No Rest Till the Top - Lent 2 28th February, 2010

A friend recently gave me a card, with a picture of some nice mountains. It was very pretty, definitely Australian, a dry landscape, but definitely not South Australia. The mountains were just way too high. In fact it was of the northeast of Victoria, where I spent many years around Wangaratta.

However, Adelaide is not blessed with mountains. Mount Lofty is not what you could call an overwhelming mountain. We think of it as our tallest mountain, at 720 metres, forgetting that the tallest mountain in the state is actually Mount Woodroffe at twice that height way up near the border with the Northern Territory.

However, we make do with Mount Lofty, and people go for pleasant walks up or down, or if very active both. I have on friend who only ever walks up it, and then has his wife pick him up at the top. It’s not too hard a walk, and there is a nice café at the top to sip a coffee before continuing on life’s journey.

In the reading of the Transfiguration today in the Gospel, we hear that Jesus took with him Peter, James and John up the mountain to pray. Unlike many of us, there is no description whether it was a hard climb or an easy climb – but only they got there and left. The coming and going is barely mentioned.

Yet in one sense the whole story of the Transfiguration only makes sense in the coming and the going. The people that Jesus takes with him, Peter, John and James will be with him at many intimate moments in his teachings and life, and will join him again in the agony in the Garden. They are the inner disciples, whose insights about Jesus will form the early Church.

Furthermore, the coming to this moment has been through the call of discipleship and the beginning of our Lord’s ministry. They have undertaken the discipleship: but as yet don’t understand the full meaning of how our Lord will be the Messiah.

The Transfiguration is really an insight for them to take on their journey of discipleship – they have travelled with his so far, thinking perhaps that he is a prophet, and this points to them how their journey will progress. No prophet was like this, and this experience will be food for thought as they journey to Jerusalem. They won’t fully understand everything, not until the resurrection, when finally all the pieces will fall into place and they will know that this Jesus is truly the Son of God.

That’s why we listen to this reading today. We have started our journey of Lent. We have barely even had a week, yet already some of us may be flagging on our Lenten journey. What have we undertaken for Lent, and how well have we kept our rule of life? This is only Lent 2 – there are six Sundays and Holy Week, forty days and forty nights to take. Walking up even our gentle Mount Lofty is not a picnic, and nor should our Lent be. The climbing of the mountain for the Transfiguration is skipped over, but would have been a bit of exercise. So should our journey of Lent.

The Transfiguration is a vision, an insight for the journey. It points to what is to come. In our journey of Lent, so we will have pointers to Easter, pointers to our own divine future. The glimpses of glory that matter in life, the vision of God that blesses our moments All these are important to us, and helpful and encouraging. Yet we must not forget – the Transfiguration happened on a mountain, and they had to climb up and down to get there. Lent needs a bit of hard work and climbing. You need to work at Lent if you are to taste the glory.

Remember the objectives of Lent: prayer, fasting and almsgiving. All three are hard work in their constant call. It’s like that walk up Mount Lofty, you have to keep the legs moving if you are to reach the top, and so with prayer, fasting and almsgiving, simple things in themselves but they keep us moving through Lent. No mountain is climbed by admiring the view – and no good Easter is made by letting time go by. Use Lent wisely and it will use you wisely. Lent is the time to become better Christians, to take on discipline to do what needs to be done, to give space to God to make us better people. Remember that the core of Lent is letting things go so there is more space for God. It is only be giving things up we find we have the space to let God give us new things.

So enjoy the moment of glory of the Gospel today – our Lord seen as he is, in uncreated light, brighter than anything earthly. Then get those legs walking and go down that mountain into life again. Lent is underway.

The Meaning of Baptism

Preached  Baptism of our Lord, 9^th January, 2010.

In 1847 the Anglican Church in England faced a crisis. A Reverend Gorham was nominated to a parish in the Diocese of Exeter. The bishop, who had some knowledge of this man, examined him and questioned him about some of his beliefs. The bishop then decided that the man did not hold orthodox views regarding baptismal regeneration, so refused to institute him in the living.

Baptismal regeneration is the belief that the affect of baptism is to change the baptised. In particular, this is the belief that baptism changes the nature of a person, removes sin, gives grace and makes the person a member of the Church. This happens whether or not a person is worthy, it is an act of Christ in the sacrament, not an act of the person. This had been the traditional understanding of baptism in the Anglican Church, also held by the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Church. It emphasises that sacraments are God’s acts.

The Bishop of Exeter decided that the Reverend Gorham did not hold orthodox views on this matter. Some protestants believed that baptism was only a symbol of a person’s entry into the Church, others that baptism only worked with those who were the elect or chosen of God - if you were not, then nothing happened. So the range of belief was from those who thought that baptism was solely an act of a person, in choosing to undergo this rite, to those who believed that it was conditional on the nature of the person. These views depend less on God’s act but more on the state of the person, to pure symbolism.

However, England is a country where the Church is established by law. The Reverend Gorham appealed against the bishop to a church court, which supported the bishop. He then appealed to the Privy Council, a purely legal body with no clergy represented, who decided in his favour and ordered that he be instituted into the parish.

This case caused a storm in the Church. Firstly, many were upset that a man who the Church decided was not orthodox was now in charge of a parish. Others were upset that a legal body could decide on what was the doctrine of the Church of England. Some clergy left the Anglican Church over the fight. Others declared that they supported Gorham, causing even a further controversy, as people accused them to be liberals undermining the church. It all has similarities to many later arguments that would rock the Church.

In Australia the controversy was hotly discussed. In 1850 the Australian, including our new bishop of Adelaide, Augustus Short, and New Zealand bishops met and as well as discussing issues on how the form a Church in Australia and how much it was subject to English law, it also discussed the Gorham case. They decided to put out a statement supporting the orthodox view.

However, one bishop, Charles Perry of Melbourne, disagreed. He also believed that regeneration was not automatic and issued a dissenting statement. So the conference, which had been called to help bring the different diocese together, ended with mistrust. This would cast a long shadow over the Australian Church, and would hinder attempts to create a strong central system. Because the bishops could not form a united front in 1850, they would find working closely together difficult. Instead, dioceses would be basically independent, and develop vastly different styles of worship.

Well, now we hardly ever talk about the matter. I have never been questioned if I believe that children are automatically changed by baptism. I do believe it though. Baptism is accorded a unique status in the Gospels. Even or Lord undergoes the baptism of John. In many parts of the Anglican Church one cannot have babies baptised any more until they are of age to make the choice themselves. This is the importation of a more protestant theology that baptism is dependent on a person’s faith - if you don’t have the faith then nothing happens.

The weakness with this is that it limits God. The traditional view has been that God will act at times in history notwithstanding our response. We did not deserve Christ, yet he came. We do not deserve to be members of his body, yet we are invited. God’s grace is not something earnt - it is offered without condition. Christ is truly present in the sacraments - they are not just symbols of the gospel story. The Holy Spirit operates in baptism and takes away our sin and gives us the grace to live Christian lives, whether or not we act on this or not.

This morning we remember Christ’s baptism by John, a slightly different baptism to that that Jesus would command the Church to keep. We also reflect on the meaning of our own baptism, whether you can remember it or not, however long ago that may be. Baptism is the act of God in our lives, the giving of grace and removal of sin that operates in us regardless of our own failings. God is not dependent on us, God choices to act no matter how unworthy we are. A last point - the controversies of the moment can cast long shadows, but the Church does carry on.

Christmas Day

The Gospel for Christmas Day is always a bit of a puzzle for many people. If you came last night, you would have heard of the birth of Christ. If we had had a dawn mass, you would have heard of the birth of Christ. But Mother Church in her wisdom, has decided that if you come for the later mass of the day, you won’t get that story. Instead you will be given the passage from John, filled with imagery of light and life.

Now, our Mother Church does not want to make things too hard for us her children. Yes, she wants us to know the story, the story of how God came to us, not in great light and power, but clothed in the person of a baby, a real baby, that would have to grow, suffer and do all those things babies are notorious for doing.

But what Mother Church wants us to do is to think. God gave each and every one of us a brain, and there is no reason why we should not use it. Mother Church wants us to go behind the baby, go behind Rudolf and his red nose and Santa Claus and all the other tinsel of Christmas.

For the Christmas story is more than a warm feeling. The Christmas story is one of great contradiction: of how God can come to us.

Now the ancients in their stories told of gods who sprung forth in great glory to bring fear and call forth worship from the puny humans they deigned to pass by. They were not cuddly creatures. They brought fear rather than love. Yet God chose a different way for us: God chose the way of enfleshment, of taking on the flesh of a human, and living its life fully with pain and suffering, to show that God is in the misery and messiness of the world, that God does not absence himself from any of the tragedy and pain and joy of day to day life.

In the Gospel today we tackle that contradiction. We hear the great poem, how God was in the beginning, how God was light and life. Yet God became one with us by becoming flesh.

But John in his gospel goes on, after saying that he became flesh, to say also that we have seen his glory, full of grace and truth. In one sense, this is the great challenge of Christians. We are not to tinsel our God. The story of Christmas is incomplete if we leave Jesus in a manger, safe and sound, with a couple of dotty animals munching hay. That’s the tinsel. John does not even bother about it in his Gospel, he leaves that for Luke and Matthew to draw the pretty pictures. John challenges us to take this picture to a different level.

This is faith. This is where we go beyond stories, to find grace and truth.

For stories are not enough. Stories and only useful, if they lead into something more, some message. The message that John wants us desperately to hear, is that God is there, God is there in flesh, God, who was in the beginning, lived among us as flesh, and that this life of love is one of vital importance for us. For unless we have faith, unless we know the living power of Jesus, our Lord, friend and saviour, then we are only dealing with the tinsel.

Jess offers to each and every one of us a life of love. Jesus offers to each and every one of us hope, grace and truth, powers that will shape our lives and alter how we live. If we just life in the now, then the tinsel of the now is the glory we want. Btu if we know God, find Jesus as our friend, then we have a hope that moves us beyond the moment. Then we have a hope that will sustain us in all the darkness of life: the darkness that threatens us, but never overcomes, because it never understands.

The Gospel from john is read today to make us think. To shake free the tinsel of the pretty scene and to think again. What does Jesus really mean – what does Jesus mean for me?

Christmas Night

As we gather in the church tonight, we gather around not just an altar, or a crib, or even these old pillars. We gather not just as friends and strangers, drawn together in the middle of the night, we gather here because we have a purpose and reason.

Now there are many other places where people gather. There are some wonderful pubs and bars, which will be doing good business tonight, even a few restaurants or take always, where people come together. But companionship and food can be found in many places, and that is not why we gather here. We have another purpose.

We gather here because of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Now, we know the story, we listen to it every year, and have it diluted into our music and carols at this season, despite the competition of Santa Claus, Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer, or some equally improbable characters dressed up in red and white. We know the story of how our God came to be with us, and choose not to come down as superman in read and white, but as a baby. A baby who would be vulnerable and open to the world, who would grown up in a family, learn a trade and be virtually unknown for thirty years. Who would then travel and teach, tell people that God’s love was more important than anything else, who would heal people and ask them to live in peace: who would be finally arrested and killed because he was too disturbing for those who like ordered, tidy lives. But that would not be the end: he would show that he was God by rising to life again and even more, promising those who love him the chance of living beyond this world.

All this is the story. The story that we start tonight, with the birth of a child who would live this life.

But that’s only half the story. That’s the newspaper report, the facts, the history, coming dimly to us over the centuries of life. Centuries of lives that have hated and gone to war, who have committed evil and deceit. The message of life has been preached time and time again, but the evil of living has continued time and time again.

What makes the difference is that in all the unpleasantness of life, there are those who jump from this newspaper report to faith. Faith is the great difference. Jesus is not just a set of facts: Jesus is a friend, a lover a hope: someone who knows us and cares for us and gives us hope even when things are black. When Jesus is our Lord: when we believe, however imperfectly and fragile that belief can be, we find that we have the hope of love.

The hope of love then that changes all things. Yes, evil will still happen. People will still shut the door on family and friends, people will not forgive when the chance comes, people will hold to what they know even if they hate what they are, rather than risk the offer of hope and love.

Yet the message cannot be lost, because God gives nothing to be lost. We, who gather here tonight, see not just old pillars, a crib and an altar: we see the glory of God. We see not just as friends and strangers: we see immortal souls, clothed in human flesh and failings, but waiting to become the butterflies of eternal life. We find not just dim facts of centuries past: we find the living love of God, the God who loved us so much he wanted to live as one of us, so that we should never, never, never be frightened of him. God offers us his love in the child tonight, God offers us hope tonight in the child, offers us the story, surrounded in candle and incense, so that our hearts may be moved and changed, hearts may be softened and opened, hearts may be given to that child, that baby, that God.

For our God has come to us, come to us tonight, and asks that we come to him.

Mary - Advent 4

There is something about Mary. You may love her or hate her, but you can’t be a Christian without dealing with her. Who she is and what she does has been one of the fracture points of Western Christianity.

Yet in Advent, when we watch and wait for the Lord, and especially in this second part of Advent, when our readings and focus look more closely to the coming of Christ in history, we have find Mary calmly waiting for us on the journey. You can’t get to the crib on Christmas Day, unless you deal with Mary.

