facebook post by Frances, a Roman Catholic teenager whose mother is training to be an Anglican priest, offers us a richly textured reflection for the last week of the church's year.

According to the infamous atheist bus that can still be seen on our streets it's all much simpler than Frances would allow. 'There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life'. In his recent book Unapologetic (of which I'm an unapologetic fan) another Francis, Spufford, reserves some of his very considerable appetite for scorn for that bus and for its message. Paraphrasing him, to suggest that human life is something to be enjoyed is to turn human life into a tub of Ben & Jerry's or an episode of The Archers. Those are things to be enjoyed. But life has rather more flavours than a scoop of Caramel Choo  Choo and rather more depth than thirteen minutes of the nation's favourite radio soap.

For example, I spent last week in a Benedictine monastery. The chief work of monks and nuns is the worship of God. The divine Offices are sung with beauty and reverence from before the sun has risen until after it has set. It is a place of profound peace. But not just of peace. New doors have been fitted to the buildings, and the storms of last week revealed that they have not been fitted terribly well. So no sooner is the divine Office finished than members of the community roll up the sleeves of their habits, climb stepladders, and wield Stanley knives in an attempt to ease the hinges. I hope they enjoy their work and I hope they enjoy their prayer, but the one verb scarcely does justice to both. More is asked of them, and more is asked of us.

Various verbs are likewise needed to describe our membership of the Church of England. We know that, locally, church works. Here at St Peter's prayers are said, worship is offered and on the portico and in the playground community is built in a fashion that we are proud to call inclusive. Yet we also know that, nationally, church looks a bit different. At the end of a week like this week, it looks absurd. Even if we rejoice that our ecclesiology allows a handful of lay people to thwart the avowed wishes of their bishops (and I do rejoice in that - there are other ecclesiologies and other churches in which it could not even begin to be possible); even if we rejoice that the Church of England still manages to form Christians who are capable of thinking and voting counter-culturally (and I rejoice in that too - on the whole we're not brilliant at it, particularly when it comes to issues of wealth creation and redistribution); even if we rejoice in these things we are left with a episcopate which is theologically incoherent and a public profile which is utterly discredited. We still belong to St Peter's Eaton Square, and we still belong to the national Church. Yet our belonging to each is of a different order. It requires different things of us and makes different claims upon us.

And today's feast reinforces what Frances identifies, our need to live at different speeds and to face in different directions. Our year ends with the proclamation that Christ is King. He is risen from the dead; he has ascended into heaven; he reigns supreme over all things and in him will all things be made new. Yet we who proclaim his kingship know at the same time that evidence in support of our proclamation is often hard to find. The planet is disfigured by war, poverty and injustice. The king appears sadly negligent of his kingdom. Enjoy your life? We need a better formula.

It is provided by our understanding of who we are. We are dust, made of the same elements that make the world we inhabit. We share with our fellow creatures a capacity for enjoyment and for its opposite. Yet we are more than dust, too. We bear within us a spark of divine life that is heaven-sent; it is this that we will kindle in Thomas and in Sofia today. Christ's kingdom is not of this world. So we are made to fix the door hinges - and we are made to sing God's praises. We are made to share the common life of St Peter's - and we are made to pray for, live alongside and love our brothers and sisters who conceive of God's church rather differently. We are made to be citizens of Westminster - and we are made to be citizens of Christ's kingdom. We are called to tend the spark within us until it burns so brightly that when our neighbours see us they see heaven's fire.

So I want Thomas and Sofia to enjoy their lives; I want all of us to enjoy the year before us; and I want to see women bishops as soon as possible. But I want more than that. I want God's will to be done on earth as it is in heaven; I want us to attend to the truth that comes from Christ; I want us to allow it to shape us, mould us and ultimately engulf us. "The Son of God became the son of man"

writes Irenaeus "that man might become the son of God". It's a rather more ambitious proposal than the atheist bus allows. Amen.