Interestingly, December has also a feast day of Mary, the Feast of the conception of Mary on the 8^th. Now this feast is one of the ones that grew out of the mediaeval love of embellishment, and St Bernard of Clairvaux hated it as an innovation in the 12^th C. Yet the Book of Common Prayer firmly places it in its calendar – actually its Calendar is very Catholic, with not only this feast in December but the O Sapientia, the marking point of the second half of Advent. Now St Bernard was one of the great founders of the Cistercian Order, whose monastic influence derived from Benedict was one of the shaping forces of the later middle ages, and hardly a proto-Protestant, and the Book of Common Prayer is hardly the most extreme Catholic document of the Reformation, yet Mary can easily swap the divides on where you would think people would find her.

Mary has continued to inspire Christians from across the divide of Anglicans and Roman Catholics. I am not even going to touch on her continual role in Orthodox or Lutheran traditions, where she still has a great following. The last ARCIC Report, the discussion between the Anglicans and Roman Catholics, was all about Mary. Some of the great Anglicans who wrote poems to Mary include from the 17^th C Thomas Traherne and a little while later Thomas Ken, both famous writers and both from a time when the Anglican Church was not kindly disposed towards Roman Catholicism. Of course, there is a huge collection of material written about her from the Roman side: some of which, like the Litany of Loreto, where they call her a mirror of justice, a seat of wisdom, a tower of David, make her sound more like an artefact than the Mother Of God.

Well today we hear in the Gospel the moment we call the Visitation, which has its own feast day on the 31st May. Mary, pregnant, visits her cousin Elizabeth, and the child of Elizabeth, John the Baptist, leaps in her womb at the coming of the Lord. Mary responds with the great canticle we use oat Evensong, the Magnificat, which has been truncated from the reading today.

The core of this reading is the two women: two women who are pregnant. It must be remembered that for the Jews, barrenness and virginity were afflictions. One only has to think of Sarah, blessed in old age with a child, removing the stigma of barrenness, or the daughter of Gideon wandering the hills bewailing her virginity, as examples of this. When the Old Testament refers to Israel as a virgin, it means it negatively: it means that Israel has not been fruitful because of its disobedience.

Mary and her cousin Elizabeth are both women under a cloud then. Elizabeth has failed to produce a child. Mary is still a virgin, and therefore of no consequence. St Luke is making the point that both these women are indeed, lowly. No wonder the Magnificat follows, with its defiant cry that God will lift up the lowly.

Yet God has granted Elizabeth a child. Even more extraordinary, Mary is with child although a virgin.

I think this is the point that Luke is making about Mary – she is not a virgin mother because virginity is been taken as more important, far from it. She is a virgin mother because it is a permanent sign of God turning things upside down. Calling her the Virgin Mary is not a title of honour, but one of contradiction and lowliness. God’s values are topsy-turvy. Think of who is involved with the story of the nativity. Three wise men who are foreigners and stargazers. A carpenter called Joseph who is either too poor or too disorganised to find a room for a pregnant wife. A couple of shepherds, living in the open, as smelly as tramps no doubt. Even a young virgin who can be Queen of Heaven. God chooses the inappropriate for carrying his message of salvation. Even the risen Christ will bear the open wounds of his death. That is God- God continually deals with contradictions to unsettle us and let the kingdom of God break in.

It’s only us who wants Christmas to be safe.

Based loosely on an article by Fr Nicholas Henshall of Harrogate, Yorkshire, printed in the Tablet, 5^th December, 2009.

Judgment - Advent 2

Advent is the time when we contemplate the future and prepare ourselves to meet the Lord. We meet him in two ways: firstly in history at Christmas, when our Lord took on our human flesh to live as one of us. We will meet him again, at the end of time, our time and the world’s time, a place without time, when we face him.

It has been well put (by St Cyril of Jerusalem, some 1600 years ago,) that when our Lord came firstly, he was judged, but when he comes again he will judge. This is indeed a terrifying prospect: we must face our sins and his judgment. Yet curiously, and as a paradox, we this moment of greatest scrutiny is promised to be one of greatest intimacy. We shall know him as he is and know ourselves as were truly are, and instead of running for the gates of hell we shall see and understand the love he has for us.

So today is rather a bit of a survival training for judgment day. We deal in the Gospel today with the figure of St John the Baptist, who is giving out a baptism for

This morning we are faced with St John the Baptist, and his curious baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. The New Testament goes to some pains to make this clear that this is difference from the baptism of the Christians, and John is only the forerunner, the one who points the way. Hence we deal with him in Advent, on the way to Christmas and seeing our Lord.

Christians deal with evil and wrongdoing in a different way to non-believers. Firstly, we acknowledge the existence of evil. Sins are not relative, not the result of background, they are to do with evil, and our temptations to evil. We cannot explain evil away, nor can we ignore the affects of evil in our life. We do sin.

In one sense, it is the hardest part of Christian living, the acknowledging of the problem of sin. We have a culture that makes us victims and wants compensation. If we have failed, there must be a reason, and someone is to blame. However, it is harder to say, that I have sinned, I am responsible, and I must acknowledge it.

Now this is where John the Baptist and his baptism comes in. His baptism was a way of acknowledging sin – it was for repentance and forgiveness. It was a public way of saying I have sinned and wanted forgiveness, and as such very, very powerful. One of the great strengths of evil is that it is nameless. By that I mean that the best sin is that never discussed, never acknowledged. Sin without form is the most powerful grip on a person. That is why john’s baptism is powerful, and it makes the person say that yes, I am a sinner.

Now here is where Christians part from John and why the New Testament makes a distinctions. For we believe that sin can be taken away. That’s the point of Jesus – our sins are taken away. We don’t have to suffer the consequences for our evil, we are not caught in a cycle of perpetuation. It all has to do with his death, showing that his love is such that no sin of ours can separate us from that all-giving love. That is why we say the Agnes Dei just before our communion, “O Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world”

All we have to do is let Jesus take our sins away.

That is why we can approach our judgment with confidence. We will be afraid, because we will see the sin in its true life, clearly spoken so to say, no longer a hidden dark nameless thing. That will be a shock. Don’t have a weak heart on the Day of judgment. But then we will know, form our Christian lives here, that Jesus loves us, Jesus forgives, and Jesus wants to take us into his bosom. Judgment Day for us is not the horror of sin only, that can drive a person to Hell, but the bravery that we can say, that we are guilty, yet we ask for that forgiveness given to us in the church, and accept it, and allow us to be overwhelmed in love.

But for now, we need to look for John, We need to stat to see our sins, and find a way of repentance. Nothing beats a life of prayer and the daily examination of conscience – how have I done this day, what have I done and what should I have done better? If we do that, sin is forced out of the shadows and we start to grapple with. That way we can prepare for judgment.

Our Lord is coming – what shall we do?

Kingship - Christ the King 2009

Part of the great tradition of Anglicanism is the daily reading of what we call the office, that is, the saying of daily prayer, in the form of morning and evening prayer. As part of that we read through most of the Bible during the course of the year and work our way through the psalms every two months. One of the great traditions of Anglicanism is that this is for all people, not just clergy, hence the title of the prayer book has been the Book of Common Prayer, as it is for all people, even the common people.

At the moment we have been working our way through the Book of Kings. It not a pretty book; the kings of ancient Judaea and Israel were always getting things wrong and giving up on the Lord and involved with some endless wars with each other. However, we read our way through this collection of disasters, because that is part of the history of the Bible, and because the compliers of the Old Testament wanted to make a point about kingship: despite its very obvious failures God was still there. In fact, in the Book of Samuel, kingship is presented as a sign of failure on the part of the Israelites: they needed no king because they had God, and kingship was a sign of their rebellion and wanting to be like everyone else. God was the ultimate king, not human substitutes.

This dislocation between earthly and heavenly kings is resolved for us in the person of Jesus Christ, who is not only of the kingly line of the ancient Jews, being of the house of David, but also the Son of God, of the divine line, so to speak. Therefore in himself he becomes a king forever, linking all kingship into himself.

However, we learn from Scripture that his kingship is radically different from the ancient kings who squabbled and fought: his kingship is one of love and service, that is seen in his life and his giving of himself for us.

So as Christians we have Jesus as our King. We are the church, and he is our King. We are called to follow him as our king, and learn to give in love and service in the same way.

However, Jesus also gave himself to us in a particular way, he gave himself to us in the sacrament of the altar. On the night he was betrayed he took bread and wine and said that this was his body, his blood. Furthermore, when we do this in remembrance of him, we become his very own body. This is what is done also in baptism. A person or child comes part the body of Christ, the church, making promises to renounce evil and follow Christ, and then confesses the faith in the creed, that he is then baptised into. A person, by being baptised, becomes part of the church, the body of Christ: that person dies to the world we say, and is born into Christ. The person is changed: they have become pat of the living Christ that is seen in the church, and open to the Spirit of God.

So not only is Christ our King, we also enter into his body and become part of that kingship. So who are we king for? This is where the model of the church becomes a model of something greater. Christ is our King, and we too are to be the king in the world. But our kingship as the church is to echo that kingship of Christ: a kingship of endless love and service. That is why the church continually gives in the world, with all charity and service. Even in Australia, the biggest charity provider is still Anglicare, not the Salvation Army.

The church, the body of Christ, is called to lead the world in the same way, as Christ is our true king within the church. Therefore this feast of Christ the King, at the end of the church year, is a reminder not only of the glory of God but also his particular kingship, of the suffering servant who gives all for his people. In return it calls us into that same kingship, to serve in the world and to give a leadership of love that the world needs. We, as Christians, must cry over the world as our Lord cried over Jerusalem, and endlessly want to gather up the world, as our Lord put it, as a hen gathers her chickens, to protect and nature the peoples of the world. This is the service that we cannot avoid, we cannot, because we are baptised into his body to live in the Spirit.

For each of us, service beckons in different ways. Service in the community, service in different charities, service in giving to the poor even in the food basket here, service in families, service in financial help, service in prayer to sustain those who suffer or who are alone: whatever way. We do this because we love: we join in the great love of God in the love of the Trinity, a three person God loving and in service. After all, you can’t love a person without giving in service, love always means self sacrifice, and in the Trinity we find that centre of love that is seen in the Kingship of our Lord, that kingship that we inherit and offer to the world.

So today on the Feast of Christ the King we try to make Christ the king of our lives. When we do that, we will find that we are also kings of this world. When we do that, we find that we are no longer kings as the world knows, but the servant of the world, giving all in love and service.

OS33 B, 15^th November, 2009.

Well, it’s a very hot time here today, but as Fr Jeffrey Taylor famously said at St Peter’s Eastern Hill in Melbourne, it’s also very hot in Hell, so choose where you want to be. However, I won’t keep you endlessly today with the sermon.

The point to get, from the readings at this time of the church year, is that they are related to the season of Advent, which will soon be upon us. Yes, this is the last green Sunday; next Sunday we have Christ the King (and remember, 10.30 am for the main mass and lunch), which, as a festival of Our Lord gets white, and then we have the four weeks of Advent, in purple. The readings ponder the end times, an area of minefields for the lunatic fringe of the church.

Contemplation of the end times and the signs about them is not healthy. In part it relates to what I said last week (perhaps it is the heat, but here I go quoting myself again) how Meister Eckhart, the great German mystic of the 14^th C makes the point that Christians have to live by being inflective with God, not reflective. It’s no use seeing God in past signs or in future signs: that’s either missing the boat, in terms of the past, or trying to second guess God, in terms of the future. A good Christian lives with God in the now, and we do that by making God part of our daily living, such as arrow prayers, or just learning to live with the presence of God.

This is what Jesus is getting at in the Gospel today: the signs are going to be very obvious. Darkening of the sun and the moon not giving its light are things that people are not likely to miss. So don’t worry about the end of the world – it will be quite obvious when it happens. To make the point even clearer he says that not even the Son of God knows the day or the hour. So if Jesus does not know, don’t try and work it out.

Christians instead have a strange sense of time: where time is compounded into a moment. That’s what the writer to the Hebrews is getting at: how Christ becomes the one true high priest who enters once and for all into the Temple of heaven to offer his blood as a sacrifice, completing and extinguishing the blood offering. It is in the strange compounding of time that we enter here: every time the mass is offered at the altar, we enter once more into that eternal offering of the Son, once and for all times. The mass enters into that eternal moment, when we become part of this sacrifice out of and over time. But then that’s only appropriate: after all, we will be called to live beyond time at the end of time: we are destined to be offered eternal life, life outside time. We don’t and can’t understand what that means. All we can get is glimmerings, like in the book of Daniel.

So the lessons of today: try and remain cool: don’t get heated up about the end of the world, looking for meanings in signs is not how we are to live. We live infectively with God, living with God in our day to day life so we become more closely the child of God, not reflectively, trying to see the hand of God in history or double guessing God in the future.

God as our Centre - OS 32 B, 8^th November, 2009.

Now the gospel reading today is a beauty. That reading about the widow giving her last mite, her last coins, has been custom made for urging the faithful to give money to the church. After all, this place does not keep going on hot air, let alone my hot air, and giving is an important part of being a Christian. We need good giving here at St George’s: we only survive as a parish through our endowments, not from the giving in our plate.

But I will leave that as enough rant for now, and your wallets can relax in safety for a while longer. For in one sense, it belittles the gospel of today to use it solely for a rant about the need to maintain our church. In the end the good people here shouldn’t give to allow me to live or maintain our church buildings: that should be a by-product of our Christian giving, not the purpose. Our Christian witness in giving should be much, much more important, and I mentioned in our parish magazine how part of our giving over the years has helped support the valuable work of the school in Simbai in PNG, which has helped made a difference in so many lives, a witness in giving that I am very proud about.