Second Sunday before Advent, 18 November 2012

 Is 'Skyfall' a serious contender for the title of 'best Bond film ever'? I think it is. The performances are excellent. The chases are fast. The fight scenes are thrilling. There are Komodo dragons, a blissfully limited amount of passionate slush, and one perfectly timed but utterly unacknowledged dry Martini. But there is also a story of two men who have been betrayed.

One of the two is Silva, a languidly creepy villain, portrayed without any trace of a white pussy cat. He is one of Britain's top agents stationed in Hong Kong. M, played again by Judi Dench, hands him over to the Chinese before the territory reverts. Silva is part of the price she's willing to pay for a trouble-free transition. The other is Bond, James Bond. At the beginning of the film he wrestles with a terrorist on the roof of a moving train. Another British agent has the chance to take one shot. But the sightline is not clear. Bond's writhing form flits in and out of the crosshairs. 'Take the shot' says M. She betrays him, just as she betrays Silva. Adamantine certainty crumbles.

The mighty stones of Jerusalem's Temple must have looked like a certainty far more reliable and far less fickle than M's loyalty. Their massive weight betokened God's commitment to his people Israel. This was the place where he had elected to dwell, at the very heart of his chosen people. "What large stones and what large buildings!" exclaim the fishermen from Galilee who have come up to the big city. Jesus's response must shock them to the core. "Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down". Jesus predicts the inversion of all certainties. He predicts the overthrow of everything that the disciples - everything that the Israelites - believe and trust. "Take the shot" says M. Jesus takes aim at what is dearest to his people, and squeezes the trigger.

Jada and Lorian are being baptized in a landscape that bears an eerie resemblance to that inhabited by Silva and Bond. Just as betrayed secret agents must learn to live without the biggest certainty of their professional lives, so Jada and Lorian, and all of us are learning to live without the certainties with which we have long lived. A global  geopolitical settlement that prevailed for decades has collapsed. Religion has re-acquired its medieval potential for terror. The fragile planet creaks under the burden of unlimited growth. The Internet has revolutionized our communication. Like Silva and like Bond we live on the other side of certainty, in a place where the stones of the temple have been thrown down.

So how do they cope? I don't think I'm giving anything away if I tell you that Bond survives. The future of the franchise is assured. Silva longs for revenge. With fiendish ingenuity he plots M's destruction from his island hideaway. The only agent capable of thwarting him is, of course, 007. And Bond cannot resist the call. After the railway shooting he embarks on a lengthy binge in a tropical paradise, but when England is threatened he cannot but return.

Silva's response is nihilistic despair; Bond's is unquestioning patriotism. But what is ours? The Gospel does not offer a plan for our uncertain times. It has much to say about many of the crises that affect us: about the destructive power of greed; about the centrality of forgiveness; about the virtue of self-giving in place of self-serving. But it does not offer one comprehensive route-map out of them. The prophet Daniel foresees a time of anguish. The prophet Jesus foresees wars and rumours of wars. The prophets of political and economic punditry foresee protracted recession, global warming and intractable strife in the Middle East. And what God offers is not the sort of neat solution that Q Division is tasked with dreaming up. Baptism is not the sacramental equivalent of a bio-hazard suit that can be concealed inside a cigarette lighter. It will not shield its wearers against everything that they encounter. What God offers is far more intuitive than that. It is the deadliest secret weapon of all. What God offers is companionship.

Secret agents are probably the loneliest people on the planet. I can't help wondering if that accounts for the success and the longevity of the Bond series. I wonder if in Bond's aloneness we see our own aloneness: a far more exotic version of it, obviously, one that is full of beautiful women, gorgeous locations and world-saving secrets. But Silva and Bond are fundamentally alone. In their possession of state secrets, in the small hours of the morning, or as they confront death, they have only their hatred of England and their pride in England for company. They are like us. No matter how strong our relationships are we ultimately face the perils of the post-certain world by ourselves. Which is why God offers what God offers in baptism. God offers it because only God can offer it, and what God offers is what we need above all else. The only one who can be with us in our aloneness is the one who is nearer to us than we are to ourselves, the one who promises to be with us to skyfall and beyond. Amen.