What is the point of the Gospel today is the point of how we live in the world. Money makes the world goes round, as the saying goes, and even in ancient societies like the time of our Lord’s, that was a true saying. The Temple complex in Jerusalem was a massive and very impressive structure. Besides the actual Temple, which had been built again on the return from Babylon in 516 BC, there was a whole series of courts and cloisters around it, which had only recently been completed by Herod the Great. It should be remembered that the Herodian kings were not of the family of Judah, and therefore not seen as legitimate kings. The re-building of the Temple complex and its expansion was part of a propaganda ploy by Herod to claim legitimacy by expanding the premier symbol of Jewish identity, the Temple. It was not paid for by the pious offerings of the people, rather it was a result on a government seeking legitimacy: nowadays they would just build schools or sporting complexes for us.

Yet what is built has to be maintained. That was part of what was happening in the Temple: people were giving to help maintain the buildings. The same is true today:  any culture makes demands on our earnings: we wish to live a lifestyle that we enjoy, we have families to maintain, preparations for our old age in superannuation, health costs, housing costs and so on. Our income is balanced, well at least hopefully balanced, by the contrasting demands of expenditure and our choices on how to spend what we have.

The problem is that this engagement in the balance of income and expenditure is one that can easily exclude God. Where is God in the balance book of economics?

But that’s not the real question. The real question is what is important in life. It’s not where is God in the balance book of economics; it is where is God in our lives? God is not a competing interest to life: God is our life. One of the great mystics, Meister Eckhart of the 14^th Century in Germany, taught about the need to how we live in the world. The goal of our life is not a reflective understanding of God, but an inflective living with God. By that he meant it was not good enough to look back and see God at work, we had to live with God now. We should not be reflective, but inflective. We need to live with God as our core. We need to live in love with God, detached from the ways of the world. The way to live is to be the true being we are called to be. God does not make us to be a butcher, baker tinkerman sailor, God makes us to a child of God, made in his very image, the image of Adam that is now the image of the new Adam in the resurrected Christ.

So how do we do this: this is where we have to learn to love God. We only learn to love God when God is our friend, our companion in life. We have to cultivate the idea that God is with us all day, every day, we have to learn to deal with our personal sins and vices to become better persons, in love with God. The better relationship we have we God, the better and more human we become, the child that God loves and wants to be a force in the world. That is when we are detached from the world: instead we live with God.

Then when we work at being in love with God more than anything else, all else falls into place. We then find the world is secondary to our love of God, and we use the gifts that God has given us in the right way. God has given each of us different and important gifts, that reach their fullest talent when we use them for the good God wants, and we can only do that when we love God and try and live in God. God is then in the details of our life, working out the consequences. Some of the details of life are unpleasant, such as pain and suffering, others are joys, such as our skills. But in each God wants to be there: that is why God lived as one of us in the person of his Son, our Lord.

So where is God in the balance book of economics: everywhere. God wants us to be responsible and loving with our money, not corrupt and power hungry with it. God wants us to know that money should not rule us. This is the point of the Gospel today: the widow gave away in trust. The wealthy only gave out of their leftovers.

What I hope we do with our rather bulky wallets that have been entrusted to us, is that we learn to live with generosity and love, and use our money how we think God would love us to use it, and not in misery and worry. Happiness is not assured by money: happiness is the gift of God that comes from the love that God has for us and we hopefully return. The poor widow in the gospel was one of life’s losers: widowed so without support, and poor: she must have faced poverty and destitution. But she gave, nevertheless.

If only we could give so willingly.

Seeing - OS30 B, 25^th October, 2009.

Most books that deal with successful lives or businesses like to explain how they got things right. They often even have rather complacent titles, like, “How to Succeed in Business without Trying” or “How to be Millionaire” or “”How to Lose Weight without Trying” or some other rather smug title.

The Gospels are completely the reverse. They continually show failure and lack of understanding by the disciples of Our Lord. Mark shows time and time again that the disciples don’t get it. One only has to think about Peter’s great confession that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, immediately followed by trying to shut Jesus up with his story of suffering and death causing Our Lord to rebuke him with “get behind me Satan.” Many scholars believe that Mark originally finished his Gospel (for there are several possible endings to Mark, if you look in a good translation of the Bible) with the command of the young man to the women to go and tell of the resurrection, but they flee and tell no-one, because, we learn, they are afraid. Yet, the Gospel was written for a community who was very much there, and growing, and Mark is teaching that despite our human failings the Church will continue, and overcome our failures to teach the Good News.

The passage today, about Bartimaeus, is a passage that continues the illustration how the disciples fail to understand. It concludes a central passage in Mark, where the miracles of healing and interspersed with Jesus teaching that he must suffer and die. In contrast, the disciples fail continually, such as failing to use the power in exorcising demons and argue who is the greatest.

Now, one of the most interesting things in this passage today, is that we have a name. Now, names are rare in the Gospel, we are only given a name if they have a continuing importance. In contrast, the blind man healed at Bethsaida is nameless [8;22], and we only learn of the healing of Jairus’s daughter, never her name [5]. Perhaps the reason is because the story of Bartimaeus is s story of coming to faith.

It starts with the story set at Jericho. This brings a resonance with the Old Testament, besides the famous story of the walls of Jericho, we also have the story of Rahab the Prostitute, who sheltered the spies of the Israelites, and is a symbol of belief in God. Bartimaeus is a blind beggar. He hears it is Jesus of Nazareth, and starts to shout out for mercy, calling Jesus the Son of David, a kingly title. Despite the orders of those who see, and do not acclaim Jesus, he continues his cries for mercy. He is heard, and Jesus calls him forward. Note that he throws off his cloak to reach Jesus – discarding of old clothes is always an important image in Mark, that is seen most dramatically in the young man who is seized after the arrest of Jesus and runs away naked [14:52].

Then we have an example of perfect discipleship: Jesus asks what can he do for him and Bartimaeus asks for sight, and Jesus grants it to and he sees immediately. Jesus tells him that his faith has made him well.

Then Jesus tells Bartimaeus to go, but instead we learn that he follows him on the way. This rather surprising contradiction makes sense only when you remember that the early Christians called their faith the way, and is an image then of following the faith. Bartimaeus becomes a model of a true disciple, not arguing about status, but calling for mercy, asking for healing in true faith, and therefore receiving it, and then following the way. It is for this reason that he has a name, as a follower and believer.

The English writer and clergyman Jonathon Swift, who in between being Dean of St Patrick’s Dublin wrote Gulliver’s Travels, once said that vision is the art of seeing things invisible. It’s a good point. Bartimaeus saw the invisible in Jesus. Bartimaeus is contrasted with the disciples in the gospel today, who see Jesus healing and doing mighty acts of power, but don’t get the vision: they are lost in their rivalries and dreams of power rather than asking for the vision to understand. It’s also the same with Christians at times; we lose the vision of what it means to follow the Way, to be a Christian. Bartimaeus recognises Jesus as a royal king, he asks for mercy and healing, and gets it. It’s the same for us; we continually need to see Jesus as our King and Lord, and ask for his mercy, then follow his way. But then remember Mark’s backup message, the message of the whole Gospel: people fail, but the church goes on. The sum of our failures is not oblivion, but continual offers of repentance and renewal so that the church, full of imperfect people, still is a place of grace and renewal.

So we are invited today to regain our sight, to see the vision once more, of a God who asks for us to recognise him as our teacher and God, who offers us sight and then asks us to follow the way. God never, never gives up on us, his mercy never fails. So let us hold to that hope, the hope of God and follow the way.

The Ranter’s Bible - Michaelmas 2009

A friend of mine holds the very Anglican view that the Book of Revelation, also known as the Apocalypse, is at best an embarrassment or possibly written by St John on drugs and certainly should not be in Holy Scripture. Its imagery is dramatic: its meaning obscure. Although possibly the last book written in the New Testament, and one of the last to be accepted, it has had a profound impact on Western civilisation with its imagery. It is also the favourite tool of any Biblical ranter, so perhaps it is my turn to give it a go.

Perhaps the best way to start with Book of Revelation is to understand that within humanity there is a cycle of violence. In early cultures, violence is very important in maintaining order. Violence is ritualised, often with sacred ways, to control violence. Sacrifice of animals, or humans, appeases the gods, who maintain the good order and prosperity of a culture. We are inheritors of the more urbane Greeks and Romans with their sacrifices of animals, rather than the more bloodthirsty Aztecs who had to appease their gods with human hearts in huge quantities.

Whatever ancient culture you look at, there is at its core the cycle of violence – sacrifice is necessary to maintain a culture. If a culture is under stress or attack, then the level of sacrifice increases – even the Romans would inflict human sacrifice in times of great crisis in the Republic. If peace and order was regained, then the level of sacrifice would revert to usual standards, if not, then the culture would be plunged into war and violence. Divine vengeance was seen as the last bulwark in the establishment of order.

This is a reason why the Book of Revelation is so popular with the ranters. When someone feels that the level of violence and disorder is growing, it is a human urge to turn then to the divine to restore order. God is seen as the enforcer of last resort. If our human level of violence fails to maintain order, then we turn to God to enforce the ultimate violence.

However, part of the Good News of Jesus Christ is that God is not a God of violence. God does not want death and sacrifice. To show this, the Son of God allows himself to be taken as a victim and put to death by the power of the world. Since then, any victim of violence, any sacrifice, links with Jesus, the suffering servant. The death and resurrection of Jesus robs the power of violence to be effective.

What I am saying that we have a fascination for innocent victims. Even the appearance of innocence or of victimisation, for us evokes image of the life of Jesus. This is a permanent change in our worldview. We will at times, identify groups for victimisation, such as the educated elite in Pol Pot’s Cambodia, or the bourgeois in Mao’s China, or the Jews in Hitler’s Germany: but whenever we do so our Christian consciences identify the victims with the suffering of Christ. At other times we will have a fascination for the young or seemingly innocent victim: one only has to remember the extraordinary scenes when Princess Di was killed to see how we can become fascinated by such imagery.

The message of Christ is that the cycle of violence can only be broken by non-violence: it is only by leaving it to God that evil will be defeated.

Now this is part of what is being said in the passage from Revelation today. By the way, don’t run down angels: we only miss out seeing the angels because we are too engrossed in the world. The miracle of the Annunciation of Gabriel to Mary is not that Mary had a visit from an Angel – that is commonplace, but the miracle is that she saw the angel: that is far rarer, a detachment from the world that allows some one to see angels. But that’s another story.

So let’s get back to the passage today. Michael and his angels fight against the dragon, the symbol of evil. Evil is defeated, and thrown down to the world. It is worthwhile to ponder that. Note, the defeat is not total, it only changes the location. Evil is not defeated totally by Michael, it is only a change of location. Different location, same characters. The battle was won but the war continues.

So now we have to deal with the power of evil. The passage gives the clue as to who shall win: those who conquer him by the blood of the lamb. In one of the other passages in Revelation, ch 5, John is told to look up and see the Lion of Judah. But instead of a roaring lion, he sees instead the lamb that was slaughtered, which then becomes the dominant imagery of the book, being used 29 times. John twists the image – instead of a lion of power, we get the lamb instead. John presents Jesus as a image of peace and vulnerability in the lamb, rather than vengeance in the lion.

The reading from Revelation that we used to day continues this theme of the victory of our Lord by being a lamb. We hear that Satan is thrown down to earth, where he continues his evil designs. But we are told then that Satan will be conquered – not by violence, but by the blood of the lamb, the word of the testimony of those who willing give up their lives. We can then rejoice that they have given their lives to achieve the victory.

So what does this teach us: well, it teaches us the need to just do our thing and take the risk. Being a Christian is a call to heroic steadfastness: to do and say what you believe, and let the worse happen. It is the call for perseverance in the face of violence, and the assurance that our way of non-violence will give us the victory. Many of us, if not all of us have families who do not believe, and we wonder how we can bring them to faith. Sometimes we wish we could force them. The way that is shown here is the way of just living the faith with courage and detachment. Just be a Christian.  Go to church, say your prayers, read your bible, say what you believe. It is the way of the suffering lamb that wins through: not the way of compulsion. Be who you are, a child of God, loved by God: that is enough.

The end of the world is not an event determined by a vengeful God: it is rather the works of evil overwhelming a place without God. But we are called to be the countless host without number, rejoicing and worshiping the lamb who was slain.

So Revelation, despite its oddity, is not just the ranter’s set piece: in its complex imagery lies a core of the message of non-violence and letting God win through in God’s own way and time. So as we celebrate Michael, Raphael, Gabriel, and all the angels, we can also rejoice in the message of God: love wins over violence.

Detachment OS25B, 20 September, 2009

As you may know I have been jaunting it around the last week in the highlands of PNG, visiting the small Vocational Centre we support there in a place called Simbai. During that time I stayed with the local teacher, an Australian, who by co-incidence that we were unaware of until we met, from the small hometown of Gosford in NSW. Now not many foreigners ever get to this village, so I was something of a celebrity, and of course the different members of the church and school wanted to raise their needs with me to take back to Australia to try and help them.

One day I was sitting in the front garden when one of the Melanesian brothers came to see me. They do great work these brothers, living a life of poverty helping to establish churches. So we went inside to talk. At the same time, a small child who had been hanging around also came into the house with us. House may be an ambitious word here – the place had rather basic with no permanent electricity or the luxury of hot water. After a while the teacher came back and noticed the child, whom I had completely forgot. You see, in his house you would often find people, students, other teaches or local children, just hanging out, or hoping for a bit of food, or mostly just curious to see what was inside and look at things and books. He had never seen the child before, and I did not know him, or the brother, but out of curiosity he had just followed us to see what was going on.

The way that house worked in that village stayed with me as I thought abut the sermon this week. The gospel according to Mark has Jesus correcting his disciples in the house. Our Lord had heard them arguing on the way to Capernaum, yet he had not stopped them on the way, but waited till he was back in the house there. The implication of the placing is that there was a permanent dwelling of Our Lord in Capernaum that was used as a base. It is there that Our Lord unravels the quarrel. This seems to be of importance: he could have stopped the disciples at any time before, but it is only in the house that he does so. Houses in villages are often places where people wander in and out as of will, kids interested in the excitement or looking for a free meal or neighbours catching up on the gossip. Village life can be very, very busy over very, very small details. It’s not a open space where strangers are, but more of an extended family. It is here that Our Lord deliberately takes up the theme of the argument that he seems to have heard and teaches.

Now what he teaches is about the quarrel. The disciples had been arguing about who was the greatest, and prestige is a thing that we are very fond of. We love the best and brightest, and we spend to get it. It may be power, influence, sex, cars, clothing or whatever, but we all have our little addictions where we want to be someone. It’s all about ourselves: curiously, that childlike trait of putting ourselves forward as number one.

But here, in the midst of the village, in the midst of the house, our Lord takes the child and tells those who seek their own grandeur and power, that the one who wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all. Then in the centre of the village in the centre of the house he takes the child in his arms, a gesture of complete acceptance and says whoever welcomes one such child in his name welcomes me.

What’s happening here is a little bit of centring. Now human greed is about satisfying our needs. But if we are serious about being Christians we have to centre our lives on Christ, and our Lord centres this on welcoming a child in their midst. The child is given no name, no relationship: it’s just a child who seems to have wandered in out of curiosity, as that child did in the village in Simbai.

Part of our problem as Christians is that we don’t realise how self-centred we are. We live in a culture that promotes our own needs: endless advertising for us to be like someone impossibly fashionable, good-looking, wealthy and happy. Because we live in a wealthy culture we can indulge these fantasies that we know will only provide fleeting pleasures.

But Christianity is not about fleeting pleasure: Christianity is about becoming Christ like. We are baptised into Christ, we have to become like Christ, who is never self-centred. After all, a God who is three, Father Son and Holy Spirit is never going to be self-centred, but always in a relationship. What we try to do as Christians is to change our lives to become Christ like. That which is only a short fix, an ego boast, is never going to do that. It’s easier, but in the end fruitless. You can get on a high, take a drug, but it’s not going to make you a better person. The only way we become Christ like is by learning about detachment.

Now detachment is when we learn not to be taken in by the world. In a sense it’s like learning to welcome the child in our midst, open in curiosity. We achieve this by not getting looked into arguments about who is the greatest or what ever ego trip we are into. We do this by learning to welcome the child in our arms. We learn this by prayer, where we don’t just recite words or lists, but just sit in the midst of our house and welcome the God who comes to us. It’s no use sitting down and demanding God to come; it’s the hard work of just sitting and waiting for God to wander in as the child in our midst, waiting to be picked up in our arms. You have to be careful of the distractions that the mind puts forth and the worries of the shopping list, but you have to let them pass you and wait for the child you don’t notice.

Our Lord gave everything for us: he gave his life and his love. So don’t be taken in by the demands of the short-term fix. Try to be Christ like. Sit down and let the anonymous child come to your arms: become Christ centred rather than ego centred.

I never learnt the name of that child who wandered in: nor many of the other countless people and children who wandered in just to see, or with the children to have a bit of exotic bread with exotic marmalade when my good host felt they deserved it. But there are countless people in the world who are all valuable in God’s sight, each and every one of them, and much more worthy than the latest gimmick we can indulge in, buy and pamper. We will only hear of their needs when we listen to God and not to ourselves. So find God at the centre of your lives so you too can become a child of Christ.

Do Not Be Afraid - Dedication Sunday, 6^th September, 2009

Do not be afraid, for our Lord is with us, is the comforting words to Christians throughout the ages. Do not be afraid, for no matter where we are, or what happens, our Lord is with us. Although we find ourselves oppressed by evil, or tossed by doubt, the words of our Lord comes back to us, to bring us hope again.

Yet how the Lord is with us has divided Christians. From tradition comes the giving of holy places: places where God has been is a special way. Here God has been seen: in a martyrdom, the resting place of a saint awaiting the resurrection; the vision of our Lady bringing hope and solace: all these places have become places of pilgrimage and devotion. So strong have been these calls of holiness that whole cities have shifted: St Peter’s Basilica in Rome is built on the resting place of St Peter, which was on the outskirts of ancient Rome, away from the Forum, yet now the city is centred on it, rather than the decaying ruins of the Senate and People of Rome.

As soon as peace came to the Christians in the Roman Empire, churches arose around the resting places of the saints, and other places, that through the transferral of reliques of the saints, became holy themselves. The ancients had their temples where people would come and give sacrifice; soon churches arose, supplanting the old temples, yet still calling witness to the power of God. Yet our presence of God knows no containment, confinement or regulated outlets. Many pagan places were baptised into new use, the mystery of thin places, where God can be touched is all too deep, too sensitive, too fragile for any controlling system. Building were not enough: Christendom had its holy wells, stones, caves and mountains where God had spoken, where the thin wall between the dullness of everyday routine and the glory of God collapsed. In all these places the shout of glory could be heard in the despair of the world: do not be afraid.

Yet with the Reformation came the attack on the place of holiness; God was indeed in all places at all times: no place was without God, even in the depths of slums and poverty where the zeal for the Lord brought hope and reform so characteristic of the best of Evangelism. But the rationalistic assertion that God was in all places also called for the levelling of all places; and no greater zeal was spared for the destruction of shrines and holy places as gross superstition. If God was in all places, then no place was more holy than another was the hard logic, and the thin places of the world were attacked and desecrated.

Yet God is not nearly as tidy as our logic dictates, and people still found that thin places whispered to the of the glory of God. Mary still walked among her children, miracles of healing were still given, and churches, consecrated and set apart for worship, still sunk into the mind as a place that prayer had made valid, in the words of the great Anglican poet T S Eliot. Even Walsingham, abandoned and desecrated for hundreds of years, shook itself free and made again an image of our Lady for people to come and pray and seek comfort. Once more pilgrims come to Walsingham and find that thin place of the world where that which is beyond calls to us in a way beyond words.

Here in this church we celebrate a holiness that is beyond us. In 1903 this place, this House of God was dedicated and consecrated to the glory of God. Generations have come here: prayed, wept, confessed and God has shriven, blessed and granted miracles. We have given for the glory of God: given in tears, given in prayers, given in countless selfish ways, helped, listened, sung, served, read, polished, adorned and even poured the tea. All this has been for the glory of God, despite our failings, our mixed motives. For God takes even the little we offer and sanctifies it to make it so much greater: God suffuses our offering with the glory of God and makes it so much, much greater, even the humble bread and wine, so all of heaven is in here, as even our God is in the sacrament of the altar. It’s not logical, but then God is more than logic.

So do not be afraid. Miracles of hope continue to happen. We worship here still in this house of God, rejoicing that God is here with us. Our small offerings are taken with the rejoicing of heaven and made into the glory of heaven. God did not stop to enter our lives as a human being, and the miracle of the taking of humility does not stop and never can. Here we can find God, for the glory of God never fades.

The Eternal Reality - OS 20 B, 16th August, 2009

This Sunday we again tackle the image of Jesus being the bread and blood. This is the third week the readings have concentrated on this image, in indication of the difficulty of this saying.
Traditionally Christians, following Greek thought, have looked at the world on two levels. The first is the level of appearances. Things are things because they look like things. A cat is a cat because it looks like a cat. A loaf of bread is a loaf of bread because it looks like a loaf of bread. However, this is a very limited way of looking. For example, I may be Father Scott because I look like Father Scott. Should I lose a whole arm, would I be still Fr Scott? Or, even worse, if I lose all my arms or legs, would I still be Father Scott? Am I still Father Scott in sixty years time, when I have received a telegram from the queen and bound in a wheelchair? In other words, appearances, by themselves, aren’t enough. Appearances are just the accidentals of life. The physical reality does not define what a thing necessarily is.
What makes a thing a thing is its substance. This is especially true with living things. A cat is a cat, not only because it looks like a cat, because it is the spirit of a cat. A dead cat is not a cat because it does not have that spirit, that substance, of being a cat. I am Father Scott because my substance is unique; I have the soul of Fr Scott.
What Jesus is saying today that he is the bread and wine, the body and blood. When we come forward to communion, we take what appears to be bread and wine. Yet Jesus is there - the appearance may be bread and wine but the substance is body and blood. Its spiritual reality is different to its physical reality. That is how we take the bread and wine and take the body and blood at the same time, we look deeper than the physical appearances. This is what we call the real presence of Christ - that he is truly present beneath the appearance of bread and wine.
Therefore the consequences of coming to the altar of God are immense. By taking Jesus’s body and blood, he dwells in us in a special spiritual way. That is why we live forever, for our mortality is transfused with Christ’s eternity. We enter into the body of Christ, that eternal reality. That is why we always treat it with the greatest reverence, such as genuflecting, whenever we approach or take and eat the bread and wine. The physical appearance may be the same, but the spiritual reality is altered.
By entering into the body of Christ by this sacrament we share gives important consequences on how we act. Jesus says in the gospel today, that whoever eats and drinks his body and blood lives in him and he lives in that person. That is why Paul in the second reading today warns us - we must be careful about the sort of lives we lead, to be like intelligent people and not the senseless. For we are called to lead lives that are signs to the world around, by our lives we redeem the world.
That is why good Christian lives are so important. For what we do and say, how we act, redeems the lives of those around. We never know the consequence of what we do. Our actions redeem others. Therefore all the struggles are worth it, for they not only save us, by our faith, but also help to save others. Never think that prayers are wasted, acts of charity lost, for God knows, and God makes use of all that we do.
It is inspiring to live a Christian life, a life that has meaning, that has purpose. It is the great battle, the battle of good and evil that stretches to the gates of heaven. It is wonderful to take his body and blood, and find our substance altered, to enter into that great mystery of eternity.
The sacrament of the altar is our meeting with our pledge of immortality. It is our meeting with God. We must therefore approach it with devotion and seriousness. We make our preparations for it by prayer, fasting and confession. It is a serious moment that demands our best. Our tradition surround the moment with solemnity to show our love in worship.
Yet at the same time the sacrament is not something earnt. We are not rewarded with the sacrament because we are good people. We take the sacrament because we realise that we need God’s help in our lives, we need to be part of his body so we can live a life worthy of Christ in the world. It is a reward not for virtue past but a pledge for the future.
Therefore this sacrament also calls us to live in a deeper way. If we take the bread and wine to join Christ’s body we have to look and see God working in our lives calling us to lead lives that our worthy of that body. Our spiritual lives are deepened by this food. The sacrament deepens our spirit to become more like Christ. Our appearance is the same, but our spirit changes.
The Son of God came to us in the form of a human child. The Son of God comes today in the form of bread and wine. We can see the child, taste the bread, the challenge is to move beyond the appearance. But that is always the challenge isn’t it: to see beyond the now to the Christ.

The God of No Limits -  OS 17 B, 26th July, 2009.