  

All Saints Sunday, 4 November 2012

When we were children my sister possessed a good singing voice and enough confidence to use it when the occasion demanded. In church she sang lustily. The problem was that the only hymn she knew was 'We plough the fields and scatter'. Whatever the season and whatever the hymn chosen for it, that is what she would sing. Loudly.

What we sing in church matters, and the day on which we sing it matters too. On one Sunday of the year my sister's choice could not be faulted. On every other Sunday it would have jarred horribly had she not been three years old. Some hymns simply belong on some days. It's impossible to conceive of Palm Sunday without 'Ride on, ride on' or of Pentecost without 'Come down, O love divine'. And, for me at least, it's impossible to conceive of All Saints without 'For all the saints'.

Why is that? It part it's sentiment, of course. That hymn has ushered in every All Saintstide that I can remember and is as much a part of this time of year as fireworks, poppies, and the church heating not working. In part it's that it's dear to any priest who has ever worked as a bishop's chaplain. Our motto is 'We feebly struggle, they in glory shine'. But it's the combination of William Walsham How's words and Vaughan Williams's tune which have assured the hymn its place in the pantheon of classics. It will surely be sung for as long as hymns are sung. 

The words. How was a nineteenth century Shropshire parish priest and a rather reluctant bishop, and in 'For all the saints' he sketches out for the church he served the essence of saintliness. The saints are not principally those who have done great things or thought great thoughts. The saints are, first, those who have confessed the name of Jesus before the world. They are those whose witness to the name of Jesus has been costly. How characterizes saintliness in bellicose terms. Saintliness is a well-fought fight; there is fierce strife and warfare long.  He published the hymn in 1864, when the American Civil War was at its height and the forces of the British Empire were engaged against the Ashanti. Today it is almost always sung a week before Remembrance Sunday, when images of men huddled in their trenches are fresh in our minds. Then and now the image of saintliness as struggle resonates deeply with those who sing the hymn.

Yet, secondly, this struggle, the struggle of saintliness, is not a struggle fought in vain, for the saints are rewarded with rest. After the noble fight comes the golden evening and the sweet calm of Paradise. But if this sounds like a rather individualistic account of the Christian life - sainthood as a tough job well done with an an appropriate recompense attached - then How envisages more.

Thirdly 'But lo! There breaks a yet more glorious day; the saints triumphant rise in bright array...' Beyond the struggles of the saints, beyond their costly witness and beyond the martyrdoms of centuries there comes a day when the King of Glory makes all things new, gathering the faithful from earth's wide bounds and ocean's farthest coast. So How sets before the church the vocation of the saints, the consolation of the saints, and the hope of the saints: the vocation of the church, the consolation of the church, and the hope of the church.

The music. Vaughan Williams entitled his tune 'Sine Nomine', as it was destined for the feast when all the saints are honoured but none are named. I know I'll be corrected if I'm wrong but it's written in four-four time and so could - I think - be played as a march. It was certainly intended as a processional, and the adjective 'rousing' could have been invented to describe it. It's not just soldiers who march, of course. Civil rights campaigners march; ban-the-bomb protestors march; anti-poverty agitators march. People march with a common purpose. They may be diverse in almost every respect, they may be a countless host, but the cause unites them and makes them one. And a march - any sort of march -  is a good metaphor for the life of a saint: never static, but always advancing, in the company of others, in knowledge of God and obedience to his call.

And perhaps it is this that accounts for the status of 'For all the saints'. The words are theologically coherent (which cannot be said of every hymn), and the tune is a good sing (ditto). But, more important than either is that 'For all the saints' enables the church to become a part of the reality that it's singing about. When the struggle of sainthood is at its darkest, writes How, the distant triumph song can already be heard. The times may seem bleak and hope may seem impossible, but the embattled saints are already on the side of the victors. Desmond Tutu says 'We used to say to the apartheid government "you may have all the guns, you may have all this power, but you have already lost. Come, join the winning side!"' The same is true of the saints, and the same is true of us. When we sing Alleluia to Father, Son and Holy Ghost we are not just exercising our lungs, or politely doing what custom expects of us at this time of year. We are adding our voices to those of the blest communion. We are claiming our place among the fellowship divine. We are singing because they are singing, and they are singing because they know they've won. '...All are one in thee, for all are thine'. They are singing us home - in a song that will never end. Amen.