The thing to do with the Gospel today, when you start to consider the miracle of the feeding of the five thousand, is to make sure you enter it with the right mindset. Now it is important to realise that people of this time had what was called the idea of limited good. That is that the world was a closed system.
By this we mean that the ancients thought that everything only existed in a finite quantity. There was only so much money, so much food and even so much good that could go around. If someone became richer, it meant that someone had to become poorer. Similarly, only a certain amount of food could be produced: it was not going to increase. Therefore for a king to become wealthy, he had to take gold from someone else, hence the need for war to find more gold and wealth.
This idea of limited good also influenced them on how they understood wisdom: hence the other week when they asked where did Jesus get this wisdom, as he was only the son of a carpenter, and then took offence, because they thought he had obtained the wisdom wrongfully, and therefore it would not be good wisdom
So in the Gospel today we have Jesus by the Sea of Galilee, up on the mountain, sitting with his disciples. Now this is another pointer here: sitting is a sign of being a teacher. That’s why even to this day we talk about professors having a chair in the university, it is from the ancient times when teachers sat to teach while the poor students had to stand or sit on the ground (which considering the state of mediaeval floors would have been a very risky thing to do). Even our churches only had seats in the form of pews at the Reformation, when long, long sermons became the norm, necessitating a little more comfort in church. Some clergy still think that pews are a dangerous innovation I think, let alone modern heating or cushions.
Another point is that he is on a mountain. Now the Sea of Galilee is not really surrounded by mountains like the Himalayas, but rather low hills, but the point is to suggest the great prophet Moses, who goes up to Sinai. John in his Gospel is showing our Lord as a teacher and prophet in the light of Moses.
Then Jesus asks Philip where are we to buy the bread for the people. I bet Philip took a double take at that, suddenly being asked to be responsible for feeding five thousand people. We are then told that six months wages would not be enough to buy bread enough.
Then Simon brings up the boy with five barley loaves and two fish. I feel remarkably sorry for that boy. Children don’t usually sell things in public unless they are very poor, the reason being that children are often cheated. So for a child to be carrying around this food, which is more than he can eat, indicates he was selling it, and he was poor. Particularly as barley bread is the cheap poor bread, not made with wheat. And also vulnerable to being cheated. He must have thought that he was going to lose the lot. I only hope he got the leftovers at the end.
Our Lord then takes the bread and blesses and distributes it to the crowd and also the fish. The bread is emphasised more now in the story, a shadowing of the Eucharistic feast that will come with the bread and wine.
Interestingly there are five loaves at the start: five is a very unholy number: it has no great symbolism However, we have at the end twelve baskets of fragments, a much holier number, which is a sign of the twelve tribes of Israel, or the twelve Apostles: a symbol of the completeness of God’s order.
So the sign of Jesus’s power is done.
Then the crowds want to make him king.
What John is presenting in his Gospel is a sign – this is a very Johannine presentation, signs are ways of showing our Lord’s great power and symbolic role. They point to his role as the Son of God. Yet people in the Gospel continually misunderstand the signs, as here: instead of seeing it as a divine sign and recognising him as God, they instead want to make him an earthly king. They want a king who can continually feed them, not a king who is God.
The miracle of the feeding of the five thousand is teaching a clear point: that God is not bound by the rule of limited good: God is not bound by the idea that there are only finite wealth, food and goodness in the world. God’s mercy and forgiveness has no boundaries, no limits: we do not earn God’s forgiveness and love, it is offered in abundance, like the feeding of five thousand from five loaves.
We, who are partakers of the Eucharistic feast, the bread of heaven here today, are also asked to remember that bounty. We are forgiven without condition: we are loved without condition: all we need do is to ask God. God then takes our offering and makes with it God’s own bounty. However, we are called to live in a world without conditions either: our love is not one bounded by ideas of limitations; we are to continually give and love in the world in the same way: forgive us our sins as we forgive others; love others as we are loved. Christians are called to do the supernatural, to live recklessly like God, and love and support with that same miraculous bounty. There is no limited good in God’s kingdom: it is one of infinite joy; infinite love; infinite forgiveness.

Scandal and Teaching - 19 July, 2009, OS 16B

Those of you with good memories may remember my comments a few weeks ago about the strange word pericope. Now pericopes are small sections of the Gospels, literally cut pieces, which is how the Gospels are constructed normally. Scholars think they reflect the origin of the Gospels, existing as independent separate pieces that could be easily told, memorised or acted out.
It is rare for the three synoptic writers, that is, Matthew, Mark and  Luke, to combine the pericopes. Yet today, as when I last talked about pericopes, to prove my comments wrong, in one sense we have the another combination. The gospel reading today is set in a wider context. Going back to the start of the chapter, after the people of his own country are scandalised by him because of his teaching, our Lord sends out the twelve, two by two, and they go so people may repent, casting out demons and healing the sick by anointing.
Then we jump to Herod, and a reflection back to the death of John the Baptist. Herod had imprisoned John because, we are told, John had criticised his immoral marriage to Herodias, his brother’s wife. Then Herod allows, through a foolish promise, John to be executed. Notice the core of the reason that John is imprisoned is from his criticism about the immoral marriage: John criticises the scandal of the marriage.
Then immediately after this passage we have the pericope read today, about the apostles returning to Jesus. Jesus then tells them to come away to a lonely place by themselves. Now here this is interesting because it reflects a concern of Jesus, that activity should be balanced by rest. I always think that one of the great mysteries of modern life is that how so many time-saving devices have meant less time. You think about all the gadgets you have in your houses and life: cars, washing machines, vacuum cleaners: all have a purpose to save us time. Yet we don’t find our lives filled with large gaps of free times when we can relax; instead we find more and more things to do with our time rather than rejoice in the space in our lives. But the Scriptures are always about the need to balance work with rest: the very story of creation in Genesis has God working for six days and resting on the seventh as a divine pattern for life. Similarly, our Lord here instructs the twelve to come away and rest after the work of the mission of going and teaching.
Yet the good plan fails, for when they reach a lonely place, the crowd follow. We are told it is a great throng, and our Lord has compassion on them because they were like sheep without a shepherd.
Now this is where should be surprised when we listen carefully. We have been told that the disciples have been healing, and how our Lord has been healing. The people who are coming to our Lord are mainly not the educated, the wealthy, but the poor and sick, desperate for help in a country where any sickness can easily mean a life of poverty or starvation. So our Lord has compassion on them, so what does he do: he teaches.
Teaches: not heals, but teaches.
Now this is where the different threads start to come together. The scandal of Jesus teaching in his own hometown: where did this man get this wisdom from? The scandal of Herod marrying Herodias. Then with the great throng, the crowd, where what one would expect is healing: that is why the crowd flock to him. Yet they get not healing and casting out of demons, but teaching instead.
What this passage is suggesting, that will be developed through the understanding of the whole Gospel, is the question of illness, violence and wholeness. We should also not ignore that the Gospels closely tie demonic possession to illness as well, for the Gospel writers, like Mark, closely see that the nature of illness is in evil. Furthermore, we are continually told about the crowds who flock to Jesus for healing, who, as we know, will turn against him at the end and shout for his death. There is something fundamentally flawed in the people. They are ill. They have evil in them. They are like sheep without a shepherd.
And our Lord has compassion on them, and teaches them.
So here we see the solution: it is by understanding, wisdom, that the problems are solved. Miracles of healing are not enough; after all, all those who are healed will sicken and die again, even the Lazarus that John recounts. Healings are only temporary. What Jesus brings in teaching, is to understand.
That teaching is that the fault lies in ourselves: we are the ones who are scandalised, we are the ones who point the finger, we are the ones who call for blood. The only way we escape from this is to realise that we are responsible: we have the sin. But the good news is that God forgives us anyway, and furthermore: the life of Jesus means that he is the victim for our evil: he becomes the willing victim of the powers of the world and the crowds, so he stands forever in the place of those victimised.
This has serious consequences for us: we are to take responsibility for our actions of victimisation. We are to find that every time we want to find a convenient victim, a scapegoat, Jesus is in that victim. But we also learn the great gifts of forgiveness; that Jesus is there to forgive us no matter what, even when we crucify him. This why, we have to learn, time and time again, that the church, the company of the disciples living in his body here on earth, is not a hotel for saints, but a hospital for sinners. But the cure we find is one in learning about our selves: we find healing in teaching and understanding the nature of Jesus.

God is Bigger than You Can Imagine - 5th July, 2009

Let me tell you about the prophet Ezekiel. He was a priest, a man of the House of Aaron, a man who could serve in the Temple of God at Jerusalem. Yet the story of Ezekiel starts with him nowhere near Jerusalem; instead he is living with the exiles by the River Chebar, which is in modern Iraq. He is a man out of place, forced to live away from his Temple, which gave him work and status.
While he was with these exiles, the hand of the Lord comes upon him, and he starts an extraordinary collection of prophecies. In one sense they are even more extraordinary for during their giving, news comes to Ezekiel that Jerusalem is destroyed. The centre of Jewish life disappears.
In one sense, the visions of Ezekiel are part of a huge shift in Jewish understanding of God. They move the cult of God away from an early city and temple to an understanding of God much greater. They see God as above the city and temple, which are then seen as only copies of the true heavenly one. The God of the Jews survives the loss of temple, because Ezekiel grows to understand that God is more than early temples and limitations. The Temple may be no more, the role of a priest may be no more, but God still is, loving and giving prophecies to his people.
The prophet Ezekiel is part of the great shift in understanding that happened to the Jews at this time. Before they had seen their God, based in the Temple at Jerusalem, as the most powerful god, ruler over all other gods. The destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple asked the question why did this happen? There were two possible answers. Firstly, their god was not the top god, and that was why the God of Israel was beaten. The second was that the God of Israel allowed it to happen, this was part of the punishment and testing of Israel that would bring forth a better understanding of their place and the place of God.
Another way of saying this was that the Jews moved from being mono-idolaters to monotheists; that is, they moved from seeing their God as being top god among many to seeing their god as sole God. That also necessitated them understanding that God did not need the temple. In one-way that is why Ezekiel has to be a priest: only a priest, one whose whole sense of worth and employment depended on the Temple could bring the news that the Temple was not necessary. Reform happens best when it starts within the institution. By the time in chapter 33 that the news finally comes that Jerusalem is destroyed, Ezekiel is way beyond the need of Jerusalem, as can be seen that the destruction of the Temple is not even mentioned I the news. Ezekiel has moved beyond earthly cites and temples.
Similarly the gospel today is also about changing worldviews. Jesus comes to his own town and starts to teach. The worldview of this time is one of closed good – there can only be a certain amount to wealth and knowledge. If someone gets richer, someone else must get poorer. Similarly, if someone gets wisdom, then someone else must lose it. That is why the question the people put are so illustrative. They don’t ask, how did this man become wise – instead they ask where did this man get this wisdom – who has given it to him? They understand wisdom to belong to certain people, authority figures, teachers, who receive it from their masters. For Jesus to be wise, he has to get it from somewhere. If he did not get it legitimately, then it was stolen, false wisdom, wisdom that was not true because it had not been given properly. If Jesus was a priest, or a recognised student of a master it would be valid. That is why they disparage Jesus – they know he is only the son of the carpenter, son of Mary (with its imputation that he as not the true son of Joseph by linking him with a woman and not a man). That is why they take offence at him – they do not recognise him for being a source of true authority and wisdom.
But our Lord wants to teach a new way outside the system of closed good, stating that God’s mercy is not closed, that religion is not a system where there is only so much goodness around, where good and evil have to be endless matched and measured. Our Lord teaches that God’s love is continually overflowing, that it has no limits: that God forgives, forgives and forgives; and God loves, loves and loves.
The message from the Scriptures today is that God will continually expand our understanding of how God is. God taught the ancient Jews to realise that God was greater than a place and temple. Our Lord taught that he was beyond the local limitations of his own people. We become too settled, too complacent with God. God becomes amazed at our complacency, our unbelief. Our journeys in faith should be ones that continually open us to deeper levels, new understandings, greater love.
There is a story of St Augustine of hippo that he had a dream. In it he was walking along the sea pondering the mystery of the God when he came upon a young boy. Augustine watched the boy repeatedly carry a bucket to the sea, fill it with water and empty it into a hole in the sand. After some time the saint asked the boy what he was doing. “I’m going to empty the ocean into this hole,” came the reply. Augustine told the boy he would never be able to do that, at which point the boy said to him, “And you will never fit the mystery of the God in your mind.”

Views on History, OS 12 B, 21st June, 2009.

“Have you considered my servant Job?” is the question that God puts to Satan in the first chapter of the Book of Job. Job is living a good life, prosperous, a large family and Job was a good man. All is going well, and when Satan comes from going to and fro upon the earth, God ask Satan this question, “Have you considered my servant Job?”
However, Satan answers back and tells God that Job is only a good man because he is having a good life. So God puts Job in Satan’s power, and Job loses everything, except his wife, for some reason (unless she was seen as part of the punishment), and furthermore is inflected with loathsome sores from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head. Then his friends arrive and a long discussion follows, where the friends are sure that Job must have committed some sin to cause all this grief. Job continually justifies himself and his friends continue to argue that he must have done something wrong to suffer in this way.
Thirty-eight chapters later the Book of Job ends when God concludes the argument. God tell Job to gird up his loins like a man, a great phrase that is omitted in the reading, and then question Job to where he was when everything was made. God challenges Job to understand the whole of creation. Job then realises that he cannot understand the purposes of God and the whole argument of whether he was righteous or not, and deserving of this punishment, is irrelevant.
The Book of Job has a profound theology. It states that we cannot understand the purposes of God and furthermore, God does not give us good lives or bad lives in return for our actions. Now this was an innovation. Many parts of the Bible, such as the psalms, clearly see the righteous being rewarded for their good deeds.  Even to this day, there are Christians who argue for a theology of prosperity, that God rewards the good with good things. The better you are, they argue, the more likely you are to succeed. They use some good lines from Scripture to justify this. However, the Old Testament is not a harmonious book: it is more of a long struggle of the chosen people to come to an understanding of their God, and Job is an important part of this reflection. The Book of Job clearly puts the argument that God does not give out earthly rewards for good behaviour like some sort of celestial lollies.
The lesson is one that was not learnt quickly though. Several times the disciples in the New Testament put the question of why people were punished for their sins: such as a the man born blind, was it something he did or his parents that caused the blindness [John 9]? Or why the tower of Siloam fell on the people [Luke 13]?  But our Lord takes the question away from the dead-end question, and instead talks about the glory and works of God.
Well, in the Gospel, we have another moment. Our Lord and the disciples are asleep in a boat on the Lake of Galilee, and the storm arises. While our Lord sleeps the disciples panic and believe that they are perishing. They wake our Lord, who calms the waters, and rebukes the disciples for their lack of faith.
Now the question comes: what was their lack of faith about? The simple answer is that he would not take care of them. That’s easy enough, but there is more here, and what is here is an attitude problem. Job wants to know what he has done to be punished. The disciples want to know about who sinned to cause the man to be blind. The disciples are accused of being afraid and having no faith.
Part of the good news about our Lord Jesus Christ is that he comes to give us a new world-view. Basically, we are told to lift up our eyes. Don’t get bogged in detail. We are too close to the action of history to be able to interpret it. We will not understand God acting directly in our lives: our God is not one of punishment and reward here. The meaning of God’s plan for history cannot be seen in day-to-day living. Instead we are to have faith and not be afraid.
What Jesus is calling us to do is to live life in a new way. Firstly we live life now. We cannot change the past and the future is unknown. All we can do is to use the opportunity God gives us now. It is an error to try and interpret our part in the meaning of this moment. It cannot be done – to do so is to fall into the error of Job and his friends. We are to live lives instead of faith in our Lord. Faith that God has control over history, God has control over our lives. That is the faith we are meant to have, to trust that God knows all and loves us. We may be in a boat in a storm in danger of being swamped, but at all times we have the Lord in our midst. He may appear to be sleeping, and we often suspect that God is sleeping, but we should have more trust.
It is this trust in the presence of God that has helped the saints throughout the Church. Those great saints who faced persecutions with joy and trust, knowing that despite what was happening, God loved them and had a purpose for them. So are we called to live. We cannot be Job, wanting to know the reason for everything. If we want to do that, we had better gird up our loins like a man and start to explain the universe to God. Instead we can be good disciples, knowing we are in a boat in the storm, thinking God is asleep, but having trust and love that God will be there for us, and get us safely to the other side.

Corpus Christi 14th June, 2009

Good theology and good science, as I mentioned last week, have at the end clarity and simplicity. Consider Einstein’s great theory, that E = mc2. We have all heard of it. It’s simple yet with profound physics behind it that helps to explain nuclear reactions and stellar physics.

Similarly, the God who made physics also gives nice clear theology. Last week we looked at the simplicity of the Trinity, how the three persons are held together in one by the power of love, which then, by the nature of love, overflows, calling the universe into being out of the abundance of love.

Well today we tackle another great theological feast, the feast of Corpus Christi, when we celebrate the institution of the sacrament of the altar. The modern church calendar, with its movement of feasts, gives us a real treat at this season, with Ascension, Pentecost, Trinity and Corpus Christi following one after another, giving us the marching season, with processions every week in honour of these great theological insights into the nature of God.

So when we come to consider the theological meaning of today, we are once again faced with great simplicity leading into great profundity. At the last supper our Lord takes bread, blesses it and calls it his body. After the supper he takes wine, blesses it, and calls it his body. From this our Holy Mother Church celebrates his presence in the blessing of bread and wine.

But then the complexity starts. How is our Lord present in the bread and wine? Our Western theology during the Middle Ages tended to concentrate on moments and methodology. Hence it emphasised the defining moment of Christ’s life as his crucifixion for our salvation and forgiveness of sins, and tied his sacrifice there with the nature of the sacrament of the bread and wine. Modern theology has tried to re-capture an earlier broadness, where the crucifixion is seen within the incarnation, life, passion, crucifixion, resurrection and ascension of our Lord. We are moving away from moments and definitions into a wider understanding. Hence in the same way as things like Newtonian theory of physics are seen as being valid only within certain frameworks, we tend to now accept the older definitions of how Christ can be under the form of bread and wine as theories, which are good, but not the only way that is always valid as defining how this happens. Therefore we say that we believe that Christ is truly present in the bread and wine, what we call the real presence, but we leave the definitions of how this is, such as with transubstantiation or consubstantiation, as theories.

I won’t go into these today, fascinating though the different arguments are, because they have the weakness of concentrating on moments instead of the broader picture.

Perhaps the best point to start any discussion of the sacrament is in the love of God. If you start with love you can’t go wrong I find. As I mentioned before, the Trinity is held together by love. This love then overflows, calling the universe into being, and God calls us into being to experience that love. Now love and desire are closely related. By our nature as created rational beings, we echo the God who made us, and we are born with the innate desire to love God in return. Hence as long as there have been humans there has been worship. Through our ancestors in faith, the Jews, we learnt that God is truly one. This was symbolised also in the creation of the Temple, where the one God was worshipped in one place. Yet the experience of the exile and destruction of the Temple, and its eventual re-founding, also taught them that God could not be bound in one place.

The Gospels foreshadow the replacement of the Temple in the death of our Lord. The veil of the sanctuary is torn, symbolising the end of the definitive place of the presence of God. Christians will not have the Temple as their sole source of worship: instead our Lord gives the sacrament of the bread and wine. This will be the presence of our Lord in their midst, in the same way the Temple was the also the presence of God in the midst of Israel.

It comes down to love again. Because we are born with that love of God, and that desire to find God, it should fill our whole lives, and we should see the whole creation shimmering with the divine presence of God, and find our Lord present in the bread and wine is we can rejoice in how God takes the simple basic bread and wine and makes them God’s presence. But the Reformation, developing late mediaeval theology, struck its colours on the cross, with the idea of that the death of Jesus gave satisfaction to God the Father for all our sins, building a theology of sin and satisfaction within the legality of salvation that could hide the love and grace of God. But the story is greater than this. We have an innate desire for God; we can’t help it, we are born with it as created souls. We have joy when our desire is fulfilled. Without God it is cut off. But desire cut off from its source is both dammed and damned. It is dammed, in that it cannot flow towards it natural end of finding God. Our desires still exist, but we channel them into the desires of the world, that cannot satisfy us, and thereby damns us to a misery of emotional enslavement to things that do not last.

We as Christians believe we can only find the true fulfilment of our desire in finding the love of God. The presence of God in the sacrament fulfils that desire. It also shows great insights: firstly, that our desires are fulfilled in the simple things of the world, bread and wine and not great possessions. It also shows us that God is present in these simple things, and reminds us again of the shimmering presence of God transfusing all creation. Most importantly it shows us that God comes to us and is present in the intimacy of this sacred bread and wine. God comes to us. God is not distant, God is not out of reach, God comes to us and lives in our midst, calling us to worship and adore and to love in the sacrament. That is why, day by day, Holy Mother Church celebrates this sacrament, calling us to come and worship so we can find our deepest desire fulfilled in the love of God, present and given in the sacrament of the altar.

Simple things, simple bread and wine, simple love: all pointing to the great wonder of God, the great Trinity of three in one, love holding Father, Son and Holy Spirit in one God, that same love that calls us into being, giving us the desire to love in return. Then to fulfil that love our Lord gives himself, in the simplicity that always marks the greatness of God, the simplicity of bread and wine, that we are called to take and eat, and worship in wonder..

Thinking the Trinity Trinity Sunday, 7th June, 2009

Today is a day you can get yourself tired into knots, is some sort of mystical yoga. Contemplation of the Trinity is one of those things that can lead you into the depths of God, where you suddenly find yourself lost in the sheer unknowability of God.
Today is the day we tackle the dogma of the Trinity. We call it dogma, as it is part of the revealed truth of the church, in contrast to just a theory. The dogma of the Trinity is part of the consideration of Holy Mother Church of the whole experience of Christians of God. We started, with our fellow believers the Jews, with the understanding that there was only one God. It is not that God is the most important God among all other gods, but that there really was only one God. This was the great insight of the Jews, called monotheism, which we inherit with the Moslems.
Now, that’s the easy part. But the coming of Jesus Christ to live among us, and his unique claim that he was the Son of God, proven by his rising from the dead, plus the experience of the gift of the Holy Spirit in the life of the Church, meant that Christians had to come to terms with God seen through three things: God the Father, who Jesus always spoke as a different person to himself, our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and the Holy Spirit. Through the life and witness of the church over the first few centuries it came to be seen that God was three persons and yet one God, a mystical unity of three in one. With that insight, of three distinct persons in one unity, we started to understand something of the deep reality of God: that God exists in a community, loving and holding all three persons together. This explains then how we can say God is love, because what holds the Trinity together is the love that each person, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, is the love for each other binding and overflowing, which causes God to create the universe so it too can experience love and find the love of God, and share that love with each other.
In the end is remarkably simple: God is One, yet seen in three persons: Father, Son and Spirit, and what holds it together is love. That love then overflows, causing the inverse into being so love may be experience. Hence we find our deepest contentment in the realisation that we are loved and give love in return, to God and to each other.
Yet it is also a great mystery, the distinctions and meaning of Father, Son and Spirit that allow you to ponder and loose yourself.
Today also we will be using the Athanasian Creed. We don’t use this very often, in fact many Anglicans never see it at all. But St George’s being St George’s we get everything here. The Anglican Church accepts three creeds, or statements of faith: the Apostles’, the Nicene and Athanasian. The Apostles’ Creed comes from the early centuries of the Church, hence it is called after the early leaders, the Apostles. The Nicene Creed was the statement of the Church that developed in the time of the peace of the Church, after the end of the Roman persecutions, in the 4th Century, to help develop a common understanding of the nature of God and the Trinity. These two Creeds are the accepted by all the great historic churches, such as Roman Catholics, Orthodox, and also ourselves.
Then, later in the next few centuries, the Athanasian Creed developed in Western Europe. To give it better authority is was credited to the great saint Athanasius, who was a great teacher of the faith in Egypt, then a centre of Christianity, in the 4th C. Even though Egypt is now a majority Muslim country, there is still about 10% of the population Christian. This Creed was then accepted by the Western Catholic Church during the early Middle Ages, around the 6th to 8th C, and therefore inherited at the Reformation by us and also the Lutherans and also some other churches.
However, it has a few problems, which is why it is so seldom seen. Firstly, it is rather proscriptive: if you don’t believe this you will not be saved. As it has never been accepted by the Orthodox, that seems a tall order. Furthermore, most Christians, and by that I include most sane Anglicans, have moved beyond the idea that God is so tidy in determining who, or who not, will be saved. Christians have also realised that God may even save people who are not Christians: certainly, the promises of God made to the Jews must surely still stand, and if so, then can we be so sure of the other faiths of the world also?
As a result the Athanasian Creed has been left in a dusty cupboard as being too hard. Anglicans, from the Lambeth Conferences, have already said it is not part of the essential faith needed in re-union. The Episcopalians, the American Anglicans, define it in their catechism as an ancient document proclaiming the nature of the Incarnation and of God as Trinity in contrast to the Nicene Creed as a Creed of the Universal Church. At the heart of this problem is the nature of the Trinity: if the Trinity is understood to be the relationship of God in love, then it’s a bit tough to use it a way to define who God does not love, that is, those who are definitely not saved.
So what of its future? Well, at the moment it’s in the too hard basket. The majority of Anglicans never even get to use it. But we are, however, with a caveat. One suggestion is that we just drop the start and the end of it, and leave the rest as is, where we can appreciate it for a bit of spiritual poetry. So that’s what we are going to do today. The sheets with it, that were handed out, have the offending lines in italics, and the rest in bold, and that’s what we are using, so omit the lines in italics. That way you can see the whole thing.
It’s worthwhile at times to remember that the Holy Mother Church on earth and her teaching can be untidy, like with the Athanasian Creed. The faith is not something that comes to us 100% complete: Jesus did not leave us with a complete manual for life. What he gave us was a brain to think, a church to share, and the Holy Sprit to guide. When you become a Christian you don’t become lobotomised, God expects us to do some thinking and praying. Don’t come here for absolute certainty, but come here for love. The Trinity is all about the love of God, God loving God and God loving us and yearning for us to love God in return. That means that we will have untidy ends in Holy Mother Church and her teaching, such as the Athanasian Creed, or the other untidy ends such as women’s ordination, homosexuality, or divorce and marriage. Holy Mother Church is a mother: and mothers are not perfect but they do love us. It’s worthwhile to remember that and not pretend to be perfect, but always do the Trinity: love. That will cover a lot.

Up, Up and Away - Ascension, 24th May, 2009.