  

Sunday 14 October 2012, 19th after Trinity

"Hate evil and love good, and establish justice..."

 

Delegates to the Conservative Party conference, which met in Birmingham last week, listened to two proposals from the platform aimed at establishing justice. Chris Grayling wants to change the law on self-defence to allow individuals to defend their property instinctively and honestly, even if the force they use is disproportionate to the threat they face. Theresa May wants to change the law on sentencing to allow individuals who are victims of anti-social behaviour to choose the penalty that those convicted receive.

 

We should be under no illusions: both proposals represent a change in the way we conceive of society. Both represent substantial shifts in the balance that we have historically struck between the individual and the community. The first will, if passed into law, allow an individual to use inappropriate force upon another as long as he judges that his act is reasonable. The community will hand that judgement over to the individual and, as long as the individual judges that his act is reasonable, the community will not question his exercise of it. The second will, if passed into law, hand to the individual who has been wronged the authority to select the wrong-doer's punishment. No longer will this function be exercised by the Crown, acting on behalf of the wronged individual and on behalf of the whole community out of the deeply-held belief that a wrong against an individual is a wrong against the whole community. The wrong suffered by the individual, and the individual's response to it, will be what determines the wrong-doer's fate.

 

As I have said, the proposals represent a change in the way we conceive of society.

 

In his lecture to the Theos think-tank, delivered not far from here the week before last, Rowan Williams spoke eloquently about how we conceive of society - how we will miss him. He suggested that to conceive of society as a balance between the individual and the community, a balance exaggerated by these two proposals, is to conceive of  it wrongly. The real balance is the balance between the individual and the person. Williams reminded his audience of Saint Augustine's observation that a person is in relationship with God before he is anything else, or before he is in relationship with anything else. None of us is on our own, and none of us cannot pretend to be - or, at least, we can pretend to be. We can pretend that human society is a matter of managing the relationship between a collection of individuals, each of whom has a stockpiled birthright of liberties and dignities. But for people of faith human society is a matter of ordering the relationship between a collection of persons, each of whom is the object of unconditional divine love.

 

In his encounter with the rich young man and in the exchanges that follow it Jesus has a lot to say about how we conceive of society. He has a lot to say about how wealth, property and family all conspire to distort the loyalty that our primary relationship should command. The young man is good-hearted and eager to please, but the possessions that he loves mean that God's claim on him will always have to compete with the business affairs and commercial anxieties that fill his head. He sees himself as an individual in a matrix of relationships which he has chosen, just one of which is with God. Jesus addresses the complexity directly.  "Sell what you own" he advises. In other words, stop trying to amass an identity for yourself; stop relying on what you own to create your conception of who you are; stop building yourself up as one individual among many. Remember instead who you really are: God's beloved. Rely  instead on who you really are: God's beloved. Give away everything else. Don't build up, and you will discover the treasure of heaven.

 

The rich young man goes away grieving and we do not hear of him again. Yet all who respond to the call to follow Jesus are asked to do what the young man was asked to do. They are asked to give up everything that they cling to, everything that distorts their loyalty to their primary relationship. This is what we call Baptism, in which God washes away every trace of present sin and through which God offers a sure route home from all future sin. Try hanging on to wealth or position; try hanging onto brothers or sisters, aunts or uncles when you are plunged into the healing and cleansing water. Baptism is an assertion of our primary relationship with God; it reminds us of our duty to it; and it underlines its fundamental significance for everything we are.

 

So where does this leave last week's proposals? Perpetrators of anti-social crime offend against the primary relationship, against the truth of God's eternal regard for every one of us. But a system of justice that panders to us as individuals, a system of justice that neglects our common origin in God, in a God who gives each of us equal eternal worth, offends against that truth as well. We of all people have an interest in the treatment meted out to alleged offenders. After all, we worship one. Faith compels us to see ourselves in them, and them in us, too. Amen.