Some wit asked me the other day, what in a sentence would the sermon for this Sunday be. I think they were planning to doze through the sermon, so they could get the idea in advance. Or perhaps they just liked me struggling to try to reduce the discernment of the great events of salvation history into a sound bite. However, your Rector is not deterred by simple challenges of reducing the insight of the saints and theology of the church over the ages to a Manuel of Christianity for dummies. So I said, the message is, that God goes up to heaven.
Well, that’s true. Today we recall the ascension of our Lord, how he returns to heaven. This finishes the early stage of his ministry. But if I had been quicker, or my subject more open to the subtleties of theology I would have put it into two great phrases for the early church, which are:
1.    God became human so we could become divine.
2.    What is not ascended is not healed.
When we say God became human, we touch on what theologians call the incarnation: that God, in the person of Jesus Christ, becomes a fully human person. It is not that God appeared to be human, like some spirit, God was human, and was subject to our condition, of aging, hunger and all the demands of human life. But by dying, rising and ascending, Jesus finishes the great journey of God; he takes our humanity into God. This makes the point: our humanity is not a burden, but blessed. If God were willing to take on our human nature, then it makes the great affirmation, that humanity, in its physicality, is worthy of God: it is the great gift to us. But more than that: Jesus changes our humanity, he creates a new mutant: we are now no longer solely beings who live and die; he infuses outside time eternity with our lives. We are now creatures who are offered eternal life; our Lord’s divinity is mixed with our humanity to make us a new creature.
The Ascension here is an important event that we celebrate not just as a historical event. We don’t just celebrate the event of our Lord’s life as history: that belittles God. If we did that we would have things like the Sunday celebrating his first tooth and other idiocies. That’s not about faith; that is why the gospels just skip so much of our Lord’s life. What is important is the why of God, the theology. The Ascension makes the ending of the physical life of our Lord here. But the body is not discarded as a useless shell; it is taken into heaven, in the inadequate phrase of the gospels, where he seats at the right hand of God. What they are trying to get across to us poor limited beings is that he takes his humanity with him and it still exists in the Godhead. God takes our humanity with him, so that it is continually honoured by God and what we are is honoured as well. We are not a religion that can look as the body as a piece of evil: instead, we look on it as something honoured and accepted and part of God and changed by God.
Now the second point is that what is not ascended is not healed. In a sense this is the great warning of the ancient church. We live in a world that is imperfect and has evil. Our continual urge is to quarantine sections of our lives and societies as imperfect, evil, or sinful. Once we do that, we ghetto them, we can ignore them, or even worse try to eradicate them. It’s also called scapegoating, blaming something for all that is wrong. We do it with people, like the Nazis scapegoated the Jews, or we can do it with ourselves: if only I had not been mistreated I could have achieved so much, or if only I had been six foot two I could have led a wonderful life. There are much more relevant examples I assure you, how people choose some aspect to lay a blame. But we are warned: what is not ascended is not healed. What that means is that we have to take everything to God, if we seek healing for our sins and failings. God is interested in everything. So whenever we start to scapegoat, our Lord has the nasty habit of reminding us that he was the scapegoat for all time, and God will be with the victim. God will be with those persecuted. Furthermore, as long as we blame part of ourselves with our failures, we will not find healing. Awful things may happen in our lives: but God wants us to find in them his own presence so we can find healing. God is with our tears, and not just our joys.
That is why the second point is that what is not ascended is not healed. If we want healing, we have to let God take up us in all our failures and hurts. God does not expect us to come to him perfect: that’s missing the whole point: God wants us to come with all our imperfections because God loves us without preconditions. It’s love, not standards that God is all about. If we want healing, we have to let God take it all up: it all has to be ascended.
That’s why the Gospels make two points about Jesus after his resurrection several times: one that he is still human, you can touch him and he eats, and secondly that he still has the wounds, they are just not fatal. He is the living walking wounded healed God, all those contradictions in one. If you can get that all into your head in one go, you are getting there, but that should take a lifetime of contemplation and more to understand that.
So if you can’t get that in one go then just remember: God became human so we could become divine; and, what is not ascended is not healed. Or if that is too hard, and you have missed the whole sermon and just woken up, then just take the sound bite: today we celebrate that God has gone up to heaven, and we are riding on his coattails.

Being Good - Easter 4 B, 3rd May, 2009.

Now, some of you may have, or had, a dog. Well, if you have, you would no doubt have told the dog at some time, that he was a good dog. The reason – because the dog had done something good, like fetched your paper or not dug out your best pot plant. You call the dog good, because of his actions, or alternatively naughty when he does something bad.
The temptation then is that when we hear about the good shepherd in today’s readings, we see Jesus in the same way.  We think Jesus is good because of all the good things he has done: he heals the sick and is nice to sinners and even dies for us. We tend to think of Jesus as good because of his deeds. He is the good shepherd because he has done good things.
But when you look closely at the original text today, the writer John deliberately does not use the phrase “good shepherd” in that way. Instead he uses a different form of good. Instead of “agathos,” which is good acting, he chooses “kalos.”
Now kalos is different. Although it has an overlap of good acting, it points to an inward quality instead. Its meaning can range from beautiful, noble, model to good. Jesus is good, not because of good deeds, but because he is intrinsically good. The quality is inside.
That is why the contrast with the hired shepherd is so chosen. A hired shepherd is paid to act, paid to look after the sheep. As such, he is a good acting shepherd as long as he is paid and as long as the risks are not too dangerous. Wolves are dangerous, so the hired shepherd balances the risks and saves his own life.
The difference is important in how we are as Christians. Christians do not do good acts for the sake of those acts. That’s the wrong sort of good; that is good in terms of appearance. What good acts we do are, in one sense, a co-incidence, as a result of us being right with God. Our acts flow from who we are, what we are, rather than any need to do them in themselves.
That is one reason why enclosed religious orders exist. Now if you concentrate only on good deeds, then enclosed religious orders don’t seem very useful at first glance. What’s the use if no one sees them? But that is once again looking at results, not sources.
Christians are called to become Christ-like. We are called to be good, not in good deeds, but good in person, good in the soul. We are called to live lives that continually test and refine us, and develop us, so that we are good in ourselves.
Then whatever good we do, we do as a result of being in tune with God. Good acts happen accidently in our eyes, but fulfil the will of God. We will be in the fight place at the right time, if we are right with God. That is when we do our good acts. There are many, many people who do good deeds: give money to charity, work at countless public initiatives, and help those in need: non-Christians can do all of these very successfully.
But that is not enough for us. For we believe that God created the world, and made it good, and that we struggle against evil to hold it and make it good still. That sort of goodness is different. That is the goodness of being a good person in spirit, and of being a child of God. That sort of goodness is innate, and can only be done by keeping a Christian life, of prayer and being with God, of taking the sacraments, so that we live as Christ’s body in the world, we are the good shepherd.
Then we tune into God and do what needs to be done to make the world right for God. Wee don’t do good deeds because we want to, we do them because God has placed us in the right sport at the right time. Those little things that are so essential that we may never know, even to being the person who says just the right thing when someone is down. They are the good deeds that flow from being a good person.
In another way, it also shows the beauty of holiness. Remember, the kalos shepherd, the good shepherd, is also the beautiful shepherd. We should have a beauty of holiness in our lives and in our worship. Sometimes people do not get why we do things in this way, with all the music and ceremony. But if you get the idea that there is a beauty of holiness, a beauty from being with God, then you start to understand why we worship in this way, why we offer the best in music, worship and buildings, for the glory of the God who is beauty itself. God is the beautiful shepherd, and we try and give to God the beautiful worship.
Our Lord is not the good shepherd in the same way as we have a good dog. But he is the beauty, the love the joy of our hearts instead. So keep on trying to be right with God, try keeping your prayer life going, your time with god, take the sacraments, so that you may develop as a child of god. Don’t worry about results, you are not a performing dog, you are a child of god trying to be a good Christian.

Of Crosses and Crucifixes - Easter 2

Recently I was listening to a sermon that was talking about the cross. It happens when you are a Christian.  It was quite interesting, as it made the point that people often get the symbolism of the cross wrong. Think about it. What does the cross actually symbolise?

Well, we have the cross and the crucifix. The cross is just the empty cross; it’s a convenient symbol, but in many ways not a good one. It is after all the instrument of torture or the cross after the body of Jesus is taken down. As such it is really a symbol of failure more than anything else. It is for that reason that it has never, by itself, been the great dominant image in our ancient churches, except in the times of the iconoclasts, who were opposed to all depictions of people.

There are of course some lovely legends about the cross, the greatest being the golden legend, how the cross was the tree of good and evil in Eden, that died for shame after the fruit was plucked. It was then taken to be used in Solomon’s temple, but it would not fit: every time they cut it to size, when they tried to fit it, it was still wrong, so in desperation they threw it away, so it sank in the Pool of Bathsheba, where it helped to heal people. Then is floated in time to be taken for the crucifixion. There is was planted over Adam’s grave, so the blood of our Lord flowed down the old tree of life onto Adam’s skull, reversing the entrance of sin by Adam into the world from the tree of life. It is this legend that often causes the skull to be placed at the foot of the crucifix.

But the cross itself is a bit short of symbolism at the end, and that is why it is never anciently placed at the centre of churches. Instead we use the great paintings or carvings of Christ in majesty or judgment, or a crucifix. Christians want to celebrate the victory of Christ (which the empty tomb is one such) and the humanity of Christ. We want a human God, hence we like to show a human Jesus Christ: the suffering God who rises to victory.

It is interesting then to listen to the Gospel accounts of the resurrection. Time and time again we are pointed to the physicality of Jesus. The fact that he is a human. He takes fish and eats it in John. He shows them his hands and feet as well. Now this may seem a strange way to prove that you are the right person, as most of us don’t go round showing our hands and feet as proofs of identity. But Jesus is making a point, that is reinforced today – he is pointing at his wounds.

So Thomas is invited to put his hand into the wound of Christ itself. To prove to him that this was Jesus and Jesus still had wounds.

Now this is important. Christ is risen from the dead, but risen as a wounded person. His wounds do not disappear but appear on his glorified body.

This is where it is good to remember the great theological maxim: that Christ became human so we could become divine. The death and resurrection of Christ takes us with him into a resurrected life. We are taken in the death and resurrection of Christ. But what is taken is ourselves in our imperfections. That is why Christ is wounded and remains wounded, so we can be that body.

Christians are not perfect people. But Christians are a forgiven people. That is why forgiveness is mentioned time and time again in the resurrection stories, for God wants us to know the power of forgiveness. This can only be done by people seeing their faults, of seeing their failures, of seeing their wounds. That can only be done by the regular examination of conscience – every night if possible, so we get to see that we fail. Then in that recognition of our failure, we find the wounds of Christ, and with that we find new life.

Christ is wounded because we are wounded and we must never forget that. Look at the Sacred Heart statue, Our Lord pointing to the way to his heart through his side, inviting us to find him that way. We need to be aware that we are imperfect, we have wounds. A person who believes that perfection is possible is hell on earth. Christians believe we are wounded but receive forgiveness. By learning that, we learn to be gentle and lowly of heart, forgiven others, forgiving ourselves, and being Christ like.

The crucified Christ is the great symbol of our faith, as it shows Christ being wounded for us. The empty Cross is insufficient to fully know the faith, it avoids the pain, it avoids the humanity and forgets the price paid for us and why we must not forget. Christ is still wounded for us, and wants us to find forgiveness in those wounds.

Easter Day

I have been trying to explain to someone about Jesus. You know, it is very difficult to explain to someone the whole reason for Jesus. I find I am better when someone asks m a more technical question: “Father, why is Good Friday called Good?”, or “Why do we eat fish on Friday?” or “Why do we call Mary ‘Mother of God’ and not jut ‘Mother of Jesus’?” I am not too bad on these technical questions.
But the simple explanations of why I should believe in Jesus is a lot harder. Simple answers are not easy.
There is a lovely story of Christ asking his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” Some said that he was one of the prophets, some said Elijah or Moses, and finally one said: “You are the immanent eschaton, the fulfilment of history, the divine tetragram. “ and Jesus said “What?”
Well, some answers are like that.
Well, words are often a lot harder than actions, and that is part of the solution of why I believe in Jesus. Today we celebrate the action of Jesus rising from the dead. We look back to a history of a man who came and lived with other simple people. He taught well, he told them about the love of God, he made a few miracles. But then he was arrested and tried, then died.
If that was all, it may be enough to remember someone. Good teachers in history are remembered: we still study the teaching of the great Greek philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle and Confucius. But there is more.
Jesus made extraordinary claims, He claimed he was the Son of God, equal to God. He also made claims that he was going to call all people to himself. Then before he died he set up a bare structure, just telling his disciple to remember, to serve each other and not lord it over others, and that he would be with them in the special bread and wine. Then he willingly let himself be captured so he could die.
But there was more.
He rose from the dead.
This changed everything. Suddenly those who followed him understood. All his actions, his willingness to die, took on a new meaning. For he said he died not for himself, but for all people. He talked about the forgiveness of sin, and showed that he took away sin. His disciples understood, that he meant it: he meant people to be able to change, he meant people to be able to take away what ever deforms them in life, he meant people to know as a person.
And still there is more.
He lives still.
The disciples found that they met the Lord after his death, the same person yet different. They understood that they were entering a new friendship with him. Through he sacraments of the church, the meal of bread and wine he would be with them always. Furthermore he told them to go out to all the world teaching this good news, that he was alive, and people could find change, could find forgiveness, could find hope.
If they believed in him.
The hardest person on oneself is oneself. One of the great bishops of the 20th Century, the African Festo Kivengere, put it in these terms. He saw himself in a courtroom before a severe judge and he was afraid. His own conscience was the prosecutor, presenting a pile of claims. He felt the stares of witnesses saying, “You were not honest here”, “You acted in a mean way”, “You failed morally.” It went on and on. When you buy, you have to pay, when you sin you have to suffer. That is what his heart told him. Then he saw God step into the courtroom. He took all those things which had wrecked his humanity, all the nasty experiences of sin, all those guilts, and put them on the shoulders of the God-man Jesus. Jesus voluntarily took on all that he owed.
This is what Jesus does. This is what he can do by taking the way of the cross, the suffering of Good Friday. This is what he liberates from us by the Resurrection. If we dare to believe, dare to trust, however timidly or shyly in this miracle, then we find the love of Jesus in return.
That is why I believe.
That is why we are here.
Christ is risen, good people of God, alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.

Easter Day

I have been trying to explain to someone about Jesus. You know, it is very difficult to explain to someone the whole reason for Jesus. I find I am better when someone asks m a more technical question: “Father, why is Good Friday called Good?”, or “Why do we eat fish on Friday?” or “Why do we call Mary ‘Mother of God’ and not jut ‘Mother of Jesus’?” I am not too bad on these technical questions.
But the simple explanations of why I should believe in Jesus is a lot harder. Simple answers are not easy.
There is a lovely story of Christ asking his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” Some said that he was one of the prophets, some said Elijah or Moses, and finally one said: “You are the immanent eschaton, the fulfilment of history, the divine tetragram. “ and Jesus said “What?”
Well, some answers are like that.
Well, words are often a lot harder than actions, and that is part of the solution of why I believe in Jesus. Today we celebrate the action of Jesus rising from the dead. We look back to a history of a man who came and lived with other simple people. He taught well, he told them about the love of God, he made a few miracles. But then he was arrested and tried, then died.
If that was all, it may be enough to remember someone. Good teachers in history are remembered: we still study the teaching of the great Greek philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle and Confucius. But there is more.
Jesus made extraordinary claims, He claimed he was the Son of God, equal to God. He also made claims that he was going to call all people to himself. Then before he died he set up a bare structure, just telling his disciple to remember, to serve each other and not lord it over others, and that he would be with them in the special bread and wine. Then he willingly let himself be captured so he could die.
But there was more.
He rose from the dead.
This changed everything. Suddenly those who followed him understood. All his actions, his willingness to die, took on a new meaning. For he said he died not for himself, but for all people. He talked about the forgiveness of sin, and showed that he took away sin. His disciples understood, that he meant it: he meant people to be able to change, he meant people to be able to take away what ever deforms them in life, he meant people to know as a person.
And still there is more.
He lives still.
The disciples found that they met the Lord after his death, the same person yet different. They understood that they were entering a new friendship with him. Through he sacraments of the church, the meal of bread and wine he would be with them always. Furthermore he told them to go out to all the world teaching this good news, that he was alive, and people could find change, could find forgiveness, could find hope.
If they believed in him.
The hardest person on oneself is oneself. One of the great bishops of the 20th Century, the African Festo Kivengere, put it in these terms. He saw himself in a courtroom before a severe judge and he was afraid. His own conscience was the prosecutor, presenting a pile of claims. He felt the stares of witnesses saying, “You were not honest here”, “You acted in a mean way”, “You failed morally.” It went on and on. When you buy, you have to pay, when you sin you have to suffer. That is what his heart told him. Then he saw God step into the courtroom. He took all those things which had wrecked his humanity, all the nasty experiences of sin, all those guilts, and put them on the shoulders of the God-man Jesus. Jesus voluntarily took on all that he owed.
This is what Jesus does. This is what he can do by taking the way of the cross, the suffering of Good Friday. This is what he liberates from us by the Resurrection. If we dare to believe, dare to trust, however timidly or shyly in this miracle, then we find the love of Jesus in return.
That is why I believe.
That is why we are here.
Christ is risen, good people of God, alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.

Good Friday

Today we come to the second day of the great Triduum, the great three days. The services flow into each other, with no dismissal between, as we walk one journey to the cross and meditate on why Jesus chose this way.
Last night we learnt that on the last night of freedom our Lord decided to teach his followers two things: one that he would be with them in the future in the bread and wine, his living presence after his death, and that the foundation of the church shall be in service: that we are to be a people who follow our Lord and serve each other and those around us.
Then Jesus goes out into the night, and the soldiers come and take him. St Matthew records a touching detail: when Judas comes, Jesus calls him friend. His betrayer is welcomed as a friend, even with those who come to take and torture him. The loving openness of our Lord now is particularly intense: he walks the way of suffering with a gentleness and love that even reaches out to those now hate and despise him.
The rest of the way is the hard part: the trial, the abandonment by his friends, the whipping, the torture: then the slow struggle to the cross. Finally, on the wood of the cross his life is nailed, with metal through flesh, leaving our Lord in agony.
Once more we are moved by little touches: St Luke record how one thief asked Jesus to remember him, and receives the assurance that this day, this day of all days, he will be with our Lord in paradise. Forgiveness and love flows even in pain and torture from our Lord.
St Julian of Norwich, one of the great English mystics of the later Middle Ages, once had a vision where she asked our Lord about his suffering. In it she learnt that our Lord would have suffered even more, if possible, if through this he could have shown his love more clearly.
What we learn today is that all of this way, this torture, this suffering is done for us. Our Lord needed to show us that God would drink with us the very depths of suffering, to show how deeply God identifies with us. The God who made the heavens and the earth could have stopped this cruelty within an instance. But Jesus allows this to happen, even though he could stop it, he lets himself be the powerless victim, he controls his power and allows the torture, to show to each and every one of us, that all suffering is taken upon him, all sorrow is carried by him.
The why we are shown today is that our God suffer with us and for us.
We must all undergo suffering in the world. It is a deeply unfair place, with so much maiming us and deforming us. Even worse, we know how our failings, our sins, our constant sin makes us a mockery of the creature of light and love that God made us to be. God wants each and every one of us to be a creature of light, of love, of pure joy in the world: and we all know how much we fail. Yet God does not abandon us ever; and today is the proof of his constant presence; Jesus walks the way of the cross to take upon himself our failures, our sins, so we can have hope.
There is nothing greater than the love shown to us today.
The why of suffering we learn today is this: the way of the cross is the way of love, that God voluntarily walks it for us to take on our burdens. If he could have walked it with even more suffering, he would have done so, because he chose to do so out of love for us. Why did he walk this way – because every time we walk a step on our own way of the cross, when life is hard, or distorted by sin, we find there a loving presence of he whom has walked that way before us.
Why does the world suffer, why do we have pain and grief, why is the world a place of suffering? The way of suffering has no answer today but the way of the cross. Suffering, grief and sin are great wastelands of aimlessness, where souls can wander to their own loss. There are no sign posts with sin: sin and suffering show no hope, no solutions, only despair. But across this great wasteland of suffering now runs the footprints of our Lord, the staggering way of the cross, that marks in blood the path out of despair. The way of the cross is the signpost to all who believe in the love of God. We have his presence: we are given his very body and very blood to be part of him. We have the entry point: the commandment to serve, for unless we serve we cannot take up the cross. Now we find the way of love, so with our cross in his we may walk through the wastelands of hopelessness, knowing that he calls us friends, even those who hate him most.
Good Friday is the day when a way is made, and our Lord shows the depths of his suffering for each of us. It is for us then to follow.

Maundy Thursday

Sometimes it is easier to preach than others. Sometimes there is a nice clear parable, or incident, that easily calls forth a sermon that teaches us something about the life and call of our Lord. My years of preaching in country parishes has trained me to give short sermons, that try and carry a simple message.

Yet at the same time, the need of brevity is a trap. Sometimes you cannot reduce the teaching of our Lord and the church into a short ten minutes or so, and I look with envy at the masters of the past, like Dean John Donne of St Paul’s London, who if he paused at two hours would have the crowds shouting, “More, more!”

But during Holy week there is a chance to do more. The three great days, called also the Triduum, are not three services, but one continuous service: that’s why tonight and tomorrow have no dismissal, just breaks in between to allow us to ponder and refresh ourselves.

We need these three days in one, because we tackle here in this great liturgy the central question of our faith, why Jesus came.

We are aware that life is cruel. We are aware that animals prey on animals, that pain occurs, that suffering exists within the animal kingdom. Even more, we are aware that we as humans refine this cruelty, and inflict it on each other in even more diabolical ways. People are far crueller than any animal. Yet even in the so-called normal round of life we are faced with pain, age and grief that causes us to question who we are and why this should be so. We are the suffering people.

Into this world of cruelty and suffering our Lord is born. He comes not as a superhuman, immune as a God, but as a human, limited by our restrictions, subject to our fates. He lives a life that teaches and shows the God of Love who sent him, yet at the same time breaking into the mundane world miracles of healing and promise that show a supernatural being. He gathers disciples together and calls people to follow him. He condemns the hypocrites. He forgives people their sins.

But the message is too difficult to understand. People do not instantly change: people listen, but wander on to the next show. Finally he is left with just the disciples, whom he decides to share a last meal as he sees that the powers of the world wish to end his challenge to what is comfortable and safe for those who use power.

The meal he chooses is the meal that commemorates the great story of history, how the slaves of Egypt were freed by the angel of death ending the wish of their captors to hold them. At this meal, this Passover meal, when they remember how the angel of death passed over them, and how they passed over from Egypt into a future, he teaches his disciples what it means to be a leader.

He serves them, he takes a towel and water and washes their feet.

This moment when the disciples gather for the last meal, where he shows them how he will be present in bread and wine in the future, he also shows them how they are to be a church, a people of God: a people who must always serve.

This is no answer to why we suffer; this is no answer to why cruelty exists. But our Lord says two things this night: one he will be with us in the bread and wine, this true body and blood,; and two we must always serve if we wish to follow.

Service is not always easy. It can be easy to serve those you love, but even that can test us if it is a crying baby every night, or a partner going senile: but service is more than that. It is the exhausting giving and giving even when thanks will never come. We all want to stop at times, we find ourselves fatigued by the calls of those who want us to give yet more. But every time we are tempted to stop, we find that the person who calls us for yet a further demand is Christ, washing our feet and asking us to wash the feet of those around us.

Our Lord, in his last hours, found no better message to his disciples than to teach them that he will be with them in the bread and wine, and theta to follow is to serve. We find no answer then to the mystery of life; just the promise of our Lord’s presence and the demand of service.

Tomorrow, we then walk further into the mystery of  the why, but tonight we start with these two things. It is only when we continue to walk the way of the cross over this triduum that we learn more, and we start to learn why.

Parodies - Palm Sunday, 5th April,  2009

One thing about the Romans was that they knew how to make a good show. They knew the value of display of power, of the legions in their uniforms and red cloaks, of the presence of the Governor’s garrison, or the statement about aqueducts: useful bringers of water, but so conspicuous rising above a city. Romans liked to flaunt power and wealth. Think of Rome, with its countless fora, adorned with baths and temples to make a statement that this is power, this is wealth, this is Rome.

So when we come to consider the entry into Jerusalem toady by Jesus, one starts to realise that it was not even in competition. In place of troops marching with bright sharp weapons, we have a motley crowd of the poor and ragged with palms. Instead of the victorious general in a chariot we have Jesus on a donkey. This is no competition to the power of Rome. This is no overturning of the powers of the world. If anything, the entry into Jerusalem by our Lord is a parody of the rulers of the world.

A parody: yet even parodies can be challenges. It was said once by Lord Acton in the 19th C, that power corrupts, and absolute power tend to corrupt absolutely. The more powerful an identity, the more it tends to fear and exploits it power to stay in control. Our history is littered with example, of rulers who start with the good of the people and end only with the good of themselves, fortified in citadels of corruption and ignoring the plight of those they once governed for good. Just think of the sad story of Zimbabwe, for whom we have been specially bidden to pray, now ruled by an elderly tyrant with extravagant birthday parties while the country is exhausted with a collapsed health system, hyper-inflation and poverty; cholera and aids decimating this once wealthy land.

The powerful who rule by might are easily corrupted, and easily frightened by those who challenge them. Jesus’ little procession into Jerusalem is no real challenge: a donkey and a few palms are no match for horses and sharp weapons. Yet even parodies are challenges for those who are insecure: and the story of the passion takes up how the entry turns into apathy, and then the authorities move to arrest our Lord and take him to death.

This year we have been reading the Gospel according to Mark, where the Evangelist Mark takes up his particular theme. Central to it is the cross, the inevitability of the cross, and the abandonment that happens. The closer our Lord gets to the suffering of the cross, the more and more he is abandoned by those who do not understand his message, who fear that they might be the next victim of power. Absolute power rarely has a sense of humour. It does not humour: it acts with viciousness. Crucifixion is a deliberately cruel way to kill. It was to this that Pilate condemns our Lord: condemns a man he knows has done no wrong, but condemns, to be on the safe side, to avoid a riot, to make sure that even parodies of earthly powers do not compete with the glory of Rome.

Then from the Cross comes the cry of abandonment that Mark recalls: “My God, my God, why have you deserted me?”

Palm Sunday contrast the story of the entry into Jerusalem with this scene of abandonment. It foreshadows the week ahead, when we will work more clearly the way of our Lord, his love, his service, his agony in the garden, before his betrayal, sentencing, passion and death. It asks us to think where we are along the way of the cross that we have been trying to keep this Lent. What have we chosen in our lives? Are we part of the power of the world, rejoicing in our trappings of wealth like Rome rejoiced in its glory? Where have we deserted our Lord?

The story of this week is that everyone will desert Jesus. Mark holds no promise of steadfastness: the disciples desert him, Peter deserts him, even the women at the resurrection desert him. Yet Mark holds this to be the Gospel: the good news, that Jesus came and died for us, died in pain and agony, died alone, so alone that even he felt alone from the love of God. Yet this is good news.

Why?

Because there is no escape for us from the evil in this world. All of us must take the way of the cross. We may cosset ourselves with our wealth, our paid comforts, our trappings of glory and power, but each of us must, must walk at some time the cross of suffering. We are not immune to pain. We are not immune to grief. We are not immune to abuse. The path of suffering is before us all, and each of us must take it, willingly or unwillingly. We have to move behind the parody of the glory of the world. Pour Lord may have made a parody of the trappings of the world with his entrance into Jerusalem, but do we not make a parody of our lives with your own desperate needs?

This week we will go behind the parodies of power, the parodies of entrances into Jerusalem, the parodies of the exercise of power by Pilate, the parodies that hide the desperate search for truth and meaning. The cross awaits us. Only it will show the answer.